Be True to Yourself

“Your only oblig­a­tion in any life­time is to be true to your­self. Being true to any­one else or any­thing else is not only impos­si­ble, but the mark of a fake mes­siah.“
– Richard Bach

“This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must fol­low as the night the day, thou canst then be false to any man.“
– William Shakespeare

I believe that the path to true per­sonal great­ness can be found through the use of a per­sonal jour­nal. Remem­ber that you will never be as suc­cess­ful as you will be to your own self, and the jour­nal can enlighten you in more ways in this area than you would have ever thought pos­si­ble. Many great suc­cess­ful men and women have kept per­sonal journals.

As a young sales­man, the one thing that kept me hang­ing on was through writ­ing and review­ing entries in my per­sonal jour­nal. In essence, know­ing how far I’ve grown was the fuel that helped me grow fur­ther. My jour­nals con­tain thoughts, feel­ings, inspi­ra­tional mes­sages, and all sorts of infor­ma­tion about myself as well as about the peo­ple around me.

This book, for instance, is the result of years of journal-​​keeping. You can use your jour­nal to reflect on, develop, and pri­or­i­tize your per­sonal set of val­ues. Bet­ter still, you should use one to develop and inte­grate the GOAL sys­tem you will learn later in this book.

You can use your jour­nal to help asso­ciate feel­ings to thoughts and thoughts to feel­ings. And most impor­tant, a jour­nal can help you to dis­cover the motives that moti­vate you.

Never under­es­ti­mate the power of keep­ing a jour­nal. In fact, look at it as your per­sonal bible; it con­tains the com­mand­ments and the prophe­cies you want your life to take, respect, and adhere to. Make your jour­nal your per­sonal gospel.

Use it to cap­ture ideas, flashes of inspi­ra­tion, new skills, dif­fer­ent strate­gies, sit­u­a­tions you are fac­ing, ques­tions about your­self, and answers you come up with. You may think you know your­self well but this is rarely if ever true. You only know your­self to the degree that you learn about your­self. And the jour­nal can pos­i­tively and pro­foundly impact this impor­tant learn­ing process.

More­over, the jour­nal can help you in devel­op­ing your intu­ition. Recently, psy­chol­o­gists have dis­cov­ered that we do not oper­ate at a sin­gle level but at three. In other words, we don’t have just one mind but three dis­tinct minds.

For exam­ple, beyond the con­scious and sub­con­scious minds, we also have an all-​​powerful, all-​​knowing super-​​conscious mind. Some peo­ple call it the “infi­nite intel­li­gence.” Some peo­ple call it “soul” or “spirit.” But if you remem­ber, I pre­fer to call it the con­science. Your intu­ition. It is the place from which all flows.

In other words, your mind is like a com­puter. For exam­ple, the random-​​access mem­ory (RAM) is your con­scious mind in which you sort, cal­cu­late, and process data. The sub­con­scious mind is the read-​​only mem­ory or hard drive (ROM) where infor­ma­tion is stored, coded, and retrieved. How­ever, the super-​​conscious mind is the pro­gram­mer on which the other two depend, since the com­puter can not oper­ate with­out it being pro­grammed in the first place.

Thus, your super-​​conscious mind, being per­fect and all-​​knowing, can help you along your jour­ney and maybe more than you think. As such, your per­sonal jour­nal can become a great tool for tap­ping into the source that lies within you.

Addi­tion­ally, it is of para­mount impor­tance for you to be able to keep records and refer back to them. Ref­er­ences can help you to become more resilient and flex­i­ble in times of chal­lenges. In other words, if you had a bad expe­ri­ence and over­came it in the past, the jour­nal can help to remind you of your suc­cesses or of the learn­ing expe­ri­ences when another con­fronts you.

The best way to do this is to use the “best-​​better” tech­nique. Look at what is the best thing you can pull from or liked about a given sit­u­a­tion, and then look at how you would do bet­ter next time or how you can bet­ter your­self from the expe­ri­ence. Don’t write what you hate about an event or how ter­ri­ble you were in deal­ing with it. And don’t jus­tify it by say­ing, “I have to know what I did wrong so I won’t do it again.”

Find­ing out what’s wrong about any sit­u­a­tion is in fact empha­siz­ing it as well as rein­forc­ing it. Instead of what you did wrong, write down what is the best thing you can pull from what hap­pened or what you liked best about your expe­ri­ence. And look at what will make things bet­ter or how you would han­dle the sit­u­a­tion bet­ter next time.

Under­stand that you must first work on your strong points instead of your weak points. Often, peo­ple work on their defi­cien­cies and, as a result, uncon­sciously lower their self-​​esteem. How­ever, if they had focused on their strengths, many of their weak­nesses would have been self-​​corrected in the process.

Nev­er­the­less, build­ing your strengths will increase your self-​​esteem, which is the key to under­stand­ing your weak­nesses and how to cor­rect them. And the jour­nal can be a won­der­ful tool for help­ing you do exactly that.

About the Author

Last 5 Posts By Michel Fortin

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