How to understand yourself

Content

Steps
Part 1 of 3: Get to know yourself
Part 2 of 3: Analyze Your Consciousness and Actions
Part 3 of 3: Open Yourself to Reflection
Tips
Warnings

It happens that you find yourself in a situation where you are doing something and have no idea why and why. Why did you yell at your son? Why did you choose to stay in your current job rather than accept the new offer? Why did you argue with your parents all evening about an issue that, by and large, does not bother you? Our subconscious mind controls a good part of our behavior, and this is why the reasons underlying many life decisions can be shrouded in mystery. However, if you know which side to look at this issue, you can learn to understand yourself much better: why do you make such decisions, what makes you happy and how you can change for the better.

Steps

Part 1 of 3: Get to know yourself

1 Get an objective assessment. The first thing you can do to gain a greater understanding of yourself is to get some objective judgment. Of course, you can ask around people you know, but their experience with you will lead them to the same prejudices as yours. It is an objective assessment that will give you a more accurate idea and lead you to think about something that you may never have thought about. There are a number of recognized tests, after passing which, you can learn more about yourself in various aspects of your personality), and unrecognized ones are innumerable.
- The Mayer-Briggs personality type theory says that all people belong to 1 in 16 basic personalities.These personalities determine how you interact with people, what kinds of interpersonal problems you experience, what strengths you have, and what kind of environment is best for you to live and work in. The basic test can be found online if you are interested in digging deeper into your personality.
- If you find it difficult to understand what makes you happy and what you should do with your life, consider taking a career test. These types of tests will help you decide what will bring you the most satisfaction, usually based on your personality type and what you prefer to do for pleasure. There are also many options for tests online, usually free, but if you are still a student, it is better to use one of the recognized experts.
- There is a theory that everyone learns and perceives their experience in one of several ways. All of these methods are referred to as a “learning style”. Knowing what your learning style is more than once will help you out after graduation and help you understand why some activities stubbornly fail for you, while in others you succeed from the first steps. As in previous cases, tests can be taken online. Just be aware that this is a controversial theory, there are many others regarding how a person learns, and depending on which test you take, you may get different results.
2 Do the character description exercise. When writers conceive a book, they often do writing exercises to help them better understand their characters. You can do the same exercise to understand yourself better. Similar exercises are also offered online. Perhaps, through such an exercise, you will not learn anything particularly objective, because you rely entirely on your own vision, which you set out in answers to questions, but it can make you think about something that you have never thought about before. Try answering a few questions to get the idea:
- How would you describe yourself in one sentence?
- What is the purpose of your life story?
- What's the most important thing that happened to you?
- How are you different from the people around you?
3 Assess your strengths and weaknesses. By reflecting on your strengths and weaknesses, you can better understand who you are and what is most important to you. Here, special attention should be paid to comparing your own description of your strengths and weaknesses with the description given by your family members, friends, etc. What is invisible to you, but visible to them, can give you a lot of food for thought.
- Examples of strengths include determination, dedication, patience, diplomacy, communication skills, imagination, and creativity.
- Examples of weaknesses: narrow-mindedness, egocentrism, difficulties in perceiving reality, judging people, craving for control.
4 Explore your priorities. What you consider most important in your life and in your daily interactions with people can say a lot about you. Think about your priorities, compare them with the priorities of other people, those you respect, and think about what your conclusions say about you. Of course, you should be open to the fact that your priorities are not built in the best way (for most of them this is so), which can also say a lot about you.
- If your house caught fire, what would you do? What would you save? It's amazing how fire reveals our priorities. Even if you saved something extremely practical, like tax checks, it still says something (for example, that you prefer to be prepared for everything and not give in to resistance in life).
- Another way to understand your priorities is to imagine that someone you love has been publicly criticized for something you don't support (let's say he's gay and you don't support this lifestyle).Will you support him? Protect? How? What do you say? Our actions in the face of peer criticism and possible rejection also betray our priorities.
- Some examples of priorities are money, family, sex, respect, security, stability, material possessions, and comfort.
5 Watch how you have changed. Look back in time and think about what has happened to you throughout your life and how that influenced the way you think and act today. Observing how you have changed reveals a lot about why you do this, since a person's behavior is based on his past experiences.
- For example, you may have a tendency to protect shoplifters, but at the same time you are very harsh in judging anyone who steals. When you think about it, you may recall the episode when, as a child, a candle was stolen from a store, and your parents punished you severely, which now explains your overreaction to such behavior.

