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Understanding one self


The Importance of Knowing Yourself: Your Key to Fulfillment

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What does it mean to know yourself?

The importance and benefits of knowing one's self

How to know yourself better

How to improve your self-knowledge?

How coaching can help

Think of the most eccentric person in your life. You know the one. 

The one who either shows up in a disheveled leather jacket or an all-black outfit and a beret. They’re somewhat aloof but always energetic. Unapologetically flamboyant, but always kind and understanding. This person chooses to be themselves, not who they’re expected to be. 

They don’t care about the world’s expectations. This sometimes gets them into trouble or attracts judging glares from nearby strangers. But, you have to admit, it would be nice to have that kind of self-confidence. And you can!

In a world rife with expectations, living authentically can feel impossible. It feels easier to have your path planned for you. But, in the long run, this will only hold you back from living a fulfilling life.

The great philosopher Socrates said it himself: “To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.” 

So if you’re wondering whether authenticity is worth pursuing, the short answer is “yes.” And, for the detail-oriented among you, here’s everything you need to know about the importance of knowing yourself — so you too can find your true self.

What does it mean to know yourself?

Knowing yourself is about discovering what makes you tick. Among other things, it means:

  • Learning your likes and dislikes
  • Unearthing your beliefs and values
  • Knowing your personal boundaries
  • Accepting your personality traits
  • Being a better team player
  • Having a clearer path in your professional life
  • Understanding how you interact with others
  • Recognizing your core personal values
  • Increasing your capacity for self-compassion
  • Having a clearer idea of your life’s purpose
  • Knowing what it takes to be self-motivated
  • Being more adaptable 

Ultimately, all of these things will increase your self-awareness. Being more self-aware lends to enhanced self-development, acceptance, and proactivity while benefiting our overall mental health.

We’ll be more confident, make better decisions, have stronger relationships, and be more honest.

The importance and benefits of knowing one's self

Knowing yourself is about knowing what makes you tick. It means identifying what matters to you, your strengths and weaknesses, your behaviors, tendencies, and thought patterns. This list describes the importance and benefits of knowing one's self:

1. Despite your quirks, flaws, and insecurities, you learn self-love and acceptance. Once you do, you can walk through the world with more confidence and care less about what people think. 

2. You can change your personality flaws and improve on your weaknesses. You are empowered to become who you want to be. This will help you become a better, more well-rounded person.

3. You’ll have more emotional intelligence, which is key to knowing others. You’ll be more conscious of your own emotions and feelings, making it easier to understand another person's point of view.

4. You'll be more confident. Self-doubt disappears when you know and accept yourself, and others won't influence you as easily. It'll be easier to stand your ground.

5. You’ll forge better relationships. It’s easier to share yourself when you know yourself. You’ll also know what kind of people you get along with, so you can find your community.

6. You’ll be less stressed. Self-awareness will help you make decisions that are better for you. And when this happens, you become less stressed about what people think or whether you made the right choice. 

7. You’ll break patterns of disappointment. You'll find repetitive behaviors that lead to poor outcomes when you look inward. Once you name them, you can break them.

8. You’ll be happier. Expressing who you are, loud and proud, will help you improve your well-being.

9. You'll feel more alive. Being who you truly are will give you energy, make you excited about life, and make all your experiences feel richer.

10. You'll have more self-worth. Why is self-worth important? Because it helps you avoid compromising your core values and beliefs. Valuing yourself also teaches others to respect you.

11. You'll understand your values. We can’t understate the importance of knowing your values. They will help you make decisions aligned with who you are and what you care about.

12. You'll find purpose in life. Knowing purpose in life will give you a clear idea of where you should go and what you should do. 

Getting to know yourself is hard. It involves deep self-reflection, honesty, and confronting parts of yourself you might be afraid of. But it’s a fundamental part of self-improvement.

If you need help, try working with a professional. BetterUp can help you navigate your inner world.

How to know yourself better

Now that we’re clear on the importance of knowing yourself, you might not know where to get started. Let’s get into it.

Check your VITALS

Author Meg Selig coined the term VITALS as a guide for developing self-knowledge. Its letters spell out the six core pillars of self-understanding:

These are your guides for decision-making and setting your goals. Understanding them will help you make decisions aligned with your authentic self. Here are some example values:

1.
Values
  • Honesty
  • Being helpful
  • Loyalty
  • Trust 
  • Wealth 
  • Family

You can see how each of these might lead to different life choices. For example, if you value honesty, you might quit a job where you have to lie to others.

