Who Do You Think You Are? This is more than the question on where you come from. You might think who you are is determined by the name
you were given at birth, the family you grew up in or the cultural values that you were taught; yet a whole lot of who you are, depends on who you think you are.
The way we think about ourselves determines basically everything. Thoughts, the intentions behind what you plan to do and the assumptions you have about yourself and your capabilities, precede everything else and play a major role in the outcome of whatever it is you undertake in life.
The way we think about ourselves however, is highly influenced by what others think of us. When we’re being bullied we start to doubt ourselves. Thoughts tumbling in our minds ‘What is wrong with me? Why is this happening to me instead of someone else?”
I would say there is nothing wrong with you. Even more so, I would say there is something wrong with the people doing that to you. They are probably bullying because you mirror something that threatens them. And the people following the people who are bullying do so because they fail to think for themselves. Some primal gene makes them follow the pretender.
Then there is the 20th century invention of television; television commercials, reality t.v, next to glossies, gossip magazines, politicians, historians, multinationals and social media. Together they wash your brain thousands of impulses a day, telling you how to think. And again also here there is apparently some programming within the human species that makes us follow the adventures of the Kardashians, gloat over Jersey-, Geordie- or our own The Hague Barbie shore. In some cases we even want to mimic them; to be as thin as the one; stay as young as the other, on which my dear friend Anne recently quoted:
We all want to become old, but none of us wants to be old.
Its all in our heads! How old, fat, smart, successful, good looking, loving, kind, or special we are all depends on how we think about ourselves. Unfortunately we all grew up in a society with the emphasis on what is wrong rather than praise over what is right.
So my take on this is :
Never let what other people think of you be more important than what you think of yourself.
You’d be surprised how it will clarify communication; or as my father used to put it:
Basically one person is 3 people.
- The one he truly is,
- The one he thinks he is and
- The one he thinks other people think he is.
When two people communicate with each other, the big question is: which of the three is talking to which of the three.
The card that goes with sort of thinking 
is The Queen of Insights: Who Am I
- ‘Queen’ as she is the ultimate Yin energy, with Yin energy being all about self care, self validation, self recognition
- ‘Insights” as it is all about the things we learn in the course of life; in this case about ourselves.
To read more click the link or card at the top of this blog
Ingrid Schippers, November 2018
The abridged spoken version of this blog, features as end note on ‘Dutchbuzz’, the radio hour for Internationals, every Tuesday from 10 to 11 pm on ‘Den Haag FM’ and can be found in the Programme Archive of the Dutchbuzz podcasts, dated November 27, 2018
OR you can click and listen to the file below:
And on the right of this blog, you can draw your own card …
