When I was in the process of starting my collage, I found the hardest part to be organizing what I would consider the important aspects of myself into these three separate categories. During regular activities in my life, most of these interests or traits seem to blend in and blur any lines of distinction between them; for example my strength of playing guitar can be argued to derive from my passion for creativity, and therefore my strength of playing guitar can sometimes be considered to be mutually exclusive with that of my passion for creativity. In order to effectively tackle the issue, I defined what I considered to be a value, a passion and a strength according to what I consider them to be.
What I considered to be my values were things which I find important, however they also have to be useful in order to allow me to achieve my goals. This is what differentiates things such as my value for open mindedness (depicted in the collage) and finding politics important; even though I may find both things important, I wouldn’t consider them both one of my values. My values lay around things such as hard work, perseverance, and being open minded in things that I do, very much with the hopes that these things will lead me to success; which is the overall theme of the collage section. I was almost shocked as I was choosing what to put under the values category, not necessarily at what those values were, but at how much they’ve changed since I was younger and how mature one gets over time without noticing.
My Passions were defined as things which since an early age have given me a certain level of drive in life. Music and reading have inspired me beyond belief to explore creative outputs in my free time, which has allowed me to utilize these creative skills in other practices. This generated a passion in creativity as well. The money depicts a passion to not necessarily be rich, but successful. The definition of success, in my opinion, lies more in reaching a point in life of satisfaction. I personally spend a lot of time thinking about what my passions are, specially during recent times as I approach an age where decisions which impact my life greatly have to be made. Because of this I found this category to be easier to develop than the others.
My strengths were simply things which I found I was particularly good at. The interesting part about deriving my strengths was how difficult I found to acknowledge that I was good at something. I reflected about what Professor Lipton said in lecture in regards to the amount of time one spends in a negative mindset, and how negative I was being towards myself simply regarding things which I’m actually good at. This in particular lead me to question how to cut out as much negativity as possible, since I find it so habitual to be negative.
From all this self reflection from the collage I came across the conclusion that there’s a lack of importance on happiness as an emotion, and more so on success as a concept. It’s allowed me to recognize that issue and now work on being less negative towards myself at the expense of ‘being better’ , in order to not be around negative emotions and focus on positive ways of improvement.