Becoming Your Ideal Self

 

       Have you ever thought about the aspects that make up your ideal version of yourself? I haven't and if you haven't either lets reflect on this thought together. I mean I've thought about my future coutless times. I'll be earning 6 figures, married at 29, have 2nd house by the beach and my 3rd be a town house in New York. But what are the qualities of the person we want to become?

    You may or may not know this, but the habits you have in you're 20s stay with you through you're 30s. As humans we are constantly changing and developing new personality traits. We may all have different ideas of who we want to become, but I think we can all agree that we want to be more confident, more optomistic, and become that IT GIRL.

    How can we turn those thoughts and feelings into our own actions though? It's not something just to manifest, but you have to create that delusional thought process and just drill it into your head. You have to change your state of mind if you want to change your outcomes. One of the most important aspects to me is having confidence. I used to have very low confidence and was scared to meet people. Which let me tell you, is not an ideal personality trait for someone who switched schools multiple times.

   I spent most of my life as the shy, introverted girl who mastered the art of nodding and fake laughing because I had no idea how to respond. I was always the listener, not the talker—and not in a deep, mysterious way, more like social loading... please wait. I may have unlocked the extrovert side of me recently, but I’ll never forget the days when making eye contact felt illegal and I’d leave people on “heard” purely out of panic.

    There is not a day that goes by where I don't look back at the moment when I was at a highschool football game and I was hanging out with my friends from another school when a guy I knew came up to me with his friends and said "Hey Hailie, I didn't know you had friends." I was so embarassed my face grew red becuase I didn't know how to respond to that and when I looked at my frineds around me for help they looked away to avoid eye contact (these were some of the fake friends I have mentioned before). I never responded, and we just stood there in silence for a full 8 seconds—which in social anxiety time felt like 8 years. I practically saw my soul leave my body and hover above us like, “Girl, say something!”

    Then there was that iconic lunch moment where I sat alone scrolling on my phone because all my friends were in line and I, tragically, had a lunchbox. Mid-scroll, this guy sat next to me and said, “You look lonely.” And without even looking up, I hit him with the quietest “yep” humanly possible. After about a minute of painfully awkward silence (me pretending he didn’t exist), he just… got up and left. I swear I wasn’t trying to be rude—I just had no social skills and a completely irrational fear of guys at the time, okay?

    Just over the past year, I’ve leveled up in self-confidence and now I actually like meeting new people—wild, I know. It’s still a work in progress though; I can hold a conversation like a pro, but starting one? Yeah… I’ll stare at you like a loading screen and hope you talk first.

    Over the next few years, I hope to become more outgoing in social settings, more well-spoken, and slightly less awkward when ordering food or making small talk without blacking out mid-sentence. Besides me though what about you? What personality traits do you hope to have or be better at? Do you hope to be more organzied? Perhaps more easy-going?