Five Steps to Become the Original Version of Yourself Are you the original version of yourself? Or are you a copy of what those around you pull you toward, whether people, media, or the countless external influences scattered everywhere? Perhaps this is the most difficult era in which to remain authentic, because external influences that pour into the space of our inner world accumulate inside us in complex and rapid ways. They conceal our true selves from us and lead us toward feelings of confusion, loss, constriction, and perhaps even the illness of our age, depression. So how do we uncover our true selves and feel worth, confidence, contentment, and happiness? Five Steps to Being Authentic First In order to know your true self and gather yourself around it, you need to ask the most important question in your life: What are my highest values? What do I believe in? Second You need to ask yourself the second equally important question: What do I want? Third Your goals must align with your highest values so that your efforts flow toward achieving them, bringing you together with your true self. Otherwise, you will remain in loss and exhaustion, living a self that is not yours, a self shaped by external influence or by fears these influences have cast upon you, driving you to run confused and far from your own essence. Fourth You need to build life plans that stem from your highest values and simplify them into daily goals that you live for, because you chose them and because you are moving toward what you want. When you find that what you do flows into your highest values, you will feel comfort, tranquility, and contentment. Yes, without doubt all of us are tested, suffer, and show patience. Yet storms will not harm us as long as we sail in the vessel we chose and hold firmly to. The storms will pass and we will remain standing. But how exhausting those storms become when they strike us while we do not know where we are and never choose where we want to be. Fifth We need to pause for moments of inner reflection throughout our day and ask ourselves: How do I feel right now? What am I thinking about? What am I doing? Are my thoughts, feelings, and actions flowing toward what I want? Or am I scattered and lost? If you find yourself absorbed in a tiring internal dialogue about something that happened between you and someone else, gather yourself again with the following questions: Does what I am thinking help me move toward what I want? If not, choose to think about something that serves your goals. If you go through a difficult or discouraging experience, stop and ask yourself: Is there something I can learn from this that will help me move toward what I want? Learn from what happened and return your focus to what you want. And if something catches your attention because the media glorifies it or people praise it, pulling you away from yourself, ask yourself again to return safely to your foundation: Is this truly what I want? Where am I going, and what do I want? It is natural to get distracted from our path at times. That distraction will make us feel constriction, and then we return with love and longing to what we truly want. It is also natural to sometimes forget and be pulled toward what we do not want. We will then feel lost, and so we return to stand with ourselves in a moment of inner exploration and ask: What do I feel? What am I thinking? What am I doing? What do I want? Through this, we regain our awareness and return to our true selves, the selves that know what they believe in, where they are heading, and what they desire. We feel contentment and happiness because we are on the path. This is the wisdom in the fact that we have been granted free will. Allah honored us with the ability to choose. We will never find true happiness unless we possess freedom of choice and freedom of decision, living our lives as people who are guided, not dragged. Some people live their entire lives never discovering their highest values and never knowing what they want from this life. Many of them remain lost. Others discover their highest values and know the goals connected to those values, yet spend their days elsewhere, hoping to find meaning in illusions and images drawn for them by others. Those are the inauthentic ones. And there is a small group who know their purpose in this life and strive to make their days and their every moment a reflection of what they believe in. These are the ones who truly believe. These are the authentic ones. We ask Allah to make us among them, to make His pleasure our greatest concern, and to guide our thoughts, feelings, and actions every day toward His love and His pleasure, free from anything else. O Allah, Amen.