Republic of the Philippines

ZAMBOANGA STATE COLLEGE OF MARINE SCIENCES AND TECHNOLOGY

Fort Pilar, Zamboanga City
Tel No.: (062) 991-0643 Telefax: (062) 991-0777 website: http://www.zscmst.edu.ph

COLLEGE OF MARITIME EDUCATION

Bachelor of Science in Marine Transportation
(BSMT)

Module 4

Job Enabling English Proficiency (JEEP)

Accelerate

Prepared by

Samuel B. Marquez, MAELL

Instructor 1
 OBJECTIVES

At the end of this lesson, you can:

1. Explain the importance of knowing oneself.

2. Identify some useful steps in the quest of knowing oneself.
3. Identify the importance of knowing oneself in relation to Job Search and Building
a Career.

Module 4 (Part 1)

KNOWING ONESELF

INTRODUCTION

The greatest and most important adventure of our lives is discovering who
we really are. Yet, so many of us walk around either not really knowing or
listening to an awful inner critic that gives us all the wrong ideas about ourselves.
We mistakenly think of self-understanding as self-indulgence, and we carry on
without asking the most important question we’ll ever ask: Who am I really? As
Mary Oliver puts it, “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious
life?”
Finding yourself may sound like an inherently self-centered goal, but it is actually an
unselfish process that is at the root of everything we do in life. In order to be the most valuable
person to the world around us, the best partner, parent etc., we have to first know who we are,
what we value and, in effect, what we have to offer. This personal journey is one every
individual will benefit from taking. It is a process that involves breaking down – shedding layers
that do not serve us in our lives and don’t reflect who we really are. Yet, it also involves a
tremendous act of building up – recognizing who we want to be and passionately going about
fulfilling our unique destiny – whatever that may be. It’s a matter of recognizing our personal
power, yet being open and vulnerable to our experiences. It isn’t something to fear or avoid,
berating ourselves along the way, but rather something to seek out with the curiosity and
compassion we would have toward a fascinating new friend. With these principles in mind, the
following guide highlights seven of the most universally useful steps to this very individual
adventure.
1. Make sense of your past
In order to uncover who, we are and why we act the way we do, we have to know our
own story. Being brave and willing to explore our past is an important stepping stone on the road
to understanding ourselves and becoming who we want to be. Research has shown that it isn’t
just the things that happened to us that define who we become, but how much we’ve made sense
of what’s happened to us. Unresolved traumas from our history inform the ways we act
today. Studies have even shown that life story coherence has a “statistically significant
relationship to psychological well-being.” The more we form what Dr. Daniel Siegel talks about
as a “coherent narrative” of our lives, the better able we are to make mindful, conscious
decisions in our present that represent our true selves.
The attitudes and atmosphere we grew up in have a heavy hand on how we act as adults.
As Dr. Robert Firestone, author of The Self Under Siege, wrote, “As children, people not only
identify with the defenses of their parents but also tend to incorporate into themselves the critical
or hostile attitudes that were directed toward them. These destructive personal attacks become
part of the child’s developing personality, forming an alien system, the anti-self, distinguishable
from the self -system, which interferes with and opposes the ongoing manifestation of the true
personality of the individual.”
Painful early life experiences often determine how we define and defend ourselves. In
short, they bend us out of shape, influencing our behavior in ways in which we are hardly aware.
For example, having a harsh parent may have caused us to feel more guarded. We may grow up
always feeling on the defense or resistant to trying new challenges for fear of being ridiculed. It’s
easy to see how carrying this uncertainty with us into adulthood could shake our sense of identity
and limit us in different areas. To break this pattern of behavior, it’s valuable to acknowledge
what’s driving it. We should always be willing to look at the source of our most self-limiting or
self-destructive tendencies.
When we try to cover up or hide from our past experiences, we can feel lost and like we
don’t really know ourselves. We may take actions automatically without asking why. In his
book Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation, Dr. Siegel wrote of an
interaction with his son, in which he’d lost his temper. After reflecting on the incident a bit later,
Dr. Siegel realized that his emotional outburst had more to do with feelings he’d had as a
child toward his brother than with his perception of his son today. He wrote of the experience, “I
realize once again how many layers of meaning our brain contain, and how quickly old, perhaps
forgotten, memories can emerge to shape our behavior. These associations can make us act on
automatic pilot.”
By reflecting on the past, using a technique called mindsight, “a kind of focused attention
that allows us to see the internal workings of our own minds,” Dr. Siegel was able to make sense
of his experience, then talk to his son about what happened and repair the situation. “With
mindsight I was able to make use of the reflections that arose from that conflict to arrive at more
clarifying insights into my own childhood experiences. This is how the most challenging
moments of our lives can become opportunities to deepen our self-understanding and our
connections with others.”
 By engaging in this type of thinking and being willing to face the memories that arise, we
gain invaluable insights into our behavior. We can then start to consciously separate from the
more harmful influences from our history and actively alter our behavior to reflect how we really
think and feel and how we choose to be in the world.

