Self-Knowledge: 3 Tools to Know Yourself Better

All of us live our personal dream. We may or may not be conscious of each step, but they’re there, playing out as accurately as if read from a script.

When we talk about reaching our goals and purposes, or materializing personal desires, self-knowledge is a key tool and is essential to our success.

There are many of us that face continuous change in our personal and professional lives. Within that search for wellbeing and personal growth, we will constantly need to rethink and reexamine things, especially those areas that allow us to know ourselves better and guide us towards what makes us happy.

Knowing our goals and the tools we need to achieve them is the first step to reaching our goals. 

It’s true that when we talk about ourselves, it can be very difficult on occasion. We feel like we know ourselves and know everything there is to know, but rarely do we stop to think, reflect, and write drown our goals. We don’t stop to “put them to ink” or consciously be aware of the characteristics that will allow or prevent their achievement.

To do that, it’s important and necessary to really dig down into what we know about ourselves and our inner nature.

What tools help us in knowing ourselves better?

“This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” — Shakespeare

These are the 3 best tools to develop your self-knowledge in a simple and efficient way:

1. Who am I?

This exercise allows you to see both who you are in this moment, in the present, and who you want to be in the future. Note that the most important part is deciding how you’re going to become the person you wish and strive to be. What would your strategy be?

You can do this task by writing down on paper who you are, on another who you wish to become, and on the last, how you’re going to achieve it. It’s also interesting to complement this exercise with feedback from the people you trust to tell you how you look and are being perceived.

2. Your life timeline

This tool involves creating a horizontal line that represents your life. On this line, you’ll mark a mid-point that represents the present. You’ll then begin to include the different situations and experiences that you’ve been through in the past. This helps you to become conscious of the things you consider relevant about your life.

The second part entails filling in part of your future, emphasizing the closest and most distant goals you have in mind. At the end of this timeline, I’d like you to reflect on what you’ve experienced, and how you’re planning to achieve the goals and objectives you’ve set up for yourself.

3. An emotion diary

I love looking at and feeling emotions as if they’re treasures, because of the enormous power they have over us. Listening to your emotions can tell you a lot about yourself, other people, or different situations. Due to that, the emotion diary is a technique that greatly facilitates self-knowledge.

Being concious of your emotional state, knowing which of these emotions are the most repetitive in your day to day life, or knowing the origins of others, can give you a greater and deeper understanding of yourself in any aspect of your life that you like.

 To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment.

— Eckhart Tolle