Role models of today

Who are our role models today and what influence do they have on us?

People need role models. They help us to find ourselves and make difficult decisions. We identify with them, sometimes imagine ourselves to be them, and thus subconsciously develop in the direction we want to go. Especially in our earlier development we need them - first of all our parents. Later they become athletes, entrepreneurs or other public figures. In the past, the range and amount of information we could obtain was small and we had only one or a few role models. Today the amount of information we obtain is gigantic.

What does that do to us?:

And what effect does it have on our life and on our goals? Subconsciously we choose as role models those who fascinate us. Only the amount of people we admire today is many times greater. In social media alone, we follow countless people. I don't mean to say that we see every person of them as a role model. But I am saying that we tend to follow the people we look up to. For example, we follow the crass entrepreneur with his Lambo, the good-looking professional sportsman with his breathtaking private life and that blonde travel guy who is constantly on the move in the most remote places in the world.

What does that do to us? Subconsciously we want to be like this entrepreneur in his Lambo. We want to become professional athletes and lead a star life like him. And we want to spend our whole life travelling and seeing the most extraordinary things in the world! Unfortunately, each of these goals is already mutually exclusive, but our subconscious does not understand that.

What does that do to us? We start to chase after some dreams that are maybe not our dreams at all. We start to set ourselves goals that we can never reach or that we will not be able to achieve. We start to compare ourselves more closely and want to distinguish ourselves. We continue to see these great pictures of our many role models every day and put more pressure on ourselves to achieve our goals. Lukas posts another picture from London - man who travels the way I actually want to travel. And Lea posts a picture from Frankfurt - man, she is successful, just as I actually want to be successful. And Oli is also travelling all the time. Every day we see people who have already achieved some of our goals, but we don't see what they have given up for it. And we forget our own small successes.

We should be aware of what we can bear psychologically. We should be aware of what all the role models out there are doing to us. We should be careful not to be destroyed by them. And we should be careful, not like most of them, trapped in the hamster wheel, overtired, chasing some superficial dreams, with the coffee in our hands, already flooding our brains with the next information in the morning, on the way to the job, which we actually don't like at all, without a sparkle in our eyes, sitting in the train, because we are chasing some dreams, which somebody has talked us into. I don't mean to say that each and every one of us is chasing after foreign goals. I just want to say that we should reflect on this for ourselves and know what we really want from the heart.

Try to think about what your current big goals in life are:

Then think about why these goals are actually your goals and where they come from. Are they influenced by someone or something or do they come from deep within your heart and they are really your goals?

Maybe these thoughts help you to get to know yourself better and to follow your goals from the bottom of your heart in the long run.