On Self-Improvement: Balancing the person you’ve become with the person you want to be.

Since the summer of 2016, I’ve been having a bit of an internal dispute about the morals of self-improvement. How do I balance self-acceptance and self-actualization without entirely abandoning one for the other?

I’ve grown up with an overdose of insecurities. I’ve been worried about my height, my weight, my appearance, my personality, and how other people perceive me.

In this article, I will examine some of the changes I’ve gone through since adulthood (ages 18 to 23) and explain some of the changes I hope to go through over the next 5 years (ages 23 to 28). Today, I will finally tackle the over-drilled interview question: “Where do you see yourself in five years?” in an attempt to review the areas in my life that I think are in the most need of improvement. Afterward, I will compare my answers with a video I recently came across on YouTube by Ralph Smart that discusses “Becoming Your Greatest Version”. By doing this, I hope to understand the balance between accepting who I am compared to the person I aspire to become. So without further ado, I will begin.

10 horrible truths I was unaware of about myself when I was 18:

1. My visual appearance was terrible.
2. I forced myself to hate literacy.
3. I had zero confidence.
4. I thought multi-tasking would save me time.
5. I was disorganized.
6. I was narrow-minded.
7. I was afraid to try new things.
8. I thought I was better than everyone else.
9. I was ungrateful.
10. I was unhappy.

The following describes exactly when I realized these were problems and how I took action.

Issues With Appearance

I remember looking in the mirror when I was 19 and realized I had a patch of fur between my eyes. I walked to my local drugstore, swallowed my pride, walked into the make-up section (this was before manscaping took full flight), found a pair of tweezers, bought them, went home, and went to town on my unibrow.

I’ll happily say that a pair of tweezers was probably one of the best investments of my life.

In addition to poor grooming habits, my posture was terrible (hindered positive body language), I didn’t work out (I regularly felt tired, weak, and unhealthy), my clothes were baggy and I had no fashion sense (despite fully thinking I looked awesome in my clothes). When I was 21, I worked on my appearance one thing at a time and it helped me feel a lot more confident in my projection of self-image. The dangers with this can be vanity through constantly looking in the mirror, but once I began to trust that I look presentable, the amount of time I spent looking in the mirror decreased and I was able to feel confident about my appearance even if it wasn’t “perfect” by my standards.

Illegitimate Illiteracy

By electing to study engineering when I was 18, I had created a bias in my head that “math is always more important than reading and writing”.  It wasn’t until I realized how much I struggled to effectively communicate with people that I needed to make some amendments to my opinion regarding literacy. After an education change from engineering to construction transpired when I was 20, I started to build my literacy skills from scratch and actually began to enjoy the value of reading books, penmanship, and wandering through the book store every time I frequented a mall.

Recently, I find nothing more artistic than quality penmanship.

Seeing my words written on paper in my own unique way leaves me with a newfound appreciation of literacy as an art form.

No Confidence

Confidence is something that I began to develop once I began to accept my decisions and stick by them despite the repercussions. The first real ballsy move I made was taking a leave of absence from my summer job for the sole reason of wanting to visit my hometown in Italy when I was 21. I didn’t know what would come of the trip but I trusted myself that I would make it worth my while.

Would it have been smarter to save for college when I needed the money? Probably, but I didn’t care.

I needed to do something for myself as a break from work and this was unknowingly the first step to developing some form of confidence. For the first time I believed that by choosing something that brought me happiness over something that brought me misery, then the rest would figure itself out. The road of confidence is still long, but there’s no looking back once I make up my mind about something now, even if the outcome is not as desired.

Multi-tasking

I had this notion that accomplishing multiple things at the same time would make me more efficient in my day-to-day life. Some people can pull this off fantastically, but I’ve tried and tested it for myself to no avail. Sadly, this is one of my more recent realizations because I only stopped doing it about 2 months ago, at the age of 23. I’m a very busy person and I have a tendency to overcomplicate my life by agreeing to do a lot of things.

I mean it’s always a great idea to play varsity soccer, be in school, work 2 days a week, play on three recreational teams, hang out with friends, write a blog, learn to play guitar, catch my shows on Netflix, chase girls, all while trying to work out, eat healthy, and get enough sleep.

Naturally, I took on too much so I started to cut each and every item out of that sentence until it read:

“I mean it’s always a great idea to be in school while trying to get enough sleep.”

I picked one thing (school), paired it with the obvious sleep necessity, and rolled with the punches because I couldn’t handle focussing on more than one thing without compromising priority number one (graduating in April 2017). I dug myself such a grave in school, that had to cut everything that I love doing out of my life just to scrape by. I managed to salvage my grades but only after I quit multi-tasking and just focussed on one thing at a time.

Disorganization

Refer to the above paragraph about multi-tasking.

It took a good deal of organization for me to sort out my priorities and effectively pull off the great escape of Semester 7.

I set a schedule for myself, created a functioning calendar, resorted to alarms for pretty much everything, and created a morning routine that allowed me to accomplish the basic necessities of hygiene in a short amount of time. It took me longer than I’m willing to admit, 23 years, to break that bad habit.

Narrow-mindedness

This was something I did not realize I had until I was 21, during my solo trip in Italy. Being on my own for a few weeks gave me time to really be my own person through the most natural of means. I was surrounded by nature while staying in a tiny town in the Apennine Mountains of Italy. I did not have an active phone I could use to connect with my friends that lived in the area. I’d have to walk for half an hour to the nearest espresso bar for Wi-Fi (which had a shoddy connection at best). My social interactions were reserved to showing up at said bar around 7pm and letting the night unfold along with whomever of my friends showed up at the bar. Everything started to slow down and it was beautiful. I began to connect with nature for the first time in a while.

