Trouble making design decisions? Where's your sense of self...

Do you have a hard time making decisions?  Decisions such as where should I live?  What should my major be in college?  What career should I pursue?  Who should I date or marry?  Or maybe just trying to decide what clothes you want to wear or what color to paint your bedroom.  All of these things come from the same place.  Knowing yourself.

What does it mean to know yourself?  It means you know what your core values are, what is acceptable to you, what is appalling to you.  You know what brings you joy and what makes you miserable.  You've spent a lot of time sitting with your interior self, building a foundation, testing out the strength of the bones, and adding embellishments to areas you feel great about.  If you have no clue what I'm talking about, you liking have been living on auto-pilot indefinitely and the idea of being conscious and present all the time doesn't make much sense.

If you want to evolve into someone self-possessed (who not only knows themselves well, but owns that self with confidence) - you need to start building from wherever you are.  If you are nowhere, start by just being more present as often as possible.  Start that right now.  You are sitting or standing somewhere.  What does the ground feel like beneath your feet?  Can you discern how your feet feel in your sock vs. how they feel beneath that in your shoes?  Can you feel your muscles and bones and nerves separately?  Can you feel the ground beneath you whether it's flooring or asphalt or soil?  Can you feel any vibrations on the ground beneath you from other people walking, cars driving by, etc?  How much can you be aware of within yourself and around all of you?  How big of an area can you sense around you?  If you close your eyes, can you sense how close to you is the nearest object?  What about something else 5 feet away?  What about the next room or a tree across the park?  Play with your senses by turning one of them off and see how big you can make yourself, how connected you can be to the world around you.  After spending some time sitting in this space, open your eyes and look back around the world, your immediate surroundings.  See how living in this moment feels differently.  You can say to yourself, I am 100% here, right now.  This is being conscious and present in the moment.  Work to feel this way as often as possible, eventually it will be how you are. 

Once you are living in your own skin most or all of the time, you can be more mindful not only of what the decisions are that your make all day, but where you are making them from.  Am I making decisions from a place of repetition/pattern or what I've seen other people do?  Am I making some decisions from a place of fear?  Am I making a decision from a place of joy where I have confidence that XYZ decision will lead to XYZ outcome and I'm enjoying owning that cause/effect?  Am I making some decisions just to please others?  Am I making any decisions to deny myself certain things because I want to feel sorry for myself or look selfless?   So much to unpack here - but you can't begin to start monitoring who you are - getting to know your interior self - without living in the present.  Once you are living in the present, and becoming aware of who you really are and how that's manifesting through your behavior - NOW - you can start to mold that self into a person that is much happier, more capable, and more self-possessed.