2. Differentiate
Differentiation refers to the process of striving to develop a sense of ourselves as
independent individuals. In order to find ourselves and fulfill our unique destinies, we must
differentiate from destructive interpersonal, familial and societal influences that don’t serve
us. “To lead a free life, a person must separate him/herself from negative imprinting and remain
open and vulnerable,” wrote Dr. Firestone. In his work with hundreds of individuals struggling
with this exact process, he’s developed four essential steps of differentiation.
Step 1: Break with harmful internalized thought processes, i.e., critical, hostile attitudes toward
self and others.
Step 2: Separate from negative personality traits assimilated from one’s parents.
Step 3: Relinquish patterns of defence formed as an adaptation to painful events in one’s
childhood.
Step 4: Develop one’s own values, ideals, and beliefs rather than automatically accepting those
one has grown up with.
3. Seek meaning
Viktor E. Frankl famously said, “Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but
only by lack of meaning and purpose.” Frankl himself survived the most horrific of
circumstances, living in a Nazi concentration camp. In many ways, his very survival depended
on maintaining this sense of meaning. In order to find ourselves, we must all seek out our own
personal sense of purpose. This means separating our own point of view from other people’s
expectations of us. It means asking ourselves what our values are, what truly matters to us, then
following the principles we believe in. Studies show that the happiest people seek out meaning
more than just pleasure, and that people are generally happier when they have goals that extend
beyond themselves. Finding yourself and your happiness is, therefore, a venture inextricably
linked to finding meaning.
4. Think about what you want
There’s a tendency in life to focus on the negative. Many of us fall too easily into
victimized thoughts and complaints about our circumstances and surroundings rather than
orienting ourselves toward positive goals, strategies and solutions. Put simply, we think a lot
about what we don’t want instead of concentrating on what we do.
Knowing what we want is fundamental to finding ourselves. Recognizing our wants and
desires helps us realize who we are and what’s important to us. This may sound simple, but most
of us are, to varying degrees, defended against our feelings of wanting. We may feel guarded,
because we don’t want to get hurt. Wanting makes us feel alive and, therefore, vulnerable in the
world. To truly live means we can truly lose. The experience of joy and fulfillment can be met
with feelings of anxiety, and on a deeper level, profound sadness.
Getting what we want can also make us feel uncomfortable, because it represents a break
from our past. It can make us feel guilty or spark a sea of self-critical thoughts that tell us, “Who
do you think you are anyway? You can’t be successful/ fall in love/ feel relaxed?” In order to
honestly discover what we want in life, we must silence this inner critic and drop our defenses.
As an exercise, when we are having a lot of negative thoughts, like “I don’t want this or that,” we
can try to shift our thinking to what we really do desire. If we are fighting with our partner and
thinking, “You never hear what I say. You don’t care about me,” we can instead think about or
even communicate on a level that genuinely conveys our end goal. “I want to feel listened to,
seen and loved.” Changing our outlook in this way makes us feel more in touch with who we are.
It strips us down to our more basic desires without the unnecessary layers of defense that divert
us from our core values and truest selves.
5. Recognize your personal power
When we know what we want, we are challenged to take power over our lives. No longer
are we engaging in a spiral of negative thinking that tells us all the things that are wrong with the
world around us or all the reasons we can’t have what we want. Instead, we are accepting
ourselves as a powerful player in our own destiny. Harnessing our personal power is essential to
both finding and becoming ourselves.
“Personal power is based on strength, confidence, and competence that individuals
gradually acquire in the course of their development,” said Dr. Firestone. “It is self-assertion, and
a natural, healthy striving for love, satisfaction and meaning in one’s interpersonal world.”
Knowing our personal power means recognizing that we have a heavy effect on our lives. We
create the world we live in. To create a better world means shifting our outlook, feeling
empowered and rejecting a victimized point of view.

