Week 11 Reflective Entry

By Noora Haraholma

I found presencing rather difficult at first. However, after I got more comfortable with just sitting down and reflecting myself, I felt that presencing was extremely relaxing. It made me appreciate more what I already have and what kind of person I am while it also gave me a more clear vision of what I want to be in the future. 

As mentioned in my previous post, traveling makes me feel more aligned with my authentic self for two reasons: first of all I get to learn something new and secondly I am able to see my everyday life from another perspective when I am far away. While I was talking with Muriel I came up with a third reason: abroad I can be whatever I want. Usually when I go outside of my home country, nobody knows me. Being free of other people’s expectations helps me to behave in away that is more aligned with my authentic self. Traveling also helps to break the routines that prevent me from being the person I want to be. This is due to the fact that from far away it is easier to see and change those routines. With Phuong we also came to a conclusion that traveling teaches us a lot about ourselves since we have to survive on our own without the safety net that we usually have.  When we are alone we have to have more faith in ourselves and we can learn something new  about our personalities and capabilities.

I also talked a lot about other people’s expectations with Phuong. Both of us think a lot what the others want from us instead of concentrating on what we want ourselves. I could really relate when Phuong told me that he is really helpful by nature and he is now working on learning to say ”no” to people. I think that is really important because even though being helpful defines our authentic selves, being too helpful at our own expense is not good for anybody. It can prevent us from pursuing our other goals and thus make us more anxious and less aligned with our authentic selves. Sometimes it is good to be a bit “selfish” and think what is best for us in order to be the best and most authentic version of ourselves.

All in all, I think that precensing was a good experience. Nowadays people are too busy with their lives and there are so many distractions that people do not have time to think about what they want from life. Instead they just pursue things that other people expect from them (or it might be more correct to say  that they pursue things that they assume that the other people expect from them). I would say that people have a tendency to think too much the opinions of others instead of concentrating on the needs of their authentic selves. In my opinion precensing is a good reality check that helps us to deal with our problems and concerns. It provides guidance and helps us to find our inner strengths. I believe that everybody should try to practice precensing once in a while and as a result we would have a lot less stress and unhappiness.