From Wandering to Wisdom: How Real Growth Shapes Identity and Self-Regulation”

Ep 134. Across a lifetime, we invest enormous effort into becoming who we are meant to be. We learn, we search, we question, and we explore. We are driven by a deep biological and psychological need to find meaning, purpose, and identity beyond mere survival. This is the human journey of self-development.

From childhood to adulthood, the path of growth can carry us far from what once felt like home. It is why the saying “all who wander are not lost” resonates so deeply. For many, wandering is not confusion—it is curiosity, courage, and the instinct to evolve. It is the pursuit of self-discovery, personal growth, and a life that feels authentic.

Yet wandering without direction can also bring loneliness, doubt, and the feeling of being unanchored. As we overcome challenges and gain experience, we naturally seek to improve ourselves. We compare, we model, and we learn from those we admire. Emulating mentors and heroes is not weakness—it is one of the oldest learning strategies of the nervous system and the social brain.

However, there is a subtle danger in the idea of endlessly “reinventing yourself.” When transformation becomes a way to escape accountability, responsibility, or unresolved parts of our past, the self-image can become inflated, fragmented, or disconnected from reality. True growth is not about erasing who we were, but integrating what shaped us with honesty and clarity.

We do not need to confess every chapter of our story, but we must acknowledge it. Self-awareness grounds the nervous system, stabilizes identity, and prevents the mind from constructing grand illusions about who we think we are. Real confidence comes from integration, not denial.

Become the best version of your self with Coach Veronika Partikova PhD Sport Psychologist and Sifu in Hung Gar Kung Fu. Your transformation awaits. 

Seek out kung fu academic at: https://www.kungfuacademic.com/

Take care, and walk well.

Transcript

Welcome back folks to episode 134 of the Running Man Self-Regulation Skills Project Podcast with me, your host, Dr. Armando Dominguez, Ph.D. in Health Psychology, licensed professional counselor and an adjunct professor at a local community college. What we're going to be discussing today is the idea of being better today than you were.

Yesterday becoming better than the self of yesterday more correctly and then we're going to throw another term in there that I need to discuss because it can also become a derail a de facto Distraction from what it is that would be our best effort at becoming that better self and that's the term Reinventing yourself now in the idea of what we would call being better today Than yesterday being better than the self of yesterday

that actually points in the direction of not comparing yourself to other people's narratives, other people's accomplishments, other people's challenges and saying well, wow, they had it harder, man. I must not be doing so so hot or I might not be struggling as much or worse yet that I've got it worse than them and I'm stuck in this comparative narrative that actually if we really look at the principles and Simon Sinek says it rather nicely and he says that comparison is the

of joy and in some cases it can be but it can also steal one other thing and comparison can also be the thief of motivation the motivation that can allow you to develop a discipline over time that can help you become

that better individual today than you were yesterday. Building on yesterday's foundations, not casting it off as if it's somehow a set of dirty clothes that you'll never wear again or somehow some aspect of yourself that's dark and not worthy to keep on my shelves today. Not anything like that, but rather one where it's indicative of not only foundation growth, but also experiential growth that seeds my future growth of self, who I am today.

armando (02:47.62)
recognizing the validity and also the usefulness of our experiences and not tossing them away like, that that was the old me, that's not me anymore. And those are things that we hear very often out in the media, out in public, and we speak to each other. And even myself working within a clinical realm, I hear many people that struggle. And I'm not saying that this is necessarily a symptom of mental illness. It can be one of the sub-symptoms within certain types of mental illness.

