thought exercise on Self-Discovery

People can say one thing and do something totally different. You see the darkness that is often hidden from polite society. The thing that you see is a widespread insecurity. I think people put on a f...

George Garrett, a novelist and amateur boxer wrote about a transformation that often takes place for fighters who stick with the sport. Throughout their journey to boxing excellence, in which they mus...

Da Vinci painted one Mona Lisa. Beethoven composed one Fifth Symphony. And God made one version of you. He custom designed you for a one-of-a-kind assignment. Mine like a gold digger the unique-to-you...

Let us begin with a question. Do you really know how to enjoy the world? Do you know how to enjoy yourself? One of the greatest parables in the New Testament has to do with the search for enjoyment an...

When I engaged with twenty-somethings, for example, who were just entering the adult years, I found them preoccupied with clarifying their identity. What kind of a man or woman am I becoming, they w...

“Know yourself” is good advice. But to know ourselves doesn’t mean to analyze ourselves. Sometimes we want to know ourselves as if we were machines that could be taken apart and put back together at w...

Before God can divulge our God-given identities in our desert-of-the soul wilderness experiences, there is something we need to know: he requires that we be brutally honest with ourselves and with him...

You don’t need to look far today to notice that personal identity is a do-it-yourself project. A gym near where I live advertises itself with the slogan: “Be Fit. Be Well. Be You.” A new apartment com...

A survey in 2015 found that 91 percent of adults in the United States agreed that the best way to find yourself is by looking within yourself. Everything else flows from this conviction. The thinking ...

One helpful, practical tool to understand our blind spot is what’s called the Johari Window, an image developed as a counseling tool in the 1950s. Subjects were given a list of fifty-six adjectives, a...

You follow your desires wherever they take you, and you approve of yourself so long as you are not obviously hurting anyone else. You figure that if the people around you seem to like you, you must be...

The BuzzFeed-style quiz is taking over the internet, serving up answers to questions no one is asking. What Star Wars character are you? What restaurant trend describes your personality? Which Hogwart...

You never really know a person until you know how that person perceives himself. I’m sure you have had experi­ences like I’ve had when you were sharing with another person, and that sharing became dee...

There is not any thing, relating to men and characters, more surprising and unaccountable, than this partiality to themselves. . . . Hence it is that many men seem perfect strangers to their own chara...

Self-deception . . . blinds us to the true causes of problems, and once we’re blind, all the “solutions” we can think of will actually make matters worse. Whether at work or at home, self-deception ob...

Impostors draw their identity not only from achievements but from interpersonal relationships. They want to stand well with people of prominence because that enhances a person’s résumé and sense of se...

In her compelling memoir Still Life , author Gillian Marchenko recounts her struggles with depression. In this excerpt, Marchenko describes one of the many paradoxes that come with depression: how ...

…When I venture into wilderness, I’m surprised by how much I enjoy my own company…The person I travel with there isn’t worried about his performance. He sheds the polished persona he tries so often to...

It is a spiritual disaster for a man to rest content with his exterior identity, with his passport picture of himself. Is his life merely in his fingerprints?

Peter Drucker suggests that we should always sustain two streams of learning and self-improvement. And though he is speaking specifically about work and career, what he says is equally applicable whet...

The bottom line is this: never grow complacent. Never grow tired of learning. As soon as we stop learning we lose the capacity to grow and mature in our work and our relationships. This continual lear...

Have you ever noticed that we often see ourselves, specifically our bodies, our facial features differently? In 2013 the soap company Dove decided to explore this phenomenon by hiring an FBI-trained f...

God uses our identity crises to reveal who we are and who he is. Sometimes these crises come out of nowhere. Something devastating happens. Someone close to us dies. We are diagnosed, or someone we kn...

In her excellent book on following Jesus in the suburbs, Ashley Hales describes one of the ways in which our discipleship has been influenced by modern secular trends such as the desire for self-actua...

The following story by professor and author A. J. Swoboda is a vivid example of how shame works in our lives, often causing us to hide and run away from the pain and embarrassment: One of the greate...

In his prose and poetry, David Whyte shares what David Brooks refers to as “emotional joy” in his book, While not necessarily unique to the Christian, this type of joy has the ability to draw us towar...

As we share our story in the context of God’s story there is a transformation that cultivates an openheartedness. God offers us the gift of a reinterpreted life by means of the story of Scripture. Thi...

In his book, Scary Close , Donald Miller acknowledges that over time he developed a mask, or a persona that kept even those closest to him from experiencing with him. As he began to peel back layers ...

In her book Confessions of a Beginning Theologian , Elouise Renich Fraser discusses how crucial it has been to listen to her body throughout her personal and theological growth. My body, once...

Our selves are fashioned; we are adorned with histories that incline us to saunter, swagger, or shuffle. Given our histories, some of us move through the world with a cape; some of us don baggy sweate...