Dr. Robert Firestone has further illustrated “6 Aspects of Being an Adult:”

1. Experience your emotions, but make rational decisions when it comes to how you act.
2. Formulate goals and take the appropriate actions to achieve them.
3. Be proactive and self-assertive, rather than passive and dependent.
4. Seek equality in your relationships.
5. Be open to exploring new ideas and welcome constructive criticism.
6. Take full power over every part of your conscious existence.

6. Silence Your Inner Critic

To be an adult, we must also break the ways we self-parent, either by criticizing or
soothing ourselves. Dr. Firestone advises that we stop listening to our “critical inner voice.” This
destructive thought process can be made up of a judgmental attitude that tells us we aren’t good
enough to succeed or don’t deserve what we want or a soothing-seeming attitude that tells us we
don’t have to try or that we need to be taken care of or controlled. By recognizing and standing
up to this internal enemy, we learn not to be parental or childish in our lives but to find our real
selves and know our strength and ability. As mindfulness expert Dr. Donna Rockwell points out,
to generate a “state of upliftedness that makes everything else possible—that creates the “go for
it!” spirit we crave—is to subdue the doubting mind by disarming negative thoughts.”
7. Practice Compassion and Generosity

Mahatma Gandhi once said “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the
service of others.” In addition to improving our mental and physical health and lengthening our
lifespan, generosity can enhance one’s sense of purpose, giving our lives more value and
meaning to us. Studies even show that people get more joy from giving than from getting. If we
want to find our way in life, it’s beneficial to practice generosity as a mental health principle and
take on a compassionate and attitude toward ourselves and others. People are generally happier
when they create goals that go beyond themselves. These individuals show care and concern for
others and practice generosity. As you go about your life, try to maintain what Dr. Daniel
Siegel refers to as a COAL attitude, in which you are curious, open, accepting and loving toward
yourself and your personal journey.
8. Know the value of friendship
We do not choose the family we are born into, but often, we assume that this family
defines who we are. While as children, we have little say in where we spend our time, throughout
our lives we can choose who and what we want to emulate. As adults, we can create a family of
choice. We can seek out people who make us happy, who support what lights us up and who
inspire us to feel passionate about our lives. This family may, of course, include people we are
related to, but it’s a family we’ve really chosen, a core group of people who we consider true
allies and friends. Creating this family is a key component in finding ourselves, because who we
choose to surround ourselves with has a profound effect on how we relate in the world. Having a
support system that believes in us helps us in realizing our goals and developing on a personal
level.
 Module 4 (Part 2)

KNOWING ONESELF

READ

Career success begins with knowing yourself

By the Centre for Student Involvement & Careers
Who you are matters – especially as it relates to your career. In fact, the things you have
done, the places you have gone, your family, friends, and community all matter.
Knowing what’s important to you is central to your career journey. To develop career ideas and
explore next steps, you need to better understand your interests, values, strengths, and skills and
how they relate to meaningful work and the life you want to lead.

Where should I begin?

Begin with you! You know yourself best, but it’s a good idea to pause once in a while
and take stock of how you’ve changed, grown, or stayed the course. New information and a
deepened sense of self-awareness can help you clarify your goals and more effectively navigate
your career. Over the past term, the classes you took, the extra-curricular activities you engaged
in, and the people you met exposed you to new ideas that may have strengthened or changed
your values and curiosities.