But it sounds almost delusional to say that well, that's not me anymore when in fact it's really about the self-image that I carry and think of myself today and how uncomfortable it is to compare it to yesterday my own comparison to me. That's not the thief of joy. That's actually something that seeds truth, but rather using that as an escape mechanism and somehow maybe alleviating oneself of the concept of accountability or responsibility even for those things.

that we're not particularly proud of and that can be difficult. Now to get more deeply into the idea of becoming better today than the self of yesterday, that is a sterling concept and it's something that I encourage people to think about because we're looking at the fact that yesterday was a foundation for today's growth, almost like a cicada that sheds its slough, its skin. And I love cicadas. I think they're amazing. They're noisy as all heck, but they're wonderfully

prominent here in West Texas where I live but whenever we hear the cicada song we must understand that at some point they were in the dirt from six years up to 17 years and when they break out they have only a few hours to climb up in the heat break out of that shell and hopefully get an opportunity to drive their wings to where they're able to fly or else they become bird food once they mate

That's about it. That's end of their life cycle. So it's a very interesting thing. They became the highest version of their self for the most part. And there was risk along the way, not unlike the parallel to human life and who we become today versus who we were yesterday. Yesterday we were that little grub in the dirt, eating roots in the dark, not knowing better than finally that spark to grow.

armando (05:06.124)
Happens over time we mature and then we break out of that ground that first level of this is the new world and I come out and I develop I dry I become stronger and I solidify in those things that are going to be the me that's driving me forward from that point in the future and I may leave behind memories of who it was whenever I was a little grub in the dirt so to speak not that y'all are grubs, but hey I like the metaphor so we'll stick with that for now and the idea is

is that...

had it not been for that grubby growth that we had when we were in the dirt, if we were our own little cicadas so to speak, then we wouldn't be able to break out of the dirt and run the risk of flight and mating and sending the the opportunity of our genetics and our genetic memory to go into the next generation. And that's fascinating. That's not so different from what human does from what we do as individuals, but also in a more down to earth social scheme, what we do whenever

we leave our home once we've grown have been raised we've had the good fortune of having for instance family or caring people to nurture us and then we set off and we adventure we seek we wonder

and we find and try things that are great. Sometimes things aren't so great, but in the process of that growth and that wondering about where things are and wandering, W-A-N-D-E-R-I-N-G, we realize that there's seeking going on. We're trying to find that thing that either connects with us or somehow clicks with us that gives us not only purpose but meaning. And those are important things.

armando (06:50.762)
As a young man,

I was always asking questions. probably annoyed my family beyond belief. And there were things that I was trying to feel and seek and understand that was not within their wheelhouse to answer questions for. And going to school, same thing. I asked my teachers questions that were sometimes in the realm of their academic discipline. Sometimes it wasn't. But I was always wondering, what do you do with this? Can this help? Can we do that instead?

once again, a process that a lot of people have. I was very solemn about it, but whenever I would ask, sometimes I would ask questions that were beyond their capacity to answer. But whenever I got older and I wound up going into the military, it was an option that I had, but it wasn't the greatest option, but it was the option that I had to be able to get out of home and maybe run the risk of going to college. And I did have a very small college fund going to the military. I served here in peacetime and I was stationed

at a big pink hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii, Triple Army Medical Center. And I was trained as a scrub tech, so I scrubbed in on all the C-sections and all the deliveries of babies during the time that I was there. And I was working close to 100 hour a week, so it kind of burned me out a little bit. But I will tell you what, the military provides you opportunities to become a better person than you were yesterday at every juncture because it's always about see one, do one, teach one when it comes to skill-building.

and they move fast and often there's a lot of practice of those skills that you develop but on top of that the culture encourages you to learn and to be teachable and those are some good useful things that can help you when you're seeking. Now when I was that age in my late teens early 20s I was very fortunate to learn

armando (08:48.618)
martial art Wing Chun under my initial teacher John s Wong and then I'm not gonna mention my second teacher's name because he probably wouldn't like me to do that, but He taught me a method called Yi Li Quan that had Tai Chi Xing in Bagua within it and I started with the Tai Chi form and That got me on my way in Kung Fu But what I didn't realize is that the foundation was gonna be with me and here I am at age 59 Probably about 40 years later

still practicing those methods, they haven't left me. I'm not a master by any stretch, but I am an instructor, I am a teacher, not ranked, but I teach people and I'm good at what I do. But on top of that, I realized that all during that wandering phase when I was trying to figure out what clicked with me, that clicked with me. I had to go overseas to find that and the universe I guess set me up in a good way to wherever I was finding what I was seeking. And I brought it back home with me whenever I got out of the military.

