Throughout my career, the constant quest for self-knowledge has been essential towards my personal and professional success, and I believe that the same can apply to you!
Self-knowledge is a quest on which you embark in order to know yourself better. What you like and don’t like? Your preferences? What are your qualities and faults? How do you react to certain events? Which emotions you have greater ease or difficulty in dealing with? What kind of people you love to engage and interact with, what kind you just about tolerate and which you would prefer to be as far away from as possible? What are your limits, which once surpassed, will add significantly to your health and what are the dreams that will motivate you to go the extra mile?
To know oneself completely is utopia! However, you should get to know yourself more and more. Allow me to draw an analogy to make it clearer. Imagine yourself as a beautiful statue, still inside a rock. There you stand, complete yet invisible and inseparable from the rock to those looking from the outside. At the same time, you are also the sculptor who is gradually chipping away at the rock with your chisel and rubber hammer. That is the self-knowledge process, where the more you invest in the search, the more access you have to the beautiful sculpture that lies inside you.
There are a few good reasons for that. Let me illustrate some of them here.
As you walk through life, you must have come across forks in the road, moments where you could have chosen to follow one path or the other. In those moments, you could certainly understand more or less clearly what the pros and cons were for each alternative, and after analysing them, you made your decision and moved on. It is exactly at those times that knowing a lot about oneself can prove to be very helpful.
Self-knowledge serves as a filter or judge to help you decide what directions to take. Should I accept this job offer or not? Why, if you are well aware of your strengths and limitations, it becomes easier to evaluate if that new job will make demands on you for which you will use your best abilities or put you in situations for which you have limited abilities and will definitely be under stress, given the high possibility of failure. Using this filter at all times increases your chances of making the right choices, precisely because you know yourself better.
Boy playing (Photo: MI PHAM / Unsplash)
A secondary benefit from this is that when you have to make decisions that respect yourself and your values, you will increase the chances of spending more time being exposed to situations where you will feel good. You will be more productive and interact with people you like, allowing you to be truly happy.
This is particularly relevant in romantic relationships where both you and the other person are getting to know each other as individuals and as a couple. In fact, this is an even more complex situation, for both statues, as per my previous example, are not completely visible.
You have probably experienced or have seen friends go through relationships that that did not end well. It may have lasted one month or 20 years, it makes no difference; what matters is that when it ended, you may have looked back and seen how different they were from each other, right? Well, imagine what you wouldn’t give for even the possibility of gaining access to this type of knowledge previously. Hence the constant search for better self-knowledge.
To allow yourself to be exposed for too long to situations that do not agree with you is equivalent to be begging to fall ill. A simple example can help to understand this. Imagine your current (or any previous) boss whose personal and professional values are completely different from yours.
Imagine yourself a selfless person, who always aims to do your best and likes helping others. You’re tolerant, likeable, like to be transparent and to tell the truth. Now imagine your career-minded boss, who will step over everyone, who uses people and disposes of them as he sees fit, who only values you when he can benefit from your actions.
Well, then? How long were you able to put up with working like this? Did you have sleepless nights? Did you suffer panic attacks? Were you depressed? How far did this affect your life outside the workplace?
That’s what I’m talking about. That’s a very common situation to occur, and good self-knowledge allows you to quickly foresee all that and make plans to get out of such a situation, be it through a change of department at work or even changing jobs, for example.
There are many ways to do this which will be more or less interesting to you given your preferences and personal profile, but the most important thing to remember is that the more time you invest in your search, the more you’ll benefit from it. How you do it is of less importance. Below I list a few ideas, to get you started.
Put yourself on the psychoanalyst’s couch and try to engage in some self-analysis (in this case, it’s you as the sculptor examining you, the statue). Why do you react in certain ways, what do you feel, what bothers you, what brings you pleasure, in what situations do you feel good? And so on. Make a note of all this and over time, reread and see where things repeat themselves.
Friends talking (Photo: Christin Hume / Unsplash)
The secret here is to ask for feedback from people in whom you really trust, who know you well and won’t be worried about saying what you want to hear. They are able to recognize your blind spots and having access to them greatly contributes towards your self-awareness.
Nothing can teach you better than your daily routine. At the end of each day, write down a few lines in your diary about what most affected you and how you reacted, what you thought and felt in those situations. After a while, re-read what you wrote and note the similar points.
Trying out new things allows you to find out about things, situations and people that you love or simply cannot stand that you were not aware of before. It’s very stimulating to learn about new things, and as a bonus, it will show you how you react to them. In my example, it’s like starting to unveil the sculpture at a part you haven’t yet worked on. The foot, for example. So, is it too big or too small?
From time to time, sit down and write about what you believe in, what your thoughts are about certain things, what legacy you intend to leave behind. What is your purpose in life? What do you intend to achieve? That kind of thing. When you write, and occasionally review, you connect even more with yourself and what truly matters to you.
Woman meditating (Photo: Dingzeyu Li / Unsplash)
First of all, you must understand that spirituality is not the same thing as religiosity. It makes no difference whether you are an atheist or the most religious person in the neighbourhood. What is important here is to expand your understanding of the world, or at least to understand what you actually believe exists, besides your five senses. You’ll be surprised at how much this understanding changes the way you see your life.
Finally, there are a lot of fine people who have studied extensively and can help you professionally to improve your self-knowledge and deal better with your emotions. Divest yourself of all prejudice and if you are able to do so, access and invest in an excellent therapist or analyst to help you with your search. I guarantee you it will be worth it.
Cover photo credit – Boy looking at himself in the mirror (Photo: Goami / iStock)