Try to answer these questions:

 What am I curious about?

 What do I already know I’m interested in?
 What experiences have I had and what did I learn about myself from them?

Reflect on the past term

Self-awareness is an important part of career development because it forces you to look at

yourself objectively and make adjustments. Examining your strengths, weaknesses,
accomplishments, and failures from the past term can help you to move forward with reenergized
goals, fresh career objectives, and improved strategies.

Looking back on this semester, ask yourself:

 What are my strengths? Uncover your gifts and learn how to describe your talents.
 What new skills did I learn? Where else could I apply these?
 What mindset shifted or changed as a result of my experiences?
 What values have informed my decisions? Values can be both chosen and inherited, and can
have great influence on your career exploration.
 Where do I have room to grow?

Seek opportunities with intention

Many students will spend hours looking at job postings online hoping to find the perfect
match. While there is nothing wrong with browsing for jobs, reflecting on who you are first may
give you clarity so you can explore with intention and refine your search. For instance, if you
have noticed that you are at your best when working in groups exchanging ideas with your
classmates, collaboration may rank high on your list of values. Identifying careers that allow you
to collaborate with others will increase your chances of finding a fulfilling job.

Check out the following resources to explore the world of work in relation to what matters to
you:

 Career Cruising – Discover more career choices” to get access. Find new ideas about how to
connect your interests with different career paths under the “Assessments” tab.
 O*Net Online – Search for occupations based on your values and areas of interest.
 Industry profiles – Get new job ideas by learning how other professionals have combined
multiple interests in their careers on Roadtrip Nation.
 Alumni, your professors, and fellow classmates can also help you dig deeper into your self-
awareness quest. Their stories can empower you to make your own choices.

Stay excited about your career

As a student, you are living a busy life, and sometimes it is easy to let go of moments that
could teach you more about yourself. Find time to reflect on your experiences and think about
the experiences you would like to have next semester.
Understanding yourself and the person you are becoming is essential to building your
career and moving in a direction that feels right for you. Self-awareness will not only help you to
identify areas of interest in your career exploration, it will also put you in an advantageous
position to present your strengths to prospective employers confidently. At the end of the day,
you are the expert of your own life, so cultivating self-awareness will help you align your
behavior with your values leading to a greater sense of clarity, purpose, and success.

5 Reasons Why True Career Success Begins with Knowing Yourself

By Mitzi Bockmann, January 7th 2018
 882
Eutah Mizushima

You know that woman you want to be? The one who seems to have the career of her
dreams? What does she have that you don’t? Probably nothing. Because the key to true career
success begins with knowing yourself.

Of course, knowing yourself is the key to success in every area of one’s life. Unless you
really know who you are, what you are good at and what you want you can never truly succeed.

This is especially true for achieving career success.

So why does true career success begin with knowing yourself?

1. Because you will avoid unfulfilling jobs and choose a career path in which you will
thrive.
If you know yourself, you will know what kind of career that will match your strengths
and passion.
If you know yourself, you will know what you are good at. Are you a big thinker or
perhaps better at fine details? Are you creative or more analytical?
If you know yourself, you will know what your passions are. Are you inspired to help
other people? Are you drawn to the arts or to the sciences? What makes you really want to get
out of bed in the morning?
If you know yourself you know that if you don’t bring your best, most passionate self to
any career you won’t succeed.

2. Because you will have confidence that you will get the job done.
If you know yourself, you will have the self-confidence necessary to get a job done and
get it done well.
 If you know yourself, you will know what you are good at and what you are passionate
about and you will choose a career path that will align with what you know. As a result, you will
have no doubt about your ability to get things done.
Furthermore, a self-confident woman is a force to be reckoned in the workplace because
she can hold her own in a man’s world, no easy feat in many cases.