So what does that have to do with self-regulation? Well, I learned a lot about self-regulation by not being skilled in self-regulation. Learning how.

learning how to get out of bravado and putting on a show, learning how to manage one's physiological, my own states whenever under stress, and also learn to realize through the military, not just the martial arts, how to overcome my fear of heights, which is natural. I wasn't terrified of them, but I certainly didn't like them and I have a great deal of respect for them, especially whenever you're balanced on a single rope that is across an expanse, wherever you're on your belly, a leg dangling down in one

hooked and you're pulling yourself across like a squirrel on a wire and never having done that before but seeing somebody do it and just doing basically monkey see monkey do and doing that at about 40 feet above the ground and learning that you can do the tarzan rope thing across an expanse of open space and a cargo net at the bottom but that's about 30 feet down if you fall and holding on for dear life but realizing that that's the kind of commitment and also the kind of determination that's needed

armando (10:59.272)
to get things done, not just in the military, but in life generally. And this is where we learn to realize what it is that we are capable of. One, how far can I go? Testing your limits and sometimes being in a structured space, military in this case, helps you reach those limits. Sometimes there are people that don't need military type setting to push themselves. They have that discipline to want to seek and find what themselves in quotes,

Means and what their limits are what can they do? Is there something that they can't do? How far can they go? And that is an adventurer's call mind you and it doesn't always have to be physical things It can be mentally can be educationally. It can be in principle It can be philosophically that you can stretch your limits now as far as our existence in our being There are definitely survival qualities that are involved now

I know that in the last episode of Running Man, I plugged Kung Fu Academic and that's Dr. Veronica Partikova and she is teaching some amazing Kung Fu, authentic Kung Fu. And the reason I mention this again is that she's very good at what she does, but if you have an opportunity to go...

to her website that she has a blog, Kung Fu Academic, and she speaks about her challenges getting to, from Chechiya to Hong Kong, living there and moving to Thailand, and the challenges she went through. And I reread some of them yesterday, and it was very much a tearjerker for me because it reminded me of some of the challenges I had. They weren't identical. I will tell you that she had harder challenges than I had in some areas, but I'll tell you what.

I totally understood and it gave me a sense of comfort, wonder, but also compassion for the fact that she stayed true to Kung Fu. She didn't drop it whenever she had very little or nothing during her challenges, whenever she was living in very difficult situations. And that was not only heartwarming, but it was also bracing and encouraging because that's the kind of determination.

armando (13:08.268)
that is needed. not quoting here but I will tell you that there's one aspect where she mentions that she had very little

But she had Kung Fu and then her comment after that was and there are some people that don't even have that and I'll be very honest it drew some tears for me because in comparison to those that we walk around there are those that have less there are some that aren't able-bodied there are some that are stuck and Don't know what to do and there's some that don't make it out because they choose and this is something I see in my field very frequently To not be here anymore. And now don't you want to say the term for this?

conversation but some people don't even have what it is that we have and we sometimes worry about how little we have not realizing that we have an abundance of potential sometimes we have an abundance of knowledge and sometimes we may not have an abundance of comfort or food or warmth but yet we still by determination keep going

the

easily end a life of what you want to do is realize that aspects by being aware aspects of ourself start to show we start realizing what it is not only that we're really made of but who it is in the truest sense our most authentic aspect of ourself that we are in that moment but not necessarily just in that moment but realize that that's an underlying factor that is me always

armando (15:04.046)
Now to get into the term reinventing myself. Now this is something that Hollywood has really exaggerated and really taken, uh, and given it a, a Laffy Taffy stretch in the sense that it's become such an archetypal thing. It's become this Egregora mindset that people quickly pick up and speak about. And a lot of the self-help gurus talk about this, and I'm certainly not taking them to task. I think it's an excellent term to make the points that they make, but I think that it also points at a direction.

