WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU TOOK STOCK OF YOU?

At different intervals in my life I have done some serious soul searching and taking stock of where I stood at that particular point in time. Invariably it was an opportunity to make an assessment on how good, or bad, I had done and to make changes accordingly. I guess for that reason I have been a work in progress.

It has just made sense for me to take periodic inventory of myself, often deeming it prudent to back up a couple of steps in order that I might take one giant stride forward. As someone who has always learned the hard way, through good old fashioned hands-on experience, self-assessment goes with the territory.

I cannot help but think that the process of taking stock of one's self is something that many  people do routinely and realistically, no one can create a self from scratch.

I came to appreciate the personal "taking stock" concept as the result of a newspaper interview I conducted 50 years ago with Mildred Newman and Bernard Berkowitz, wife and husband psychologists, who had just authored a book "How to Take Charge of Your Life". Their philosophy encouraged self-identification and self-fulfillment as important steps toward becoming a total human being.

Mildred explained it this way: "If you have deep respect for yourself, you will have respect for others. You will not become self-centred or selfish. You will find yourself increasingly considerate of others around you." And she was right!

If you take stock of yourself, self-love or respect is mandatory because more often than not there will be things that you have done in error that require correction and you cannot correct a wrong until you own it.

We happen to live at a time in history when there is more freedom, more to choose from, more possible ways to be than ever before. The way in which we go about choosing the elements that attract us as building blocks for our own personality, and the ways in which we put them together spell out that which is uniquely us. Everyone chooses from what is available.

Even though we may have clothed ourselves in borrowed finery, we are not a fraud. After all, who has been doing the choosing in your life? You can be sure that no one else has ever put together exactly the same combinations as you have; and don't forget there are only 12 notes in a musical scale, and yet many countless unique and beautiful compositions have been created.

It is all a question of how your notes are put together and it does not make you any less to have taken from others who, in your mind, have it all together.

The wonderful thing to understand -- what comes to so many as a stunner, a shocker -- is that you do not have to take yourself as a pre-packaged product coming off an assembly line. There are certain things you have inherited -- your coloring, your sex, your bone structure, your height -- but what you do with your biological inheritance is up to you.

Much of what you are you have made, and it is your right, if not obligation, to remake yourself exactly as you see fit (as long as it is for the better). And why shouldn't you do a better job of it?

You have had a lot of experience since you started putting yourself together and you have learned a lot more about what works and what does not.

If you inevitably see something you do not like about the current you, remember that chances are you put it there, and you can change it.

And to think that I wouldn't be what I am today if it were not for periodic taking stock exercises...A silly old fool still learning the hard way!

A work in progress? 

I'd like to think so!