Why Figuring Out Who You Are Should Be Your No. 1 Priority When You’re Young
As a young person (let’s sayyyyy roughly birth-30), you’ve got a hell of a lot of things to figure out and choices to make. You’ve got some form of education, then maybe further education, maybe working.
You have to navigate relationships, passions, hobbies, finances, travel, life plans. Stressed? Yeah it’s stressing us out too.
What if we could simplify it and say figuring out who you are, and walking in that direction every day - will guide and carry you through all of the rest?
Sooo.. let’s say you’re building a house. The ground and foundations you build are going to be the number 1 most important part to start with and do well. The stuff you build on top of it depends on the stability, size, scale, quality of foundations.
If you and your identity are the ground and foundations, your relationships, career, mental health, the way you treat yourself and others, happiness, achievements, confidence etc etc. - rests on this.
A strong sense of self has been linked to everything that is good - better mental health, better relationships, better career, and overall better fulfilment and happiness. Authenticity is at the core of your own happiness - figuring out who you are, what you want and living that comfortably.
To live your life, on your terms which will lead you on a road to meaning and happiness - you have to get clear on who you are and what matters to you.
The other reason it’s so important to do this figuring out yourself, is that a well-lived, joyful, fun, fulfilling life is different for every single person on the planet.
Your roadmap is going to be different to everyones - so start looking at it from your own perspective.
We do have to do some exploring, thinking, re-assessing and re-committing to figure out how to get that nice juicy foundation. And know that you’re always changing and growing, this means your identity and what you want will change too - this is actually a good thing.
You might be thinking “where do I start!”, “what does this all mean”, “ok, you’ve said fulfilling and identity 20 times but what does that actually mean?”. Luckily we’ve done some of the work for you and developed a mini eBook with 8 activities to walk you through the process of figuring it all out.
How To Use the eBook
The activities we chose have been used in sessions with young people exploring their identities and mental health. We only included the ones that worked really well and people really liked, so hopefully you will too.
We're giving you some ideas called "prompts"for you to think and explore what the answers might mean for you.
We have suggested how to do this, noting either "journal" or "creative" - but please don't feel restricted. Use them however you feel is relevant for you - they're just suggestions.
We are going to explore different paths of figuring out who you are/want to be, then we'll bring it all together to reflect and have some direction on where to go next.