That potentially could be detrimental to us if we want to develop and become the fullest and most authentic self that we want to be to become literally the pinnacle of individual that we can become and we don't truly Reinvent ourselves in the sense that we're leaving this husk of individual but rather maybe there's a concept maybe a metaphor of a husk of individual self aspects of self that are left behind and whenever you stop behaving a certain way does that mean that you are no longer the person that

that behave the way that we no longer do well if we think about it this is a very zen thing in that you look at the witness and that's the the part of yourself and the the happy term that we use now is meta thinking and i laugh at that and uh that that's the new high tech way of looking at thinking about our own thinking but uh that part of ourselves that's that us that was looking out from the roots of our eyes from the back of our eyes into a mirror whenever we're too young to recognize ourselves in that mirror before we

We realize that we had a self before we even recognize that the words that they were telling us that we didn't know were word for sounds coming out of people's mouths that were actually maybe our name that we learned to associate by conditioning with who it is that's supposed to pay attention. That's me and that individual observer within the self that has no voice. has no words, but it is just our witnessing our watching our self do and this

where we watch our thoughts come up and then they go back down where we can visualize and we're watching ourselves watch ourselves do stuff that is the self and that never changes. So to me, and this is my interpretation and an opinion, of course, but based on experience, it wasn't foolishly put together is that whenever we start thinking about reinventing self, we're talking about really reinvention of a self image that has to do with the social self that part of that we put out there.

armando (17:33.68)
That we want people to believe is us when in actuality it's really not us That is merely a simulacrum of me and that is to use a science fiction term that my favorite author Stephen Barnes wrote in one of his books many years back and I still use a term because I just loved it but whenever we're looking at something that is Pointing at who it is that I'm telling you I am it's not really me. That is merely the artifice That's the clothes. That's the mask. That's the hat I put on that I wear when I'm enacting a certain role

But when we talk about reinventing ourselves, we're really talking about evolving our lives and Very honestly, we point at the possibility of no longer being accountable or responsible For the weight of those things that I may have done that I'm not so proud of sometimes This isn't the guilt shame talk, but rather recognizing that yes, I've gone through stuff But that doesn't mean to slog along carrying it like this bag of trash on my shoulder either it's merely acknowledgement and recognition with

that attachment that we must do so we can move forward. That's part of self-regulation too, not getting hung up in the past and punishing ourselves unnecessarily for something we can't change anymore. If we've changed ourselves, okay. But we can't overemphasize. I can't overemphasize the fact that sometimes the self-image we want to buy into, tend to exaggerate. tend to hyperbolize in the sense that we want to almost make it like a superhero who I'm going to be. But if you're really doing skills, learning,

physical skills learning how to run how to jump how to swim how to become better what it is that you do within a discipline you realize that it's not really a superhero thing that you may get very very familiar and really confident on what you do and become very skilled in what you deliver and With a great deal of clarity be able to teach it and get people to do as much as far as what you're teaching and that's great and to somebody that's an observer on the outside that has no skill that is literally at the unconscious competent or the conscious in

level of learning than to them that's like gold I remember seeing my teachers that did martial arts like I want to do that and it was exciting it was motivating but when it got to the work it doesn't feel exciting and motivating it feels like hard work it feels like effort and basically hard work discipline hard work over time is technically what Kung Fu means so yes it is definitely an interesting concept but we can also get lost in it to the point that

armando (20:03.28)
that we become less accountable and responsible if we allow ourselves to do that and that is unwise in my estimation my opinion professional and personal but also in my experience so what I would like to tell you is that I certainly appreciate your time today we had an interesting discussion today and I tell you thank you thank you for listening to the running man podcast and please go to YouTube and like subscribe and share give it to people I'd love for this channel to grow and that

is that running man self-regulation skills project podcast on YouTube and it's available on on all platforms such as

and

empty-handed because that wasn't really me. Self-regulation is about recognizing where to put the effort and where to avoid falling into the pitfalls of reinvention of self and realize that that wonderful aspect of you that people want to experience is that authentic you and please nurture that take care of that and thank you for your time and take care walk well