Part 2 of 3: Analyze Your Consciousness and Actions

1 Analyze when you are experiencing strong emotions. Sometimes you suddenly feel very angry, sad, cheerful, or inspired. Understanding what triggers these stronger-than-normal reactions, where they are rooted, can help you better understand yourself.
- For example, you might be insanely angry when people talk in the theater while watching a movie. Are you really angry about the conversation or feeling disrespectful to you? Since this anger doesn't help the situation, it might be better to try to find a way to pay less attention to it and worry less about other people's respect for yourself so you don't have to fight that anger.
2 Observe the processes of suppression and substitution. Suppression is when you don't want to think about something, so you help yourself to forget that it ever happened. Substitution is when you react emotionally to something, but the real reaction is provoked by something else. Both are common reactions. Both are unhealthy reactions. If you can identify the cause of these reactions and learn how to deal with them, you will become a happier person.
- For example, you may feel that you are not too saddened by the death of your grandmother, but when your family decides to get rid of her favorite chair, you get upset and angry. You’re not upset about the loss of your chair. It was already all stained, smelled funny and, possibly, contained radioactive substances. You are upset about the loss of your grandmother.
3 Notice how and when you talk about yourself. Do you turn every conversation into a conversation about yourself? Or are you always making fun of yourself? How and when you talk about yourself can tell you a lot about you, what you think of yourself, and how you perceive yourself. Sometimes it is helpful to talk about yourself and realize that you cannot be able to do everything, but you should pay attention to the extremes and realize why you are resorting to these or those extremes.
- For example, your friend just got his Ph.D., but when you start talking about it, always translate the topic to how you wrote your diploma. Perhaps the reason is that you are embarrassed that your friend has already become a Ph.D. and you are not, and you want to feel more important and more fulfilled by talking about yourself.
4 Pay attention to how and why you interact with others. When you interact with other people, do you tend to humiliate them? You may have noticed that you only spend time with people who are richer than you. Behavior like this can also open your eyes to yourself and what really matters to you.
- For example, if you only choose people who are richer than you as friends, this may indicate that you want to feel richer by pretending to be equal to these people.
- Think about what is being said and what you "hear". This is another way to explore your interactions with friends and family. You may find out that every time you hear “I need your help”, even though everything that was said was “I need your company”. And this proves that it is very important for you to be needed by someone.
5 Write your bio. Write your bio in 20 minutes, 500 words. You will need to type very quickly and think less about what to include in your bio. By doing so, you will help yourself determine what your brain considers most important in terms of what kind of person you are. For many people, 20 minutes is too short to type 500 words. Reflecting on what you said and what makes you annoyed because it was not included in your biography can also be a revelation.
6 Pay attention to how long you can wait for the reward. Research shows that people who are able to delay the enjoyment of rewards do much better with their lives, get better grades, better education, and better health care. Think about situations in which you could delay the reward. What have you done? If you've had a hard time with this delay, this is an item worth working on as it often affects your success.
- Stanford University conducted a famous experiment called the Marshmallow Experiment, in which it monitored children's reactions to marshmallows and then followed their development of life over several decades. Children who were able to give up food for more rewards did better in school and were in better health.
7 Analyze what is more important to you: to tell or to be told. When you are doing some work, you are looking for the next task yourself or you need someone to tell you what to do. Or the best option for you is to tell other people what to do yourself. All of this, depending on the situation, can tell a lot about you.
- Remember, there is nothing wrong with receiving instructions from another person. You just need to keep this in mind in order to better understand and control your activities and your behavior when something important arises. For example, if you know that you are not in control of a situation and is required to do so, consider that your unwillingness is just a “habit”, not a necessity, and can be changed.
8 Pay attention to how you react in difficult or unfamiliar situations. When it gets really hard and difficult, for example, you lose your job, a loved one dies, someone threatens you - hidden or restrained sides of your character come into play. Think about how you have reacted to difficult situations in the past. Why did you react that way? How would you like to react? Would you react this way now?
- You can imagine all of these scenarios as well, but keep in mind that all your hypothetical answers will be veiled with biases and therefore not reliable about your actual reaction.
- For example, imagine you are moving to a new city where no one knows you. Where do you go to make friends? What kind of people will you try to befriend? Would you like to change the way you tell people about yourself versus what your friends know about you? It can show your priorities and what you are looking for in social contacts.
9 Think about how power affects your behavior. If you have any kind of authority, consider how it affects you and your actions. Many people, gaining power, become tougher, more closed, prone to control, more suspicious. If you have to make decisions that other people depend on, think about why you make this or that decision: because it is so right, or because you want to control the situation?
- For example, if you are babysitting your younger brother, do you punish him for the slightest offense? It really helps him learn something, or you're just looking for an excuse to get rid of him while he's in the corner.
10 Explore what influences you. What influences your thinking and worldview can tell a lot about you whether you really agree with what you are being taught or not. By seeing how these influences have shaped your behavior, you can better understand the roots of your actions. Seeing where you deviate from what you have been taught also determines your uniqueness and personal thinking. You can be influenced by:
- Sources of information such as TV shows, movies, books, and even the porn you watch.
- Your parents, who can teach both tolerance and racism, both material well-being and spiritual values.
- Your friends, under whose pressure you take an interest in certain things and go through new experiences.