2.
Interests

Your interests are what you do without being asked, like your hobbies, passions, and causes you care about. You can then try to align your work with these interests. Here are some examples:

  • Climate change. If you’re passionate about this issue, you might choose to work directly on the problem. Or you can make choices that allow for a more sustainable lifestyle, like owning an electric car.
  • Audio editing. Perhaps you’re an amateur musician, and you spend your time recording and editing audio. You can start working as a freelance editor or find a job that uses these skills.
  • Fitness. If you love working out and value helping others, you might consider becoming a trainer at your local gym or leading a running group.

Not all of your interests need to be a side-hustle. But being aware of them can help you make decisions that better suit your desired life. It is really about knowing your priorities.

3.
Temperament

Your temperament describes where your energy comes from. You might be an introvert and value being alone. Or, as an extrovert, you find energy being around others.

Knowing your temperament will help you communicate your needs to others. 

If you’re a meticulous planner going on a trip, you should communicate this to your more spontaneous travel buddy. They might feel suffocated by your planning, leading to arguments down the road. Bringing it up before your trip will help talk it out to avoid conflict later.

4.
Around-the-clock activities

This refers to when you like to do things. If you’re a writer and you’re more creative at night, carve out time in the evening to work. If you prefer working out in the morning, make it happen. Aligning your schedule with your internal clock will make you a happier human being.

5.
Life-mission and goals

Knowing your life mission is about knowing what gives your life meaning. It gives you purpose, a vocation, and something to strive for.

To find your life mission, think about what events were most meaningful to you so far. For example:

  • Leading a successful project at the office
  • Influencing positive change through your work
  • Helping someone else succeed

There are many ways to fulfill a life mission. You can fulfill your goals with the skills and resources you have. For example, “helping someone succeed” could mean becoming a teacher or mentoring a young professional.

6.
Strengths and weaknesses

These include both “hard skills” (like industry-specific knowledge and talents) and “soft skills” (like communication or emotional intelligence).

When you do what you’re good at, you’re more likely to succeed, which will improve your morale and mental health.

Knowing your weaknesses and toxic traits will help you improve on them or minimize their influence on your life.

How to improve your self-knowledge?

Are you ready to get started? There are many ways to understand your inner self:

  • Write in a journal
  • Meditate
  • Be curious
  • Step out of your comfort zone
  • Track your progress
  • Choose smart habits

How coaching can help

A professional coach will encourage you to reflect on and reframe your inner thoughts and patterns. They understand that, in many cases, impulsivity holds you back from attaining your full potential.

The amygdala — an almond-sized region of the brain partially responsible for emotions — releases dopamine to reinforce impulsive behavior. This happens every time you open Facebook instead of working, eat chocolate while on a diet, or get angry at your colleagues instead of helping solve the problem.

Self-awareness can help you overcome your impulsivity. Armed with the right tools, you can break unhealthy or unwanted behaviors. 

A coach can help you meet these ends. They can teach you:

  • Mindfulness: the acceptance that nothing is inherently good or bad 
  • Metacognition: the awareness that your mind is the root of your actions
  • Reframing: the power to react differently to an event or circumstance

These three elements can help you strengthen your self-control. You'll keep a cool head in stressful situations, communicate more effectively with others, and become a better leader overall.

In other words: by checking in with yourself, you avoid wrecking yourself.

At BetterUp, our coaches are trained in Inner Work® and understand the importance of knowing yourself. This is a lifetime journey. But together, we can make your life better.

Understanding Ourselves Is the First Step Towards Understanding Others | by Bruno (HE) Mirchevski | The Logician

You need to be prepared for the hardships of your journey.

  1. The Correlation of Self-Awareness and Empathy
  2. How to Understand Yourself, Others, and Why?
  3. Constant Learning or Self-Acceptance?

Every journey has its own obstacles.

Whether we are leading the path towards success, or the path towards happiness. Oftentimes, these two are intertwined, and for many people, they mean the same thing.

There is no success without happiness, or at least it does not mean anything to us. And the other way around, if you are happy, you’ve also succeeded in life.

However, not all people can brag with this. Not every one of us can say that he or she is happy and successful in the long term. For this to happen, you need to work hard, and even more importantly, you need to work on yourself and getting to know your feelings and needs better.

It’s so common for people trying to figure out what they want, and what they really need in life. Unfortunately, sometimes we forget how important this is for our entire well-being, and what an immense value it holds in understanding others.

To understand yourself and others is a virtue, one that is not given to you, but one in you need to put effort into obtaining.

But how does one do it?

There are many questions correlated to this that I want to appoint, and I believe they will lead to a “conclusion” on how one can understand others through understanding oneself, and why it matters so much in life.

Photo by juan pablo rodriguez on Unsplash

To understand others and their feelings means to emphasize with them.

But how can you do it for others, if you cannot do it for yourself in the first place?

There is an interesting correlation between self-awareness and the perceptions of empathy, as many believe that this is actually the first step towards understanding those around you.

