How not to lose everything. How not to lose yourself in difficult times: life lessons. Explain to him why you need personal space

They say love blinds. When you meet that one person to whom both your heart and mind cling, and whose eyes sparkle, you are ready to do anything to maintain this relationship. ALL. And this can lead to the fact that a previously strong, independent, confident woman simply loses herself in a relationship. Your personality. Your dreams. Your own drive. Friends. Beliefs. Everything is changing. For the sake of a man. For love.

Of course, in the end, all relationships require some kind of compromise or even sacrifice, but you don’t have to give all of yourself to it. And this is dangerous not only from the point of view that when suddenly the relationship no longer exists, you will no longer exist. Even if you are together forever, you will not be happy.

I collected some tips on how not to lose yourself in a relationship:

1. Don't forget what makes you. Your personality, your quirks, what you like and don’t like - it’s all yours and you don’t need to change it or adjust it to another person. You will be much more interesting to each other if you are different and share this with each other, rather than trying to be similar.

2. Invest in yourself and your passions. Your time and money are finite, so you need to use them wisely. Any relationship will take some of this away, but not all of it. Invest in your career, development, education, health, hobbies.

3. Give yourself dates. Make time for yourself: one evening just for yourself and your favorite activity. Maybe you want to watch a movie like you used to when you were alone, go for a bike ride - basically, do what makes you happy, regardless of your relationship status.

Learning to be alone is one of the most useful skills. This should be sacred time for yourself that no one should take away from you.

When you learn to be happy yourself, you won't need anyone. You will be able to freely choose someone with whom to share your happiness and complement it.

4. Don't forget your friends. Even if a guy becomes a true friend to you, this is not a reason to forget about others. About those who can honestly tell you if your relationship is not healthy.

5. Don't forget about your family, whatever it may be. Maintain relationships with your family - this will always remind you of how real you are, who you are.

6. Set clear boundaries. And remember: borders are not walls. When two independent people start a relationship, they must establish certain rules, the space that each other needs.

7. Date someone who likes you. This may seem like an obvious condition, but it's not always the case. If a person insists that you change radically, it means he doesn’t love the real you. A loving person does not want you to lose yourself as a person. Because that's exactly why he loved you.

9. Learn to calmly accept the idea that you may break up. You can cry, scream, eat chocolate and ice cream, it will be hard. But you have to understand what it can be. It's better to lose someone who wasn't right for you than to suffocate in a bad relationship. You only have one life - don't waste it on those who don't let you be yourself.

Of course, love requires sacrifices and some changes in oneself, but not so much as to lose oneself. And remember: someone who truly loves you will never want you to be someone other than yourself.

Hello, dear friends!

In the endless search for ourselves, the constant desire to improve the comfort of life, eradicate negative habits and completely transform our worldview into a superman, we get confused, afraid and lost. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

One after another, changing kinship councilsnicknames, friends, public pages and magazines, all as one repeat the truisms of success. But are we living our lives subscribing to such updates? How to stay in balance and not fall into depression and melancholy? How not to lose yourself is the topic of today's article.

Sometimes it happens that life circumstances drive us into the zone of totality and brutal survival. Forgetting about ourselves, we strive to satisfy other people's desires. Achieving goals becomes impossible due to the constant desire to please people. Is it worth it?

In any case, making a decision on one's own, you can save yourself from the consequences that will come if undesirable development of the situation.

Often people shift part or even the entire area responsibility on someone else's shoulders, thus being realized. All their lives they dreamed of becoming an astronaut and then you appeared on the horizon of events. Why not take advantage of the situation and instill in your head the idea that you are the reincarnation of Gagarin? It would seem that not everything is imbued with negativity or malicious intent, but the ability to think with your own head is much more effective and more honest in relation to your personality.

7 tips collected for today's material will help you remain yourself and be true to your principles, dreams and goals. Are you ready? Then, let's go!

Take your mind off worldly worries and be alone with your thoughts, a change of scenery will help and of course new cities and countries. Going to places where everything familiar and boring recedes into the background, it becomes possible to calm your nerves and recharge new, fresh emotions.

Sometimes do pauses healthy. Developing a fresh, not lathered-up look at seemingly everyday situations is possible if, when you go on a trip, you don’t pack feeling of guilt.

Make time on oneself and reflection- a guarantor of high-quality search for answers to important questions. Atmosphere of freedom and solitude will allow you to free yourself from the burden of accumulated problems and bring a wonderful souvenir from your trip - clarity of thought and sobriety of decision making.

This advice, in turn, is brilliantly simple and complex at the same time. Spending a huge amount of time at work, fighting for your material well-being and fulfillment, solving everyday problems and managing to raise children, it is very difficult to allocate minutes for anyone else.

