The Power of Understanding Yourself

Chapter 17 Age-Worthy Maintaining the Best Me

Like fine wine, you get better with age.

– At least one Facebook post on your birthday after the age of 40

We have come a long way. At this point, we’ve learned what metacognition entails, and then engaged in that process to deeply explore many aspects of our essence. We have taken responsibility for this journey and what we discovered along the way by manifesting an internal locus of control. We used the principles of horizontal alignment from organizational development to identify the important life inputs that have shaped our behaviors, both good and bad, and formed our current state. We examined our core values and desired outputs. We connected our current state to our desired future state with a core ideology that defines our vision and mission in life. If you have kept up with your Extracting Me Worksheet, you have documented all these episodes of positive self-examination.

That’s not all. We evaluated our style. For many of you, this may have been a review of these concepts but with a fresh perspective turned inward. For others, this may have been the first time you have dissected your own preferences when experiencing the world. Either way, you spent meaningful time considering the influence of your approach to life on the definition of Me. We contemplated how these preferences contribute to our best qualities – and how they can make us vulnerable and oblivious, too. We even explored the complicated role stress plays in ...