It has even been researched by scientists to understand just how important it is to be in touch with your own feelings, in order to understand others.

Apparently, emphatic people are skilled both at steering their own feelings and other people’s emotions at the same time. When you think about it, it is almost impossible to understand and help other people, if you cannot understand and help yourself, and vice versa.

To be a fully functional individual in your surroundings, you need to grasp the world around you, to have a clear understanding of what is happening and how you can contribute.

That is why it’s so crucial to understanding other people’s feelings, their intentions, as well as beliefs. It’s an invaluable social skill, and it will help you on your journey towards reaching all of your goals.

It’s a fact that some people are more empathetic than others, but it is not something that you cannot improve over time. You only need a clear and open mind, one without prejudice, and you will be able to put yourself in someone else’s skin.

However, in order to fully comprehend other people, you need to be at peace with your own self and the whole baggage you are carrying in life. In other words, and I know this can be really difficult, you need to challenge yourself.

The road towards self-awareness, therefore empathy, requires getting out of your comfort zone.

It requires seeing things that you were not able to see before, or you just couldn't accept.

So how do you do it?

Source: Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

To answer why it is important to understand yourself and others is rather easy, but to actually be able to achieve this is very difficult.

So let’s start by answering these questions one by one.

First of all, self-awareness and acknowledging your strengths and weaknesses is crucial because it allows you to build your life around them.

In other words, once you’ve determined your strengths you will work on them and enhance them. Also, the moment you recognize your weaknesses they are no longer that, but they become a goal that you need to overcome in order to improve.

With that being said, understanding yourself means grasping a go-getter attitude towards life, and excelling in it.

When it comes to the people around you, it’s pretty much the same. If you are a better person for yourself, that means you are able to become a better person for your friends and family as well.

You will learn that people, including yourself, are not flawless and that everyone is going through something. You will be able to empathize with other people’s feelings, instead of focusing only on yourself.

Answering how you can do this, can be quite tricky. To make this process easier, I am going to share a quick summary of the things that you can and should try to both, become self-aware, and develop empathy towards others.

Keep in mind, however, these can vary depending on your personality, and in my opinion, everyone should find their own suitable alternative for embracing these things.

How to Become More Self-Aware

1. Write down your goals and objectives in life. If you want to have a clear understanding of your present and future, take a piece of paper, and write down every goal/objective you have, no matter how big or small. This will show you where you are standing at the moment, and in which direction you are trying to move forward in life.

2. Practice meditation. Not everyone will find this to be a suitable option for themselves, but meditation can help you get in touch with your inner self. It can also provide moments of clarity, which is something that is incredibly important when you are trying to become more self-aware.

3. Ask questions. You won't know how you are behaving until someone tells you the truth. Therefore, ask your friends, family, co-workers how you are behaving with them. Don’t expect all of the answers to be true, but if you see a pattern in their answers you will have a real image for your behavior, and you will be able to change/upgrade it.

How to Understand Others?

1. Empathy can be learned. While this is not exactly the answer you were looking for, it’s safe to say that even if you don’t currently “have” it, empathy can be learned over time. As previously said, it can be learned by discovering and understanding yourself. It’s a skill, and skills can be improved over time with practice.

2. Always listen to others. Being self-absorbed and talking about your feelings only is not the proper way to develop meaningful relationships with others. You need to listen to the people around you, but you need to do it with your heart as well. Focus on what they are saying and think twice before you reply.

3. Get out of your comfort zone. Putting yourself in different situations, not only those in who you are comfortable in, is a huge step towards understanding both yourself and others. You need to do this more often if you want to really see the world from a different perspective.

Source: Nghia Le on Unsplash

Finally, the more you learn about yourself, the more you will see the good and bad things of your attitude towards you and the people around you. However, sometimes what we learn is not the answer that we were expecting.

People are complex beings with good and bad traits. Sometimes these bad ones take the best of us.

We often have t deal with prejudices, with self-pity and bad thoughts about ourselves. The more we learn, the less ignorant we become and notice these things.

Over time, our bad traits are even more noticeable, and this can easily turn into self-hate and have bad consequences for you and the people around you.

This got me wondering, is it better to accept ourselves the way we are, or constantly trying to improve ourselves?

Should we bother to understand the things that are happening around us, or simply accept the reality and live with it? I say we do both.

It’s immensely important to understand and accept yourself the way you are. It’s the only way to go if you want to be happy in life. However, you should never stop learning things about you and the people around you.

We are constantly changing, and that is a good thing. What would be even better, is if we recognize the change, and make something positive out of it.

In conclusion, you can be happy and satisfied with what you are doing right now, but you should also keep learning and upgrading all the time.

You need to do this both for yourself, and other people.

We are complex beings, who are better in a group instead of alone. So you need to make sure that the people who are around you are loved and appreciated.

