SELF-AWARENESS
WHAT FILLS MY TREASURE CHEST
Meaning Making is a series of reflection provoking exercises that will help you gain self-awareness and clarity about the life that you desire to live. When done with complete focus and honest awareness you will develop deeper understanding about yourself and how to be more intentioned in your day to day experiences, relationships, and goals. To get the most out of these exercises, I recommend that you write them down either in a journal or on the downloadable free worksheet. Let’s get started!
It’s not uncommon that many of us lead busy lives. We go from activity to activity, to-do-list item to the next, and day to day. We get caught up in the hustle and bustle that is our world today and we may find that somewhere along the way our path became blurred. We may lose sight of your priorities, those things that are important to us at our core. They can get buried deep beneath the clutter that fills our days. And we may not even realize it. We move further away from self-awareness.
It is a fortunate day when awareness of this jolts us like a lightning bolt, knocking us into greater self-awareness, and setting into motion our quest for greater clarity.
When this hits, if we embrace it and follow it to uncover what’s deep within us, we can uncover a path that leads to greater self-actualization and life-satisfaction. If it hasn’t yet come knocking on your door, here is your lightning bolt to jolt you into motion.
This exercise will help you gain clarity on your life priorities, how you spend your energy, and where you should spend your energy and focus to foster greater life satisfaction, happiness, and your authentic self.
What Fills My Treasure Chest
This exercise will help you gain clarity on your life priorities, how you spend your energy, and where you should spend your energy and focus.
Take a moment and visualize a treasure chest. Consider the materials it is made of, how simply or ornately it is decorated, how big or small it is in size. This treasure chest symbolizes your life and the components which make it what it is and give it meaning. Now, open the chest. It is filled with gems and rocks. Visualize the gems – their sizes, colors, and shapes. Visualize the rocks – their sizes, colors, and shapes. Consider that your life is this treasure chest and it is made up of varying amounts of gems and rocks. Gems represent the positives in your life such as experiences that bring you joy, meaning, and a sense of purpose. Bigger gems represent those experiences that bring the most joy, meaning, and purpose. Smaller gems still provide these benefits but at a lesser degree. Rocks on the other hand represent experiences that take up energy and space in our lives and get in the way of us experiencing those benefits. Bigger rocks take up more energy and create bigger barriers to those gains, and small rocks less energy but still serving as barriers.
Without judgment and self-editing, answer for yourself the following questions.
- When I first opened the chest, what did I see?
- When I first opened the chest, how did I feel?
- Why did I feel this way?
- What is my chest mostly filled with – big gems, little gems, big rocks, or little rocks?
- What experiences do the big gems represent?
- What experiences do the small gems represent?
- Do the sizes of my gems accurately reflect my preferred experiences?
- Are there small gems that I would like to make into big gems?
- What’s one small action I can take to make that happen?
- What experiences do the big rocks represent?
- What experiences do the small rocks represent?
- What can I do to change big rocks into small rocks, or even better, into gems?
- How would I feel after I made those changes?
- What’s one small action that I can take today to make that change?
Take your time completing this exercise. Listen to your your inner self and if you need to step away and then revisit your responses for further reflection then do so. The more you are able to get clarity on your gems and rocks, the more self-awareness you will foster and the more you will be able to set intentions that will be meaningful to you and that will move you closer to the authentic life that you strive to experience.
If you found this exercise useful and would like more reflection and journal exercises to gain a deeper self-understanding, click here for other reflection prompts in the Making Meaning series.
We all have ability. The difference is how we use it. -Stevie Wonder