3. Because you will achieve work/life balance.

If you know yourself, you will more easily achieve a work and life balance, a key to
career success.
For many years it was believed that the harder we worked the more successful we
became. And, while hard work is very important, so is having a quality life outside of work.
If you know yourself then you will be able to look at your career and your personal life,
define what are priorities for you and make them happen.
Is it important to you that you get some exercise every day? Is it important that you be the
first one into work in the morning? Is it important that you get home in time for dinner? Is it
important that you go out one night a week with your co-workers?
If you know yourself, you will more readily be able to define what you need for success
in all areas of your life and make a plan to make sure that all of your needs are met.

4. Because you will know how much you can handle.

If you know yourself, then you will have a clear understanding of just how much work
you can handle.

Many women are guilty of biting off more then, they can chew because they believe that
they are the only one who can get the job done and get it done well.
If you know yourself, you will have a clear understanding of how much you can take on
without overwhelming yourself. This is important because if you are overwhelmed you won’t get
the job done well and you will not be able to achieve good work/life balance.
And if you know how much work you can manage successfully then you will be more
likely to achieve career success.

5. Because you will know your value in the workplace.

If you know yourself, you will have a clear understanding of the value that you bring to
your workplace.
 If you know yourself, you have a hold of your financial needs and therefore can make
some good decisions regarding the work that you do.
Many of us take on jobs that do not give us the financial security that we need. As a
result, we either take on another job or we live with the knowledge that we are barely making
ends meet. Neither one of these things are conducive to getting a job done well.
So be clear with yourself as to what you need to live in the manner to which you are
accustomed. And don’t be afraid to speak up to the powers that be about what you are worth.
A woman who knows herself knows her value to her employers and isn’t afraid to say it.

True career success begins with knowing yourself.

Before you begin your job search take some time to inventory yourself. What are you
good at? What are your passions?
Armed with this information you will have the self-confidence to go forth in the world
and find work at which you will succeed.
Once you have the job of your dreams, if you who know yourself, you will take on no
more than you can handle so that you have a work/life balance that will allow you to succeed in
all areas of your life.
So get to know yourself TODAY. You will be happy you did!

ACTIVITY 1

Instructions: Make a comprehensive explanation of the following word / group of

words found in the above article. Write your answers in the space provided for or
you may use another sheet of paper. Take a picture of your answers and send it to
your instructor’s gmail account (sammarquez2019@gmail.com).

Career Cruising
In order to assist people of all ages reach their full potential in education, work, and life, Career
Cruising offers a self-exploration and planning program. Self-awareness development Detailed
information about a variety of professions may be found here, along with multimedia interviews,
images of the workplace, typical career trajectories, and many more job opportunities. That is
why most of the people are looking for job in different platforms but when it comes to choosing,
we first must know ourselves specially in our own skills, our talent or how we do things in a
certain job so that it can be matched or the proficiency of work will be at its best.
Industry Profiles
In many corporate databases, industry profiles may be found. They disseminate information on
the forces and trends influencing the market at the moment, examine the performance of the
industry, identify the top businesses, and compile general financial statistics and projections. For
it will help the analyst develop strong sense of what is going on in the industry.

Silence your Inner Critic

Silencing your Inner Critic is a must for this gives you the wrong idea about who you really are
because the voice in your head points out your mistake and most of the time it will lower your
self-esteem but occasionally it can assist you to avoid making poor selections specially in
deciding, planning and trying ideas or things in which you will really avoid making any mistake.
The best thing to do when it comes to our Inner Critic is that you have total power over our inner
critic so that you can never lose your self-esteem when it comes to difficult situations.

Personal Power
Personal power is based on the strength, confidence and competence of an individual it is like,
someone who is trustworthy, assertive, and well-organized will be treated more seriously in
professional situations in which they represent actualized personal power and it influence other
people to do the same thing because personal power is more of an attitude or state of mind.
someone with strong personal power is focused on their self-efficacy and ability to cooperate
with others.

