Personal Engagement is choosing the same thing again and again whether or not we’re aware of it.

While its easy enough to see what Personal Engagement is, it may be harder to understand why it’s important to live engaged. Knowing that we’re engaged personally, whether or not we’re aware of our engagements, it can be harder to answer the question, “Why live engaged?”

In my 20-plus years experience working with adults and youth to engage them throughout our communities and around the world, I’ve learned that there are six main reasons to live this way.

7 Reasons to Live Engaged

• Personal Engagement lets you know yourself. Engaging within yourself intentionally allows people to know themselves more deeply.
• Personal Engagement builds self-reliance. Without living in a bunker or sequestering yourself in a hovel, becoming self-reliant begins with knowing who you are, but then meeting your own needs in rich ways.
• Personal Engagement broadens horizons. By digging within yourself, you can connect all the broad parts of yourself, remove masks that aren’t you, and open your own doors to the world around you.
• Personal Engagement meets your needs. Personal Engagement allows us to see what we actually need in our lives, remove the things we don’t need, and finding room for our wants to be okay instead of smothering them.
• Personal Engagement encourages you to name your biases. Knowing what you stand for and what you stand against can let you decide whether or not those biases serve you accordingly.
• Personal Engagement lets you become the person of your dreams. Life is filled with infinite chances to become who we really are, and as we become consciously engaged within ourselves we get a clearer picture.
• Personal Engagement allows you to live cohesively. As whole people, our lives have play, work, creativity, dreaming, resting, and so much more in them. Personal Engagement allows us to draw all this together on purpose and be who we are.

There are so many reasons to become personally engaged, and these are merely the beginning of a tremendous list. What would you add?