Yourself
How Well Do You Know Yourself?
Do I Know Myself?
Sometimes I look at myself on the mirror and I wonder who the fuck I? Either I look strange or I have done something wrong the night beforte and now I question myself. The root of the problem is I do not know what I want most of the times. I am sure there are lots of people in the same situation. If you don’t know what you want then you are a lost soul.
Knowing what you want or what is your purpose in life is makes you stronger as a person, a strong character equals a better life, better relationships, better friendships. You are more likely to have stable relationships, friendships and succesful at work. Not knowing who you are is like a ripple effect; you are going around and around with no ending. At least this is who i am most of times.
Getting to the bottom of what it is that you want has a lot to do with honesty, transparency, and knowing yourself. You can take a deeper dive into getting honest with yourself in this other article I wrote. While it might sound a little crazy or counterintuitive, sometimes the best way to get at the heart of an issue is to take a backdoor approach. To get to know yourself better and figure out what you want, ask yourself the following questions
Think about and write down traits and characteristics that you would use to describe your past self. What types of things did you enjoy doing? How did you spend your time? If you had any self-defeating or self-sabotaging habits, you’ll want to write these down too. Don’t just focus on the good stuff. Focus on your previous shortcomings also. The idea is to comprehensively describe your past self—the good, the bad, and the ugly
Know the limits of my knowledge
The “Dunning-Kruger effect” relates specifically to the tendency of people who are poor at a task to over-estimate their ability at it. As David Dunning has written: “The scope of people’s ignorance is often invisible to them.” (Although see Gignac and Zajenkowski again, with a paper from this year arguing that the effect is (mostly) a statistical artefact).
This over-confidence can be dangerous both to the individual, and to others. For example, a US study of student pilots found that those who’d scored lower on a pilot knowledge test “grossly overestimated their ability” while higher-scoring students tended in fact to under-estimate theirs.
The same effect has been noted among other groups such as chemistry students. In this case, students who’d scored less than 50% on one exam had predicted that they’d get an average of 69%, while their actual average mark was just under 37%. That’s a massive discrepancy. If you don’t know that you’re under-prepared for a test, this is clearly a problem
The better-than-average effect may be old news, but results from a recent systematic survey of Americans’ beliefs about their own intelligence (the first to be conducted in 50 years) found that about 70% of men and 60% of women agreed with the statement: “I am more intelligent than the average person.”
The team was forced to conclude that Americans’ “self-flattering beliefs about intelligence are alive and well several decades after their discovery was first reported.” Other work has found that our over-estimates of our intelligence can be staggeringly huge — around
IQ points, on average, according to a study by Gilles Gignac and Marcin Zajenkowski published last year (which also found that we tend to over-estimate our romantic partner’s intelligence even more than our own). The sobering lesson is that you’re probably a lot less smart than you think are.
You can’t deny that I know who I am
How well do you know your own personality as it fluctuates from moment to moment? This was explored in a recent study, which found that participants had self-insight into their momentary levels of extraversion and conscientiousness, but weren’t great at rating how agreeable they were being at any given time. As the researchers write: “This apparent self-ignorance may be partly responsible for interpersonal problems”.
However, when it comes to personality in general — your fairly stable, trait levels of extraversion, agreeableness, and so on — there’s some rare, good news when it comes to self-insight. According to a large-scale review of data on self-reports of personality vs personality ratings from others, published in Psychological Science in 2018, we’re actually pretty good at judging ourselves in this way. In fact, the work revealed that if anything, we’re harsher judges of our personality than other people are. This was a surprise to the researchers, who’d assumed, based on other work in this field, to find a positive self-bias.
If you love salt and vinegar crisps, say, but hate cheese and onion, then fair enough. No one’s going to argue that you’re mistaken. But if you tell me, you love coffee, I might be less accepting. It turns out that it’s not always that easy for us to tell the difference between liking something and wanting it. A study published this year found that “heavy” coffee drinkers (people who drank three or more cups a day) want coffee a lot more than they like it. The implication is that they drink it mostly or entirely to feed their addiction, rather than for pleasure
A word of caution
Our understanding of the potential pluses or minuses of accurate self-insight is, according to a recent review, “clouded” by all kinds of issues, including differences between studies in the way self-insight is measured, and also fundamental differences in types of self-deceptions. (Self-deception may sometimes stem from an individual’s desire to defend their self-esteem, but other times exist simply because a person hasn’t really engaged in close self-assessment.) Jennifer Beer and Michelle Harris write that the currently available research “does not allow us to confidently conclude that self-insight has advantages over some types of self-insight failure (or vice versa).” They conclude by calling for “more systematic investigation of why, when, where and for whom self-insight is costly or beneficial.”
