“Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” (Forrest Gump)

We do not get to choose our place of birth, our native culture or our family. However, we can learn about their influence on our upbringing and our choices throughout our life by increasing our self-awareness.

 

Photo by August de Richelieu on Pexels.com

Being self-aware is not explicitly taught in schools. It has only recently started to emerge in non-mainstream education programs. This means that the adults of today are not very well prepared to optimally deal with all the choices and decisions they have to make throughout their life and that impacts their existence.

Some people gradually learn from experience to challenge, find and/or build their options, strengths and limitations in relation to specific choices and decisions. This process may be long, slow and tiring.  

However, you can make the journey toward your more self-aware persona energising and abundant of new and interesting findings about yourself, which you will use throughout your life in order to to reach your potential.

 

This more effective way is through methods that make you reflect on your choices, preferences, privileges and such. Meditation, mindfulness, Gestalt, or existential approaches to therapy and coaching, to name a few, can get you there. Since this is a coaching site, I will focus on coaching, but the rest of the methods are not disconnected from a coaching exercise. They all guide you to your goals in a trusting and non-judgmental manner. In this way, your personal and/or professional life doesn’t have to take you off guard anymore as you build the skills and tools to initiate and manage change.

Coaching can inspire you to see in your life the “box of chocolates”, to explore its new flavours with fresh curiosity, while preparing you to deal with and enjoy the dynamic and diversity of life.