Everyone remembers a time in their lives when they were asked to share who they are. 

Either in school for a school oral or it was for an essay for an application letter. I remember standing in front of my grade 4 class as I recited what I had practiced with my father the night before.

“My name is Beatrice Adoma. I come from Ghana. I am 9 years old. I have 3 sisters and 2 brothers. My father is a Lecturer and my mother is a designer. My favorite color is pink and my favourite food is Banku and Okra soup”. People will meet you for the first time and ask you about yourself.

Employers will ask about your background. Even in romantic relationships, when you meet someone and start as they now call “vibing”, you ask one another about your background, your aspirations and experiences. 

Knowing who you are, what you want to achieve and setting intentional steps to get there is the beginning of self leadership. It’s the beginning of self awareness and personal growth. So how do you “find yourself” ? How do you innately know that this is the path you are supposed to undertake? The reality is that you are not lost, you never were, so there is no reason to find yourself. There are circumstances in life that will leave you battered, confused and misaligned. This can come about by negative as well as positive experiences in life. You lose a loved one and begin to question the meaning of life or you fall in love and give up your dreams to please the person you want to be with. 

When it comes to carving out the life you want to live, you first have to take responsibility for your life. Yes, things happen that we have no power over. However, we still have the choice in how we want to react to those situations. 

We can decide to either use them as a stepping stone or see it as a blockage.

1. Take time to get to know yourself: what you like and what you don’t like. Take time to understand how you process things and how those things influence you. 
2. Write down your purpose statement: if money and time were not factors, what is it that you would be doing? 
3. Set actionable goals to achieve what you want. Having an accountability partner will help you stay on track. 
4. Create a culture of learning and reading and acquiring the knowledge that you need to live the life you want.
5. Be intentional about making time to look after yourself physically and emotionally. 

The path we choose to create for ourselves is determined by how well we know ourselves. Knowing who you are and being able to lead yourself is the beginning of mastering your greatness. 

So take the time to get to know yourself, invest in self-development courses, and never kill the desire to learn. 

Love, Beatrice