Changes from who you use to be
When thinking about what’s changed between your past and present self, what are you most proud of? List any accomplishments or achievements that you’ve attained. Where have you grown and matured in your understanding, perspective and experience? In addition, it’s important to also include areas of struggle, where you perhaps still have work to do. You’ll also want to note positive aspects about yourself that you like and admire that you still embody.
As you think about who you are today as opposed to who you used to be, take note of the moments and experiences that shaped the current you. What lessons have you learned on your journey and how will they inform your future? How can you leverage what you’ve learned about yourself to step into who you want to become?
Sometimes it’s easier to know what you don’t want instead of what you want. Fortunately, you’ve got life experience under your belt and you can more clearly see how far you’ve come from your previous self. When you think about the experiences you’ve had and the lessons learned, what do you with certainty no longer want in your life? This can include anything that you recognize as detracting from your joy, light, and vision for a happy life
This is where you allow yourself to dream free from limitations. Think about the life you envision for yourself. One trick is to think about how your future self would reflect on your past self. What achievements would your future self be most proud of? What do your surroundings look like? Who is in your life sharing your joy? Most importantly, how have you made people around you feel? What have you brought into the life of others?
How can I get better at knowing myself?
Well, the people around you could be more honest: in general, other people don’t help us to correct our biases. Too often, feedback from employers, family, and friends is vague, and overly positive, according to research led by Zlatan Krizan at Iowa State University. “
As a society, we make the wrong trade-off by thinking that boosting self-esteem is going to boost performance, and that rarely happens,” Krizan says. “That empty praise of telling someone they’re great or pretending there are not skill differences when there are, can really become a problem.”
As well as seeking honest feedback and bearing in mind the better-than-average effect, it could also be worth practising humility. Research published in the journal Self and Identity suggests that people who are more modest about their degree of self-knowledge know themselves better.
No one likes a narcissist. But there could be some benefits to thinking you’re better than you are. They relate to the optimism bias — the fact that we tend to over-estimate the likelihood of positive events in our lives, like getting a top promotion, and under-estimate our chances of suffering everything from a divorce to a car crash. Optimism is important for mental and physical health
So perhaps having inflated self-views is important for our wellbeing, too. In fact, according to the results of a study published last year in Nature Human Behaviour, this may well be the case. The participants completed various tests of cognitive and emotional abilities and then reported how well they thought they’d done on all these tests. They then spent a week completing daily diaries, in which they reflected on their levels of satisfaction with their career, relationships and life in general.
The researchers found that having accurate self-insight was not related to higher levels of satisfaction in any of these areas. The data even suggested that people who most over-estimated their abilities had the highest levels of life satisfaction. Still, it’s worth noting that feeling great about your life and performing to your highest level are two different things. People with accurate self-knowledge may be more driven to improve and achieve more.
Again, a backdoor approach to answering this question might be helpful. One way to get at the root of how to arrive at your ideal future self is to ask what is stopping you from becoming who you want to be. What is standing in your way? After you have listed all of the things that stand between you and your future self, note what steps you need to take for each of item. You’ll likely find that you can begin your first step almost immediately. You might also find that you are the only thing standing in your way
Find Your Ikigai
Ikigai (pronounced ee-key-guy) is a Japanese concept that means “a reason for being.” To find your ikigai is to cultivate your inner self while you fulfill your life roles. This is like getting to know yourself 2.0. Further, it is not just an exercise for self-discovery. It will also help you connect with yourself to find your purpose [exciting, right?]. Ask yourself these four questions to discover your ikigai:
- What do you love?
- What are you good at?
- What does the world need?
- What can you be paid for?
Essentially, the intersection of these four categories will lead you to discover your ikigai, in addition to your passion, mission, profession, and vocation. It’s important to note that the Japanese philosophy focuses on finding your bliss and purpose, while the western interpretation focuses on finding your dream career
To know what you want out of your life and career, you need to know yourself. This will require brutal honesty with self. With deep introspection and self-reflection, you can begin your journey of self-discovery. Two helpful exercises to know yourself better are journaling and finding your ikigai. As a result, you’ll not only have a better sense of what you want, but also your purpose in life. This is in addition to better understanding your passion, mission, profession, and vocation. With commitment, discipline, focus, and patience, you’ll be on your way to who you are meant to become in no time