Understanding and accepting yourself is the first and most important step of doing the same thing for others.

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How to learn to understand yourself?

Every person has such periods in life when it is difficult to understand oneself, to hear one's heart. In such stages of life, often our companion is mental discomfort. But, to understand yourself and be able to distinguish your own desires is important. First, to achieve harmony. Secondly, for successful self-realization. How to learn to understand yourself? Let's take a look at some tips to help you with this.

Watch your emotions. nine0007

Our feelings are a subconscious reaction to what is happening. But, they are not happening! Moreover, many factors influence our feelings today. The entire media system is designed to influence our feelings and channel them in a way that someone else will benefit from. But, alas, we are not. Therefore, it is very important to be attentive to your feelings. If you learn to catch your reactions, you will be able to understand yourself, your position in life, and, if necessary, change what makes you uncomfortable. nine0003

Man is created to live in harmony, but if he does not follow his heart, does not understand himself, it is practically impossible. Therefore, first of all, watch your feelings, which can tell you the direction in which you need to move. In addition, feelings will definitely show you what you need to give up. This does not mean that feelings will rule your life. This means that your feelings will show you those moments in which you do not find agreement with yourself. nine0003

Moments of calm.

Just like emotions, calmness and silence help to understand oneself. Appreciate moments of solitude, because they allow you, fenced off from the intrusive voices of the world, to hear yourself. Find an opportunity to be alone with yourself, to reflect on yourself and your life. Often in such moments you can experience insight, expand your consciousness. If you are in constant hustle and bustle, you will not be able to understand yourself, your true desires and needs. Therefore, find time to spend it with a good person whom you see daily in the mirror. nine0003

Helpful hints.

• Do not ignore your desires, and even if you are not going to fulfill some of them, it is worth listening to them.

• Spend more time in silence. Due to an overabundance of information, modern people cannot hear and understand themselves.

• Study your own motives - they often show us what is really important to us.

• Keep a diary and try to write down everything you feel and think about. Re-read your notes periodically to see your personality from the outside. nine0003

• Get creative in some way. It is in the creative process that certain aspects of our personality are revealed, energy is released. Creativity activates the processes of self-knowledge, allows a person to look deep into himself.

• Be observant - notice not only your emotional reactions, but also behavioral habits. Try to analyze what makes you better and what is the source of negativity, and gradually cleanse your life.

Self-understanding opens the door for us to another level of life, more harmonious and comfortable. The ability to understand oneself does not come in one day - it is necessary to work on it, making efforts and concentrating attention. It's not easy, but the result pays off all the effort! nine0003

Svetlana, www.vitamarg.com

How to learn to understand yourself

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Each person has his own preferences: he likes to do something, and he does not like to do something - this is quite natural. Almost all of us would like to do what we love and stay away from those things that we do not like.

Nevertheless, at times we recognize our limitations, which, as it seems to us, are generated by a whole bunch of reasons that prevent us from achieving what we want. nine0003

However, in fact, we all have exactly what we want to receive, and we stay away from what we do not want to have!

You can make your life perfect - you just have to really want it. Do you want to know how? Read on.

To begin with, you must be very specific about what you want to see your life and what you do not want.

If you have never thought about it before, now is the time to do it, the main thing is not to hurry. nine0003

Perhaps you have been living someone else’s life for many years and doing only what other people expected of you, and at the same time you never took time to seriously think about your own person, and therefore you don’t know what you really like, what you are need and what you want .

It is easy to say “I must (should) change my life” in words only, it is quite another thing to take real steps to achieve the desired changes.

Let's see what you can do to make them happen. nine0003

  • You must be very clear on paper about what you want.
  • You must then develop a written action plan that will lead you to your goals.

Later, you can discuss it with someone you care about, but you must first develop it yourself. To do this, you need imagination or, as some would say, the ability to dream. You can resort to the help of meditation or prayer.

The first version of your plan does not have to be perfect and comprehensive. To begin with, you can make only a few points in it - describe several aspects of your life that you would like to change and on which you are ready to work on improving. nine0003

It's best to start small. Do not try to make several radical changes to your lifestyle at once.

Your goal can be either very simple, one-dimensional, or complex, multi-level. But in any case, it is very important to draw up an action plan and write it down on paper . When it is ready, you will be able to make changes and additions to any of its paragraphs as necessary.

nine0002 So let's get started.

  • If you had all the time allotted to this world at your disposal and nothing was forbidden for you, how would you spend your days and nights?
  • If you had an inexhaustible source of finance, what would your life be like?

Wait! I can already hear you say, "I can't have an infinite amount of time and I can't own all the money in the world."

  • Please don't focus on information related to your past - focus on what might happen in the future. nine0057

Your task is to plan your life as if you had already achieved your goals.