Make sense of your past

In order to uncover who, we are and why we act the way we do, we have to know our
own story. Being brave and willing to explore our past is an important stepping stone on the road
to understanding ourselves and becoming who we want to be. Research has shown that it isn’t
just the things that happened to us that define who we become, but how much we’ve made sense
of what’s happened to us. Unresolved traumas from our history inform the ways we act
today. Studies have even shown that life story coherence has a “statistically significant
relationship to psychological well-being.” The more we form what Dr. Daniel Siegel talks about
as a “coherent narrative” of our lives, the better able we are to make mindful, conscious
decisions in our present that represent our true selves.
The attitudes and atmosphere we grew up in have a heavy hand on how we act as adults.
As Dr. Robert Firestone, author of The Self Under Siege, wrote, “As children, people not only
identify with the defenses of their parents but also tend to incorporate into themselves the critical
or hostile attitudes that were directed toward them. These destructive personal attacks become
part of the child’s developing personality, forming an alien system, the anti-self, distinguishable
from the self -system, which interferes with and opposes the ongoing manifestation of the true
personality of the individual.”
Painful early life experiences often determine how we define and defend ourselves. In
short, they bend us out of shape, influencing our behavior in ways in which we are hardly aware.
For example, having a harsh parent may have caused us to feel more guarded. We may grow up
always feeling on the defense or resistant to trying new challenges for fear of being ridiculed. It’s
easy to see how carrying this uncertainty with us into adulthood could shake our sense of identity
and limit us in different areas. To break this pattern of behavior, it’s valuable to acknowledge
what’s driving it. We should always be willing to look at the source of our most self-limiting or
self-destructive tendencies.
When we try to cover up or hide from our past experiences, we can feel lost and like we
don’t really know ourselves. We may take actions automatically without asking why. In his
book Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation, Dr. Siegel wrote of an
interaction with his son, in which he’d lost his temper. After reflecting on the incident a bit later,
Dr. Siegel realized that his emotional outburst had more to do with feelings he’d had as a
child toward his brother than with his perception of his son today. He wrote of the experience, “I
realize once again how many layers of meaning our brain contain, and how quickly old, perhaps
forgotten, memories can emerge to shape our behavior. These associations can make us act on
automatic pilot.”
By reflecting on the past, using a technique called mindsight, “a kind of focused attention
that allows us to see the internal workings of our own minds,” Dr. Siegel was able to make sense
of his experience, then talk to his son about what happened and repair the situation. “With
mindsight I was able to make use of the reflections that arose from that conflict to arrive at more
clarifying insights into my own childhood experiences. This is how the most challenging
moments of our lives can become opportunities to deepen our self-understanding and our
connections with others.”
By engaging in this type of thinking and being willing to face the memories that arise, we
gain invaluable insights into our behavior. We can then start to consciously separate from the
more harmful influences from our history and actively alter our behavior to reflect how we really
think and feel and how we choose to be in the world.

True Career
___________________________________________________________________________
Life Balance
___________________________________________________________________________

ACTIVITY 2

Instruction: Differentiate Self Understanding versus Self Indulgence.

 ACTIVITY 3
Instruction: Write an essay on the topic below:

“on the importance of knowing oneself in the quest to finding a job”

Why is it important to know oneself in the quest of finding a job? Do you

really know yourself? How do you know that you know yourself? We all know
that knowing oneself opens a lot of opportunities and changes in life specially for
the greater good of oneself and others.

It is important to know oneself when it comes to finding a job because it is

where you can have a deeper self-knowledge about yourself when it comes to your
character, strengths, capabilities, skills, interest, talents, and understanding for your
best work field when you apply. It also give self-awareness to what you need to do
and what you must do specially in different work environment because self-
awareness is the ability to focus on yourself and how your actions, thoughts, or
emotions do or don't align with your internal standards and lastly self-reflection, it
is the ability to witness and evaluate our own cognitive, emotional, and
behavioural processes in which you can control when it comes to different
situations and different place.
 Everyone has its own experience and understanding of who are and I as well
have my own understanding but has a common positivity, productivity, and
efficiency in work or activities that we do everyday of our lives because we are the
ones who make things possible specially the achievements that we earn and
making our days’ worth living.