I felt one with the flow of the water down the mountain, the bugs in the middle of the street, the sun that beat down on me, the wind blowing scents of mountain freshness and/or baked bread of the lady down the street.

My thoughts began to clarify, my worries began to dissipate, my appetite began to crave the nutrients of the mountain, and my eyes began to open up to the world around me. Everything was beautiful no matter how dreary it would seem. I was fascinated by rain, fog, and the cold. From the deepest depths of the forests to the peaks of the mountaintops, the spectrum of possibilities of my life opened up in the form of the valley in front of me.

Neophobia

Neophobia is defined as “the fear of trying new things”. Prior to visiting the mountains of Italy in 2014, I was only open to familiarity. I clung to familiarity because it was safe. I could predict what I was going to get out my daily experiences. I cracked my neophobia when I was thrust into a new environment and was forced to go about things differently. I had to try new things, meet new people, and eat new foods if I was going to adapt to my environment.

Condescension

I had a desire to be the best. There’s nothing wrong with striving to be better, until I realized that I didn’t have the desire to be the best version of myself, but rather that I had the desire to be better than others. I don’t even know what I was trying to prove by desiring to be better than my friends, peers, teammates, and family. Regardless, I felt this pressure that I had to prove something to them. I had to show them that I was of value. I had to perform to certain expectations or standards set out by whom? What I had failed to realize until I was 22, was that I was of value.

In fact, I was of infinite value just like everyone else because we are all equal.

We are all human beings. When I stopped judging myself so harshly, it became so much easier to love myself but also to love others because I had stopped judging everyone else so harshly as well.

Ungratefulness

I thought that I had an appreciation for the hard work put in by my parents throughout their lives as they earned a living to raise my sister and me. That mindset changed when I stepped into a working environment for the first time at 19. To this day, I am thankful for the opportunities given to me by my first job.

The lessons I learned about hard work and the struggles to make it through the day on a construction site turned out to be paramount for my personal development.

I began to understand how hard my parents had worked in order for to afford a roof over my head and food for the table. In addition, I am lucky to have worked with some incredible people who mentored me and watched out for my safety when they could have just let me figure things out the hard way. If not for those summers on the construction site, I would probably still be that scrawny 115lb kid instead of the significantly healthier 145lb man I am today.

Unhappiness

I did not realize how unhappy I was until I look at this attempt at a smile in the photo taken of me at my 18^th birthday. I see a lot of things when I look at this photo but what pains me the most is that I couldn’t even muster a real smile on my 18^th birthday. I’ve been through a lot ever since but I’d definitely consider myself to be a lot happier than I was at that age.

I wonder what my life would be like right now at 23 if I could go back in time and slap some sense into 18 year old me…

But if I hadn’t lived through the experiences I do not think I would be in the position to see all the growth I’ve made on this journey I’m on.

Time to Dive Deeper

In a YouTube video I watched recently entitled “10 Signs You’re Becoming Your Greatest Version” by Ralph Smart from his channel “Infinite Waters (Diving Deep)” (see the link below), Ralph discusses some of the signs he’s witnessed along his own journey to become his best version. They are as follows (quoted directly and/or paraphrased):

"10 Signs You're Becoming Your Greatest Version"

1. Our vision becomes clearer – Realizing there is something wrong because you are miserable, anxious, and/or depressed.
2. We reconnect back to nature – “We begin to gravitate towards more natural environments”.
3.  “We become more open to new possibilities – Diving deeper into books, questioning everything critically, e.g. how is this serving me right now?”
4. “Not judging ourselves as much as we used to when we look in the mirror – If you do not embrace yourself, you will abandon yourself.”
5. “Health goes at the forefront – We need the most optimum fuel. You don’t put milk in a Ferrari.”
6. “We need deeper intimate connections – We need to connect with our partners on a heart level”.
7. “Our thoughts and words have power – We are the architects of our own reality. What we think and say about ourselves shape who we are.”
8. We become resilient.
9. “We become fearless – This is done through taking risks”.
10. “The contribution” – the desire to give back to the world by the means of which we know how. “How can you help the world without helping yourself?”

Taking into account what Ralph has said, I find many of his points relatable to my own personal journey so far. Reflecting back on the last 5 years make me wonder what advice I’ll have for myself 5 years from now. So here is my own current rendition of “10 Signs You’re Becoming Your Greatest Version”. In other words, by the time I turn 28, here are some of the things that I need to work on.

10 Things I think 28 year-old me would tell present 23 year-old me:

1. Stop interrupting people in conversations and actively listen.
2. Be early (on-time) for everything.
3. Be concise (apparently 4 pages of text isn’t enough for me so far).
4. Don’t overthink things.
5. Do what you love.
6. Express how you truly feel to others.
7. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
8. Stick to your guns/fight for what you believe to be true.
9. Take your own “good advice” that you give to others.
10. Live in the moment.

So, to answer the question at the beginning of the article:

“How do I balance the person I’ve become with the person I want to be?”

In order to even be able to discuss the topic of self-improvement, I had to experience it at some level. That’s the beauty of analyzing my first five years of adulthood. I can analyze the person that I’ve become because I have actual experiences to measure up against. I am going to pile up all those experiences as if they were construction components and build a tower. I will call this tower “Tower 23”. Not far across the way, 28 year-old me already built “Tower 28” with his experiences from 23 to 28. In order for 23 year-old me to meet 28 year-old me at the top of “Tower 28”, I will cross an imaginary tight rope strung between the two towers. In order to keep my balance, I have to focus on the tasks at hand by staying present to make sure that I don’t fall. When I stop for a second to look ahead, I see the person that I want to be and when I start to move again, I slowly shift the weight of the man I’ve become. If yesterday shapes who I am and tomorrow defines my destination, then focusing on today will keep me balanced and get me where I need to go.

- M.B.