The gravitational force of the sofa can be so high that you can lift your body and push it onto meeting a friend- an impossible task even with a strong desire.

The enchanting pursuit of illusory and phantom ideas about a happy life is like fighting windmills. Look around you: you have arms, legs, a head and a roof over your head. Isn't it happiness?

You have work, a reason to meet friends and enjoy time with your family. The most valuable and important thing is time. Show him off productive and look around more often in search of endless joy. And she is here, very close, and once you feel her, you will fully and clearly find yourself.

Friends, I’ll put an end to this. Subscribe to my blog updates and recommend it to your friends to read. In the comments, tell us how you think you need to keep in touch with yourself? What advice should you listen to?

See you on the blog, bye-bye!

These days, self-development, motivation, time management, positive thinking are words that sound everywhere. Every day on all social networks we are advised to work on ourselves and strive for a better life. There is a lot of information, and it can be so contradictory that it doesn’t take long to get confused. And when you get confused, you finally become convinced of your own imperfection and naturally get upset and give up.

On the one hand, we are strongly encouraged to be grateful for what we have. On the other hand, they are no less persistently advised to strive for more and not be satisfied with less. Every more or less successful psychology blogger considers it his duty to talk to his audience about low self-esteem and how important it is to praise yourself even for the smallest achievements.

At the same time, when you write down every pot of soup you cook on your list of achievements, over time you begin to doubt your own adequacy. And against the backdrop of all this splendor, sometimes you just want to feel sorry for yourself, sit down and cry. But you can’t: you need to be grateful, write down goals and praise yourself for success.

How to understand the abundance of useful advice and learn to live fully, while remaining yourself?

What is valuable to me personally?

The most important thing is to understand who I am and what is valuable to me personally.

Surprisingly, but true: many people come into adulthood without a clear understanding of the processes that occur in their heads. In our youth, we very often live and act by inertia, not guided by any principles or relying on the opinions and experience of our environment.

How to understand yourself and learn to listen to yourself? I offer several methods that may help you get in touch with your inner self.

How did you get to this point?

I suggest you draw scale of your life. Put age marks on it that will correspond to the most important events that in one way or another influenced your development.

For example:

6 years- starting school;
13 years old- first relationship;
18 years old- admission to college;
23 year- wedding;
28 years- birth of the first child;
30 years- death of grandmother;
32 year- dismissal, etc.

You yourself evaluate how much impact these events had on your life or way of thinking and whether they are worth adding to your scale. For example, for some, graduating from school might go unnoticed, but in childhood there was a tragedy that left a deep imprint.

Now consider each event separately. Remember the emotional state in which you were at the specified age interval, and write next to each item your rating from –2 (for a very depressed state) up to +2 (for a positive mood). Let 0 will be the neutral point.

This way, you will see a picture of your life and understand how you ended up in the situation you are in at the moment. Surprises may await you. Maybe you will suddenly understand why the same unpleasant event happens to you throughout your life.

Get in sync with your feelings

Very rare people know how to live consciously. That is, regularly ask yourself what the meaning of their actions is and what motives are actually behind these actions.

I suggest a little exercise.

First of all, start listen to your body. You will be surprised, but your reactions can very often provide answers to long-standing questions.

For example, you may notice that you begin to nervously grip the back of the couch or bite your nails every time you answer a call from a certain person. Try to think about what is behind this unconscious gesture. Most likely, you will find that for some reason you are uncomfortable with the upcoming conversation.

Write down your settings

Then take a notepad and write down on a separate page the main judgments that control your behavior, and installations that influence your actions. To do this, you will need to analyze your behavioral patterns.

For example, if you constantly refuse help from loved ones, there may be a certain principle behind this: “I can do everything myself” or “I have to cope on my own”, or maybe "I don't want to be obligated". Perhaps, having written down your basic settings, you will want to change them to new ones, completely abandon them, or at least reconsider their use.

Start asking yourself questions

In order to live consciously, you must constantly ask yourself what is behind your actions. For example, if you constantly get annoyed with your child when he fails to complete his homework, stop and answer yourself why this is happening. Ask yourself questions: why, what is important to you in this situation, what do you want, what hurts you.

Ask the same question until an answer comes to mind that seems closest to the truth. For example, if you get angry when your other half goes out with friends, start your internal dialogue by asking "Why?".

“Why don’t I like it?” Most likely, the first answer will be the very formal explanation that you give to others and to yourself. For example: “Because instead I could have babysat or cleaned up”.

However, if you try to clarify with yourself whether this two-hour meeting really influenced the affairs of the household, it may turn out that not everything is so simple. An unpleasant answer may come unexpectedly. For example: "Because I'm jealous".

Continue the internal dialogue. Ask yourself why you are jealous. For example, your answer might be: "Because I don't trust him/her".

