Pause a bit,……and then Invest In Yourself!
“You are too dark and black”, I was told by a fellow student during my first year at the University of Cape Town in April 2017. This statement came at a time when I was struggling with the culture shock that had hit me when I arrived in Cape Town for the first time. The same week I had been racially discriminated against in one of the Cape Town restaurants. Ah! I felt so out of place and I quickly noted that I was losing my self-esteem and self-confidence. I felt so sorry for myself. I started to question why someone would discriminate against me because I was black. Little did I know that these two events would lead to a life-long journey of investing in myself.
Investing in yourself!
Warren Buffet, “The most important investment you can make is in yourself”. Investing in yourself, as Nely Galán puts it, means that you stop drifting through life waiting for things to happen, and instead take concrete actions that bring you closer to your best self. She adds that when you choose yourself, “people will notice you, and they will choose you over and over again. In simple terms, investing in yourself means becoming a better version of yourself every day.
After noticing my self-esteem was deteriorating, I spoke to my mentor whom we had a long conversation on how I could rebuild myself. During the conversation, he asked me whether I was taking time to think about myself and improving myself. I confessed that I was not doing so. He shared with me his experience of how investing in himself had benefited him over the years. After the conversation, I made a deliberate decision to start investing in myself — To give myself some time to think about myself. I took his advice seriously and I quickly developed a plan on how I was to invest in myself. The plan was broken into three stages which are:
- Self Discovery: Take a self-discovery journey to understand who exactly I was. In the process, I was to do a complete self retrospection to understand my strengths, weaknesses, biases, prejudices, and insecurities.
- Self-Acceptance. Essentially, appreciating who I am and embracing my identity.
- Self-Action: Work toward improving myself by addressing my weaknesses and looking for opportunities to turn them into my strengths. Striving every day to become a better version of myself.
Self Discovery Journey.
Allow me to ask you a simple question, How many times a week do you sit down and think about yourself?.. {pause}. How many times a week do you analyze your behaviors? … {pause}. How many times do you plan about improving yourself? …{pause}.
Bankers argue that you cannot manage to invest in something and get a good return on investment if you have not invested time to know what exactly you are investing in. The same notion applies to you when you are investing in yourself. You have to understand who you are, what defines you, what scares you, what drives you, what excites you — in simple terms, you have to understand YOURSELF. When your name is called and you quickly know that is you, knowing yourself means knowing that human being beyond your name. This is an important step of investing in yourself as you are able to understand exactly where you are…….{pause} and what you need to do to improve and become a better version of yourself.
During my self-discovery journey, I decided to dig deeper about my life experiences that had shaped the person I was. Moreover, I introspected my beliefs and checked whether I was living according to them. I deliberately started to note down things that made me happy and what made me withdraw. For example, I realized that I was enjoying listening to my cultural (Kikuyu) music more compared to other songs I was trying to listen to. I realized that I was a black person and nothing I could do about that and if I was meant to secure happiness, I had to embrace being black. Having relocated to Cape Town, I was feeling the pressure to start getting civilized. But….. in my self-discovery journey, I realized that was a dangerous approach as it could force me to become a FALSE SELF.
Unfortunately, the journey wasn’t that easy as I found myself sometimes being confused in the process. I had to revisit most of the choices I had made that had shaped me and question if they were the right decisions. I remember sometimes I would be chilling in my room and start asking myself so many questions which sometimes got me in deep thoughts as I tried to figure out exactly the kind of person I am. Some questions I asked myself were: “Am I happy with my life?”, “Is there anything that is bothering me right now in my life?”, “What things did I enjoy when I was still in childhood and I was still doing them?’ — Many questions.
Nevertheless, the journey was worth it. I discovered a huge part of me that I had ignored to find out. I discovered that previously I had not really understood my biases, prejudices, and my insecurities which was the main reason why I was losing my self-esteem. Insecurities in human beings cause anxiety and when one faces his or her insecurity, they are at risk of losing their self-esteem. However, if a person is aware of that insecurity, they might be able to withstand the incident and not affect their self-esteem. Over the years, I have noticed one of my huge insecurity is my dark complexion. Before the self-discovery journey, I had believed in stereotypes that people and civilization have put on complexions. So whenever someone would comment about me being too dark, I was becoming anxious and ended up losing my self-esteem and self-confidence. However, through the self-discovery journey, I realized that this was due to the fact that I had not done self-acceptance.
Self- Acceptance
Self-acceptance means accepting the self within you — embracing your weaknesses, being conscious of your prejudices and insecurities. Accepting who you are……, ease feelings of guilt or unhappiness and sets out a conducive environment for you to plan on how to improve yourself.
Even though a self-discovery journey is a continuous journey that never ends… after doing it for some time, you are in a better position to have known who exactly you are. In my case — after two years, I had managed to know the kind of person I was.