Part 3 of 3: Open Yourself to Reflection

1 Stop defending yourself. If you want to truly understand yourself better, you will have to reflect on those sides of yourself that you do not like at all and admit some things that you do not want to admit. Naturally, you will have a defensive reaction and a reluctance to admit it all, but if you really want to understand what is happening inside you, you will have to let go of this protection. Even if you don't lower these barriers in front of other people, you should at least lower them in front of yourself.
- Stopping defending against your own weaknesses also means opening up to help other people and correcting past mistakes. By becoming more open to discussion, criticism, and change, other people can really help you understand yourself and become better.
2 Be honest with yourself. We lie to ourselves much more often than we want to admit it .. We convince ourselves that we made some dubious decisions, guided by noble or logical reasons, even when, in fact, guided by revenge or laziness. But hiding from the real motives of our actions, we lose the opportunity to change and develop. Remember, there is no point in lying to yourself. Even if you discover truth about yourself that you don't like, it will only give you the opportunity to tackle these problems, and not pretend that they do not exist.
3 Listen to what other people have to say about you. Sometimes, especially when we do wrong, other people warn us. We also tend not to listen. Sometimes this is good, because often people say something only to hurt, without having a basis for their statements. But sometimes what is said can be a qualitative analysis of your behavior from the outside. Think back to what people have said to you in the past and ask again for their opinion on your behavior.
- For example, your sister may have noticed that you tend to exaggerate. However, on your part, this happens unintentionally, and, therefore, this is a sign that you do not quite adequately perceive reality.
- There is a big difference between evaluating what you have been told and depending on that opinion. You should not shape your behavior to please other people, unless it has a negative impact on your life. (Even then, it's worth considering whether the real reason is your behavior or your environment.) Change because you want to change, not because someone else told you to do it.
4 Give advice. When we give advice to other people, we often get a great opportunity to reflect on our own problems and evaluate them from a new angle. When you look at someone's situation, you may think of things that you have never thought of before.
- You don't even have to do it in reality, although helping friends, family, and even strangers is a good thing.You can give advice to yourself in old age and to yourself young, in the form of letters. This will help you to reflect on your past experience, understand what you learned from it, as well as what is especially important for you for the future.
5 Take the time to live life. The best way to truly know yourself is to just live life. Like meeting another person, understanding yourself takes time, and living life will help you understand yourself much better than taking tests and interviewing yourself. You can try:
- Travel. Traveling will put you in a wide variety of situations and test your ability to cope with stress and adapt to change. You will understand much better what makes you happy, where your priorities are and what your dreams are about, than if you continue to lead a monotonous and boring life.
- Get more education. Education, real education, provokes us to think in new ways. Getting an education will open your mind and make you think about things that you have never thought about. Your interests and how you feel about the new things you learn can reveal a lot about you.
- Give up expectations. Let go of other people's expectations of you. Give up your own expectations of yourself. Let go of expectations about what life should be. When you do this, you will become more open to seeing how much new experience can enrich you and how much happiness it can bring. Life is a crazy carousel and you may encounter many things that scare you just because it is new and different from what you knew before. Don't shut yourself out of this experience. It is he who can make you happier than you were before.

Tips

Before you try to understand yourself, become yourself. You cannot understand who you are not.
If you are constantly angry or sad, then you have no idea who you are. Try to find out.
If you realized who you are and you don't like the result, change.