Know Yourself Through an "Identity Chart"

Step 1: Know Yourself through an “Identity Chart”

Necessary wisdom

The challenging phrase to “know thyself” can be traced back to Ancient Greece where the saying was attributed to several philosophers including Socrates and Pythagoras. Ever since then, philosophers and psychologists have reminded us of the important role that self-knowledge, knowing who we are or understanding our identity plays in our spiritual and psychological health.

This path to self-knowledge and identity must be the first path or mission we follow in this spiritual dimension since all other missions flow from such knowledge. Our identity is the key to creating a fulfilling purpose for our life. Once we have a handle on our purpose, we can determine the most authentic way to live, and when we are living authentically, we are best able to locate meaning in our life.

We can start to understand and shape our identity by developing working answers to the first two groups of big questions in life: “Who am I?” and “What do I want?” The “Who am I?” questions ask us to reflect on what makes us unique and different from the other seven billion or so members of the human race - essentially the baggage we carry with us on our life journey. This includes a fascinating package of cultural and family background influences, our assumptions and preferences, the “ghosts” of our past, our personal flaws and our particular talents and strengths. The “What do I want?” questions focus on the things that drive and motivate us - our basic human needs, our conscious desires and our absorbing passions. Together, answers to these two groups of questions will form a working understanding of our own identity and provide a basis for working out a life purpose statement.

How We Shape Our Identity

One useful and accessible way to start answering the “Who am I?” questions is to describe ourselves in terms of a range of common “identity indicators”, that is, topics that help to clarify some of the key differences between human beings.

Common Identity Indicators

-          Gender Influences

-          Family Influences

-          Cultural Influences

-          Birth Generation Influences

-          The Inciting Events of our life story

-          Current Passage Of Life Influences

-          The Influence of Roles in Society

-          Values And Beliefs

-          Personal Images

-          Personal Favourites

-          Personality Preferences

-          Character Traits

-          Ghosts and Skeletons

-          Skills, Talents And Gifts

Our Changing Identity

As we explore these indicators in relation to our own life, we will reveal a large number of simple “identity elements” that enable us to “see” or build up a picture of who we are and provide a way of describing and identifying ourselves. Identity elements are short descriptive statements that could complete a sentence such as, “This person is someone who…” e.g. “loves to listen to rock music”, “enjoys putting things into categories” or “is a typical youngest child” etc.

One limitation of these elements is that, like photographs, they only provide a snapshot image of aspects of our identity at a particular point in time. We may not always exhibit such preferences and abilities, so our identity is something that is changing constantly. We are beings in process, always “becoming” who we are. Even so, by thinking of ourselves as a unique package of constantly changing elements, we can still meaningfully consider ourselves to have a unique identity at each moment in our history.

Figure 3: One way to conceive of our identity

One analogy is to imagine ourselves as a many sided, three - dimensional figure such as a twelve sided dodecahedron (See Figure 3). On each face of the figure, a movie or slide show is in progress reflecting one particular aspect of our life. Each face is therefore in process and constantly changing - just like each aspect of our lives. If others look at one particular side of the figure, they will see a series of changing scenes of one aspect of our life. Those scenes give an observer an indication of one aspect of our identity, but, of course, they do not fully sum up who we are. We are all of those sides, but not one in particular. Having said that, the dodecahedron is a constrained, single entity and we can gain a working impression of that entity by staying with it for some time and observing all the changing sides. In a way, that is what we need to do with other people - to “know” someone, we need to give them our time so we can take in a range of their changing sides or faces.

To know ourselves, we need to spend time reflecting on the various identity indicators and the identity elements they reveal about us. The longer we spend and the more perceptive we are in observing those various fronts, the more balanced and whole will be our assessment and understanding of our identity. That is the major task of the first half of this first mission.

The process starts by setting up an “Identity Chart”.

The “Identity Chart”

The identity chart is a tool used to assist us in shaping our own identity statement. It is best set up on a double A4 page spread, but if necessary, can be expanded to several pages.

The three main components of the chart are your name and its meaning, a symbolic drawing of yourself and space to record a large number of “identity elements”.

Identity elements can simply be added in one colour or, to help separate the elements added from different identity indicator activities, you can add them in a range of colours.

Your Name and Its Meaning

The heading used for your identity chart is your full name and its meaning.

Whilst the meanings of our names are not indicators of identity in themselves, they can be interesting to explore as an introduction to the subject of identity.

In many cultures of the past, a person’s name had a significant impact on the life of the person. It often gave them a sense of purpose and meaning that affected the way they lived. Because of this, many communities gave a child a temporary name or label until the child’s true nature could emerge and they were mature enough to receive their “true” name. In today’s Western societies, parents or guardians typically provide our name, and such names are often influenced by the current fashions in names, or the names of people our parental figures liked or disliked. How often have you heard a prospective parent say something like, “I could not name him “Mario” - I know a “Mario” and I would not want him to grow up like that!” It is obviously an illogical statement, but such a statement contains a remnant of the old belief that names influence us.

In this process of discovering our identity, a useful and easy starting point is to become aware of the historic meanings behind our current names. We may then choose to deliberately embrace or “own” our names and draw some power from these symbols that have been attached to us since our birth. In certain situations, where we feel genuinely uncomfortable about our names or their traditional meanings, we may even wish to adjust or even change one or more of our names to help make a statement about our identity.

To record the meanings of your names, you may require access to a book of “Baby names” with meanings, or access to the Internet. In a general search engine, simply type: “meaning of (include your name)” and the engine should reward you with your meanings or a site that will contain the results. The process is straightforward for your given names, but the meaning of your surname, last name or family name may be more difficult to find. Surnames are sometimes a composite of occupations e.g. Butcher, Farmer, Thatcher etc. and/or a relationship to a first name e.g. Davidson comes from the son of David, Johnson (son of John etc.) and/or connection to a location e.g. Hill, Ford, Brook. Baby books do not usually provide such information, but you can almost certainly find it on the Internet. This time, you can type, “meaning of surname (your surname)” or “meaning of last name (your last name)”. If possible, have this information with you when you set up your identity chart later in this step.

Identity Focus Techniques

Another way of gaining insights into our identity is to make use of what I call, “Identity Focus Techniques”. The techniques are simply tools we can use at any time to learn more about ourselves and particularly, to reveal further identity elements. The technique of “Unconscious Art” is included in the process of answering big question one, and other techniques are included in the process of answering the second group of big questions. (Presented in later blogs)  These are the techniques of “Guided Imagination”, “Understanding Dreams”, and “Creating Mandalas”.

Philosophy of Life Document

Your set of working answers to all the big questions will essentially form your own “Philosophy of Life” document. If you are using the Thematic Journal approach to this project, as suggested above, you will be directed to store all your working notes and answers to the big questions in either the “Identity Documents” or “Philosophy of Life” sections of your journal.

More on this in later postings.