Ask the question “why?” again: “Why don’t I trust?” Keep moving forward until you gain a deep understanding of the true reasons.

It may well turn out that the problem is not at all that the children were left “unwalked”, but that you doubt yourself. And in this case, you will have to deal not with the duty schedule in the kitchen, but with your own self-esteem.

Johari window

This technique, developed by psychotherapists Joseph Luft And Harry Ingham in 1950, will help you discover sides of your personality that are invisible to us, but obvious to others.

Take a piece of paper and write it down all your character traits that come to mind. Then reach out to a few of your friends or acquaintances and ask them to do the same. Let them tell you what they value most about you, what they consider to be your strengths, and what they think your weaknesses are.

Then divide the piece of paper in half vertically and horizontally. You will get four windows:

Top left- this is the “open self”, the zone into which you can rewrite the qualities that are on both lists.
Bottom left- this is the “closed self”, a zone where only words from one’s own list will go.
Top right- This is a “blind” list. Here you can write down what others think about you, but what is missing from your own list.
Bottom right- this is the “unknown self”. This information is not yet available to you or those around you. However, when you find yourself in an unknown situation, you can learn a lot about yourself.

Define your values

I would like to stop at this point and consider it in more detail. This is my favorite technique because I deeply believe that our values represent the base of the pyramid, the foundation on which we can build our goals and separate them from the goals imposed by other people.

It is the understanding of our values that can help us make a choice in an ambiguous situation or assess whether we are following our own path or have already lost our way.

Values can change throughout life. But they definitely influence us and our actions, no matter what we do.

For example, for a man who grew up in an orphanage, family will most likely not be one of the basic values. But freedom and independence will probably be on their list. Having met a girl who is looking for a serious relationship, this man may fall in love, but it is unlikely that such a relationship will become successful.

At the same time, growing up, developing, studying himself and the world around him, a man can realize and accept family as a value. And then he will build any relationship according to a different scenario.

How to determine what is truly valuable to you?

Look carefully at all these words and cross out those that do not evoke any positive feelings in you. After this the list should reduced to 20 points.

Now is the time to think seriously. Read each word on your list carefully and think about what it really means to you. Select 10 core values.

This is already not bad, but the most significant values are usually no more than five. So we take our list again and look at it carefully and in detail. We reflect on our own lives, analyze when and how we acted, focusing on any of the values.

As a result, we get three, five or seven points.

You can refer to this list every time you doubt your actions or wonder if you are moving in the right direction. Look into it before setting a goal or in moments of doubt.

Working on each technique on this list can take a lot of time. These solutions seem simple at first glance, but in reality they will require deep study and active analysis. But believe me: learning more about yourself can be a turning point for you.

Spend at least 10 minutes a day on these exercises, and very soon you will find out what is truly dear to you, and maybe even discover your true purpose.

Know and love yourself and be happy!

From the editor

Psychological trainings, seminars, lectures on self-development - all this is beneficial only if you are ready for change and understand how to get the maximum benefit for yourself. A practicing psychologist explains how to do this Olga Yurkovskaya: .

The question of how not to lose yourself has come up more and more lately. It would seem that this question is becoming relevant only now, in the modern world, but this is not entirely true. For many centuries, if not millennia, people, when they have free time from work, begin to ask this question.

After all, if a person works at physical work, trying to feed himself, his family, and somehow arrange a comfortable life, then he has no time for deep life questions, which is why previously such questions were of interest only to rich people with a lot of free time.

What does “not lose yourself” mean?

So what does a person mean when he thinks about the question of how not to lose himself? The fact is that this is a so-called decoy question; behind it there is always another question, which a person is often afraid to voice even to himself. After all, if a person accurately understands his place in the world, his mission, values, he understands what he is doing and why, he is not worried about the issue of losing himself.

But if a person lives without understanding the meaning of his life, without faith in himself, he is not sure that his actions are correct, and his life is going in the direction it needs to go - that’s when he begins to think that perhaps he is somewhere... then I lost myself.

Therefore, the question of how not to lose yourself can be given an unambiguous answer; for this you need to deeply understand yourself, your role in this world and where life is heading in general. And to make it easier, we will divide this process into three stages, which any person can do.

Stage 1. Remember ourselves.

Do we remember ourselves as children, what we wanted to achieve, what to do. What we liked or scared, what we most wanted to avoid. You can remember your life for a very long time, but how to structure your memories so that later you have the opportunity to somehow work with them. It turns out that our desires are the totality of everything that makes up life at any particular moment. Therefore, if we want to describe ourselves at some period of life, the easiest way to do this is through our desires, those that were at that moment.