“Growth begins when we start accepting ourselves” -Jean Vanier
As I practiced self-acceptance, I started to feel self-fulfillment and overwhelmed by self-love. I started to work on improving my weaknesses which I had identified such as being hot-tempered, feeling guilty whenever I said no…
I remember when I was in German in January 2019, we were a group of South African students who had been funded by the German government to go for a study abroad program. One day we went to a cultural event and a white lady came running towards us and asked us, “ Are you guys migrants from Gambia?” — We were all shocked. But since I had already accepted that am a black person, I didn’t take offense rather I went ahead to ask why the lady ask us that question and she explained to me that she was working with an organization in Germany that was helping migrants from West-Africa. The fact that I didn’t lose my confidence in this incident was because of self-acceptance.
Self-Action
Self-Action is what you do to improve yourself. The actions you take to invest in yourself.
Some of the actions I took to invest in myself are:
- I left my comfort zone — I rendered myself vulnerable and prepared myself to learn and improve myself. During my first year at university, I was not confident enough to ask questions in class which affected my academic performance. I thought people would laugh at my accent. I knew if this was to change, I had to invest in ways of boosting my confidence. I started attending student society events and speaking to new students on campus. I enrolled in the student leadership program as I was told that the program will enable me to boost my confidence. The program was taking place on Wednesday from 5 pm to 7 pm and Saturday from 9 Am to 12 pm on campus meaning I had to save time to attend the program sessions. It meant investing my personal free time to attend the leadership sessions despite having a lot of academic workloads. I managed to attend almost all the sessions and finally got a certificate of participation. Through-out the program, I realized my confidence had been boosted. After the program was over, I was asking questions in class confidently. I appreciated the return on investment that I had made to myself.
- I looked for opportunities to grow myself: Building yourself and self-learning make you grow into the imagined vision of yourself. Whenever you challenge yourself, you build yourself. After the challenge, you realize you have become a better version of yourself. In 2017 November, I was selected as treasurer of Enactus UCT. I was just a first-year and just a week after the completion of the student leadership program. Despite my limited knowledge of leading society in UCT, I decided to accept the appointment as I saw the need to challenge myself. My first task was to create a society annual budget and organize the following year's orientation week. I had never prepared a budget nor had I ever prepared an Orientation week for a society in UCT. This meant I had to learn so fast to make sure the society was running effectively. No orientation was done to me by the previous treasurer meaning I had to learn everything by myself. I managed to create the society budget and also managed to learn fast and ensured that the society was complying with the university student treasury guidelines. This process was not easy but it built me. Being a treasurer, I managed to learn how to work with a team and also the art of time management. My friends kept asking me why was I overcommitting myself, but I knew I was investing in myself. I was building myself and I was running away from my comfort zone. To cut the long story short, I ended up serving Enactus UCT for two years as the treasurer. Throughout the two years, I learned a lot, I built myself and I got the return on investing in myself.
- I prioritized self-care — Self-care means caring for yourself which is important as it helps you maintain your mental health and be able to function well. I ensured that I was having a good and healthy diet for my health. I made it a routine where I took some time to listen to my favorite music and watch my favorite youtube channels, going to the gym to exercise and meditate…. All these to ensure that I was taking care of myself.
- I started becoming brutal to myself sometimes and started having difficult conversations with myself. In the past, it was difficult for me to sit down and start thinking about my mistakes and blame myself for those mistakes. I realized I had this problem when I attended a leadership workshop that was organized at the University of Cape Town on self-leadership. During the workshop, the facilitator shared her experiences on how she had improved herself by ensuring that she spared some time to have personal conversations where she could blame herself for mistakes she had done. It is during the workshop, I started to realize the importance of sparing time to think about myself and correct some of the mistakes I had made. After the workshop, I started to spare some time to think about myself. I would write down some of the mistakes I had made and think about how I would avoid making the same mistake again. Gradually, I realized that I was becoming better as it was hard for me to make the same mistakes. I started to improve on my weaknesses and eliminated some of them. For example, sometimes I would arrive late for my class but after I started having conversations with myself, I realized I had a weakness in following my timetable. I decided to work on it and after some time, I found it easy following my timetable.
5. I STOPPED, I repeat, I STOPPED comparing myself with others — I decided to stop comparing myself with others and moreso focus on building myself. Comparing yourself with others will always disturb your inner peace. When I stopped comparing myself with others — I got overwhelmed with much inner contentment. I started becoming happy and satisfied with the person I was becoming. Many people ask me why I look happy nowadays, and I always respond to them that I have accepted the person am, am also on a mission to continue building myself and I never compare myself with others.
“Do you have a role model?” This is a common question that I get asked by many. Personally, am a huge believer that everyone has their own weaknesses and strengths — so no one is perfect. I always study various people and see what they excelled in and try to see if I can implement that in my life. If it works out, well and good, if it doesn’t, well and good too since we are all different. What works for you, may not work for me and therefore it is not ideal to have a role model since you may end up copying another person and becoming a photocopy of that person, rather than trying to become a better version of yourself by constantly improving yourself.
As I conclude; Go and discover yourself, Accept yourself and then Invest in yourself.
Author: Willie Macharia, A Masters's student pursuing an MSc. in Computer Science at the University of Cape Town.
To connect with me :
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/willie-ng-ang-a-macharia-121518102/
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Email: ngangawillie84@gmail.com
