How do you identify yourself as a senior? Do you look at yourself as an active older adult, or as a formerly active person who has gotten old? Are you an old man or woman who is in the twilight of your life, or a vibrant and active older adult with a lot of life still ahead of you? Do you see your future as one of opportunity, or a future of despair?

The tenth attribute in this series based on the 12 Attributes of Human Functioning as listed by Michael Murphy in his book, The Future of the Body and Michael Murphy and George Leonard’s book, The Life We are Given is “Sense of Self”. What does that mean? Sense of self is basically your own Personal Identity that you carry with you throughout life.

Your Sense of Self starts as a child. The things you absorb from your parents and teachers, both motivating and discouraging affect how you see yourself as a child and is reflected most often through a Positive or Negative outlook on your young life. As you moved into adolescence, it is mostly your teachers and your peers who affect your self image, as well as the way you see yourself as a teenager and as you move into adulthood. Your successes and failures or disappointments during this period will affect your attitude toward life as you become an adult and will change slowly as you develop new influences and new peer groups.

Is there an outward reflection of your Sense of Self? Of course. It’s reflected in your posture, your bearing, and your expression of enthusiasm for living. It’s mostly reflected in the way you demonstrate your general attitude toward life. People can tell whether you have a positive attitude or a negative attitude about life by the way you carry yourself and your outward manifestation of self-confidence. These things show.

Why is your Sense of Self important as you move into your late fifties, sixties, seventies and older? How will it change? What changes have you noticed about the way you think about yourself as an older person. Who are you now? Has your self identity changed?

As we get older, we start changing our “sense of self”. We start to think of our accomplishments in life, or we often think of our lack of accomplishments in terms of the things in our life that we have never done, or are unfinished. How did we get to be this age and have so many things undone? Will we become incapacitated? How can we prevent becoming dependent?  A good sense of self comes when we feel good and take care of ourselves and are happy with life as it is. Acceptance of “life on life’s terms” becomes critical to our attitude. We look at the future as pure opportunity.

This is not the kind of article where a conclusion is in order. Rather it is a series of questions that we should be asking ourselves.  How we answer those questions will determine our “sense of self” during the remainder of our life. There are a lot of those questions in this article that can only be answered by you.

We can choose how we want to live our senior years. We can choose our responses to what happens to us as seniors. How we think about ourselves, our “sense of self”, will be a powerful force in how we live our lives. Let’s hope we make good choices.

Thank you for reading.

585 wds.

Volition. 1.The act of using the will; exercise of the will as in deciding what to do. 2. a conscious or deliberate decision or choice thus made. 3. the power of faculty of using the will. (Webster’s Collegiate)

Volition is the ninth Attribute of Human Functioning in the list of 12 Attributes set forth by Human Development Gurus, Michael Murphy and George Leonard.

I keep referring to Michael Murphy and George Leonard as if everyone should know who they are. Most people don’t have the slightest idea who they are. Michael Murphy is the co-founder of the Esalen Institute on the Big Sur in California near Pebble Beach, Carmel, and points south of San Francisco. George Leonard was a member of the Board of Directors, and the former President of the Institute. The Esalen Institute was the cradle of the Personal Development Movement in the late 1960s and 1970s, and still hosts seminars and workshops in the Personal Development Movement today. Murphy wrote the over 800 page tome, The Future of the Human Body, and they co-wrote The Life We are Given, a much easier read. Leonard has written a number of excellent books about human performance including the best sellers, Mastery and The Ultimate Athlete.

Using volition is simple. It means being willing to make a choice. How does it relate to Health, Fitness and Personal Energy for Seniors? As long as we are willing to move our bodies and be mindful of what and how we eat, we will retain the ability to make our own choices and not require someone else make our choices for us. Freedom of choice is a major factor in keeping us identifying ourselves as “young”. When we slowly start to let others do things for us because we are “getting old”, we are giving up a bit of our independence. And it is our independence that we so jealously guard against losing.

Loss of the ability to live independently is the number one fear of older adults.

As with most things in life, how we choose to move, eat, breathe and think (our attitude about life) is key. We can choose to move our bodies and eat well, or we can stay sedentary and eat junk. We should be making the right choices while we can, before someone else has to do it for us.

We have become a less healthy Nation because of some of those choices. That’s why Volition is listed as one of the 12 Attributes of Human Functioning. It’s up to us as individuals to make the healthy choices, while we still have the ability to choose.

Thank you for reading.

Do you see, understand, think and feel? Are you aware of what’s going on around you? Can you tell right from wrong? Can you create things? All of this, and more, comes under the umbrella of the term “cognition”.

Yes, I’m still writing the series about the 12 Attributes of Human Functioning and the subject for this  article is Cognition, number eight on the list. Cognition is defined by Webster as: “Knowledge; to know; the process of knowing in the broadest sense, including perception, memory, judgment, etc.” Man has the ability to understand and “to know” things.

We have the ability to understand chemistry, physics, mechanics, medicine and our bodies. We have the ability to take that “knowing” and expand on it and to create new things from what we know. We can also use “knowing” in a higher sense, as in “knowing” about ourselves and our overall world.

We also can “know” our own physical bodies. We can see, hear, touch, taste and smell. Some scientists believe we are now evolving beyond those physical senses. We can allow our own bodies to tell us what is going on inside us, and we can use those sensory impulses to determine if all is right, or if there is something we need to watch or do something about.

We believe that other animals don’t have that higher ability “to know” that man does. Some come close, we think. But they’re not quite there yet. So we believe. But take a look at this very recent and enlightening TED Talk. Here’s the link.

The visual at the end asks the question:

“Do humans have enough consciousness, intelligence, rationality, creativity, empathy, love, to let Life on Earth Survive.”

I’m far from being a diehard animal activist by any stretch, but there is a powerful message in that video.

Man is a rational being. We consider the mind to be paramount. We believe in the conscious and rational mind. We are told by “thought leaders” that we get what we think about and that we “become what we think about”. Is that true? There is probably some truth to it.

We have the ability to understand complex ideas and to play with and act on those ideas.

We act from what we link pain and pleasure to — but we think with a cognitive mind.

And when we recognize (”re-cognize”) something, we are seeing it with our mind — again.

We do things we know we shouldn’t, but we are cognizant of the difference between right and wrong.

So, cognitive ability is a critical attribute of human functioning. It is one of the attributes that separates us from the lower animals, but probably not by as much as we think.

what does all this have to do with Health, Fitness and Personal Energy? Simply that it is an Attribute of Human Functioning, and how we use that attribute determines who we are as individuals.

Thank you for reading, and have a great Thanksgiving Holiday.