These days, the world demands more various characteristics. As it is demanded, oddly, people lose their own characteristic and just follow the trend, which includes not only fashion, but also the culture of a city. This phenomenon is supposedly from losing the sense of value that goes through people. A resolved sense of value helps people choose how to act in various situations. In other words, having the sense of value leads a person to live with a special characteristic. Self-reflection and self-examination, which are hardly done in the quickly changing environment, can help people find their own characteristics.
Firstly, the meaning of sense of value is important. People often think that the sense of value can determine something right or wrong. However, it does not propose what is right. Rather it could suggest what you like, since the sense of value is made through different experiences and deep contemplation on oneself. If someone goes through those ways, one could know what suits oneself when one needs to choose things that come in life.
Contemplation on self includes self-reflection and self-examination. These allow people to find their ego-identity. It is the same as understanding oneself. Narrowly, self-reflection is thinking back and judging what one has done. Taking one step more, self-reflection means accepting and encouraging oneself about things that could be seen as a bad. For example, if one plays an hour more than what one had planned, he may think that he is a loser. In another view, he could think that one hour of playing can reduce stress. That is to say, changing from negative to positive thinking causes happiness in life. Self-reflection can be promoted by writing a diary, thinking back on the end of the day and so on. It plays a role as a window to knowing oneself.
Self-examination is a more deep and wide concept. Self-examination has four steps. The first step is to understand oneself. All people have characteristics and habits that are considered good or bad. According to personal standards, people often ignore bad characteristics. However, the first step to understanding oneself is becoming aware of personal characteristics and habits even if they are “bad”. The next step is to accept those discovered characteristics as you. Acceptance of oneself means embracing the characteristics and considering how you can use them to develop. If one is ready, the next step is exposing those characteristics to others. Exposure will encourage one to overcome or develop the characteristic as one’s own. At last one will become unique.
Those contemplation skills are just skills. For the development of ego, people need time. Time for thinking by oneself is so important that if one does not make the time, development of ego hardly exists. In these days, students have so many things to do. Postechians may think they have too many assignments to think about themselves. But, as the most important person is oneself, thinking about oneself and loving oneself must be the first of order of priority. It will help you become the real you.