Getting to know yourself

Four rules and a few methods

DeepakAlse
Remnants from the mind
4 min readFeb 22, 2014

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Getting to know yourself is a lot like running barefoot along beachshore on a stormy hightide noon — your feet constantly sink into the sand, you can drown if you don’t pay attention and you can feel like you are going nowhere.

After 3 decades as a student of purposeful self-awareness, I’ve four rules that work well for me.

Don’t take yourself too seriously. Self awareness is a tool; sometimes it is a blessing and sometimes it is a curse. It is a curse if your awareness of self becomes focussed on ideas of ‘ Who you will/will not/can/cannot/should not/should be ?’ or ‘Who you think is better than you?’ It is a blessing if you use it as a tool for evolution, a tool for moving forward and tool for building your own hypothesis. Some very depressed people are extremely self-aware and some extremely successful people have lived in a bubble that nowhere resembles self-awareness.

Don’t meditate with the intent of generating self awareness. Meditation and contemplation are not the same thing. Meditate to bring a sort of stillness/calm to your mind. Contemplate to ask questions ,wonder and hypothesize about your life. A lot of the advise on self-awareness tends to revolve around methods and ideas generated by/for saints and monks — So, learn them but be selective about how you apply those methods. Absolute stillness and calm are great tools for someone who wants to renounce all worldly attachments but the same methods can become a hindrance in experiencing and enjoying the broader spectrum of emotions and joys that is abundant in material life.

Habits make the person. Your mind and your hands are a great team that need to be used together to make a better ‘You’ — Meditation and contemplation help your mind but without physical work and effort of the kind that involves experimenting with hypotheses and learning hands-on, your personal progress will never be complete. Saints and monks who meditate and contemplate in the hills, achieve far less real impact than people who put their fears on the line, find real work problems to solve and then experiment with failure until they succeed.

We are the stories we tell ourselves. So let your self-awareness be about the awareness of the stories you are telling yourself and how the world around you is affecting and influencing the story, its plots, its characters and its themes. There are only a few basic characteristics that shape your awareness — empathy, vision ,ambition, focus, desire to be fair, the desire to be connected and the desire to make sense of the world around us. Even a rock gets weathered — So it is perfectly okay to let your story change when the facts change or when your motivators change.

A Few Methods

I’ve used the following tools that help measure and get some sort of baseline self awareness — Remember that none of these completely provide some kind of ‘The Answer’.

  • JOCRF Aptitudes Test(www.jocrf.org)
  • DISC Assessments
  • Enneagram
  • Myer-Brigs Type Indicator
  • Gallup Strengths Inventory

I have hundreds of pages of notes to myself, archiving my thoughts, fears and ideas — Once a month, I’ll flip through a random page and spend some time wondering about what i’ve written on that page. Sometimes they act as a reminder of how some thoughts are fleeting and sometimes they remind me of how little i’ve changed over the years!

Read ‘ The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’ by Stephen Covey — Over the past 20 years, I’ve read that book about 4 times, once every 5-6 years and each time I tend to reinterpret it and apply it to myself in better ways than I have in the previous iteration.

I observe people and work hard to avoid judging them. I tend to develop strong opinions and then change them constantly because i hate being unfair. I don’t just observe those that are successful or those that are failures. I observe anyone who enjoys what they are doing. I like to see what makes them tick and see how they work. You’ll mostly find that if something is worth doing, it is work doing well. You’ll also find that being successful is easy, being valuable is a lot more tougher.

Every year, for about 4 weeks prior to my birthday, I invest a few hours running a self-assessment on the weekends. These are moments that I use to question my goals, my values and my achievements over the past year. For those 4 weeks, I am usually more silent than usual. I prefer a type of ‘Return to Zero’ accounting for life, one where I assume that I’ll die on the day before my birthday and will be born again on the birthday. I’ve found that this exercise helps in framing my perspective about the risks, challenges and gains to be expected from who i am.

Every few years, when i feel like I am not living a life of intent, when I feel like I have gone into a sort of mental autopilot, I tend to take a sabbatical. The sabbatical tends to be more than just a vacation. I try new things and break from the cycle of doing things the way I’ve done them in the past.

In Aerosmith’s infinite & ‘Amazing’ wisdom — ‘ Life’s a journey not a destination’.

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