In psychology, this process is called defragmentation. when we write down all our desires, dreams that we can only remember. The easiest way to do this is sequentially, either from childhood to the current age, or vice versa, it doesn’t matter. The process itself can take many hours and the list can consist of hundreds of wishes. At first, the process may be difficult, after writing 30-50 points, you may have the thought that this is all and a strong desire to finish, at such a moment it is best to take a break and then start again.

I would also like to note that we do not have the task of analyzing our desires and dreams, and we just need to write, even if now this desire may seem strange, unnecessary, and children’s dreams about an astronaut or singing are stupid, they still need to be written down. The process itself already gives a very strong effect, gives liberation and “cleanses” the brain. But for us this is only the first stage.

Stage 2. Determine who we want to become and what we want in life.

Once we have remembered who we were, we can begin to formulate who we want to be and what we want our life to be like in the future. In order not to lose ourselves, we need to very clearly understand who we should become. There must be a standard by comparing ourselves with which we will be able to adjust our life path. The list from the first stage will help us with this.

Cross out from it all those desires and dreams that you have already achieved or fulfilled, then cross out everything that is no longer relevant for you and is not needed, what you once wanted, but now you want something else. The rest will become the base, the foundation for creating an image of yourself in the future.

Based on your past dreams, try to describe the person you would like to become in the future. What does this person do, where does he live, what surrounds him, what has he already achieved and what does he want to achieve in the future. Look many years into the future, at least 10, but maybe 20 or 30 years.

If it’s difficult to imagine yourself, think about which person you know you want to be like and describe his life as your future. This approach is even better, because in addition to simply describing life, you can spy on the life schedule, habits, skills, values and manners of your idol. This can give a strong boost to your understanding of what you need to do and study.

For convenience, it is very good to break down the vision of who you want to become into certain sectors. For example, achievements at work, family relationships, health, friends and environment, finances, spiritual development. Break it down into as many sectors of life as you want, but if there are more than 10, it’s better to combine several sectors.

Stage 3. We build a guideline to check where our life is heading.

For this point we will take as a basis the well-known technique of the Wheel of Life, but we will change it to suit our needs. Namely, as in the picture, we draw a circle and divide it into the number of sectors that you came up with at the last stage. A scale from 1 to 10 is how much we rate our life now in this sector, where 10 is what you want to achieve.

For example, in the finance sector we determined that we want to have an income of 10,000 per month, and now the income is 2 thousand, then accordingly, now we are on a scale of 2. With non-financial sectors, of course, it is more difficult, you cannot calculate so clearly, give yourself an assessment that the first one comes to mind.

The completed wheel will be the reference that will show where you are now in relation to who you want to become. And if you have any doubts about whether your life is moving in the right direction, whether you have lost yourself, it is enough for you to do the same wheel at that moment and see the changes with the basic one that you have made now.

You will not only receive a definite answer, you will see for yourself in which sectors of your life you are successful, and in which, perhaps, you are moving away from your main goals. By doing this exercise even once a year, you can clearly imagine the vector of your development, what you need to pay attention to or what needs to be changed right now. Do you think that the 10 minutes that such an exercise will take you once a year is worth being calm about the question of whether I am losing myself and whether my life is going in the right direction? I'm sure it's worth making.

Instructions

Be yourself. Don’t try to try on different roles, because there is only one life, and there is no room for theatrical acting in it. Personality formation occurs with age, and it is normal for teenagers to measure images one after another. But an adult must know exactly his place in this life.

Don't adapt to people. Communication with friends, colleagues, romantic and family relationships - they all leave their mark, but you should not let them change you beyond recognition. For example, if someone thinks you are uptight, you don’t have to respond by dancing on the bar counter in a nightclub. Most likely, you are just shy and introverted, which is not a bad character trait at all.

Do what you love. To find yourself, you need to find a calling, and only in it is it possible not to lose your personality. If at work you simply follow other people’s orders, do everything “under pressure” and adapt to your colleagues and boss, you should think about changing your position or profession.

Set priorities, don't chase everything at once. Torn between work and family, you may forget about yourself and subsequently feel confused. Decide what is important to you at the moment and focus on that.

Stay alone with yourself. A person who wants not to lose himself often tries to communicate more and not close himself off. But this is not always the right approach. Loneliness also bears fruit, because a person has the opportunity to think about what is happening around him. At this time, he belongs only to himself, and this gives good results. This kind of self-improvement should be done every day, and it has nothing to do with taking care of your appearance or cooking in an empty kitchen. Learn to just sit in silence sometimes, walk alone in parks, watch the city from a bench or from a window.

Educate yourself. Continuous personal improvement does not happen on its own; for this you will have to make some effort. It is not necessary to go to university or enroll in courses. There is always the opportunity to purchase books or find useful information on the Internet. This way you will feel solid ground under your feet and will not be afraid to take the wrong step to the side.