8 ways to get more intimate with yourself

 

Self-awareness is one of the most important skills you can foster. When you become intimate with who you are, what triggers you, what you want and what you don’t, you become truly empowered in how you deal with your life. 

This awareness allows you to set boundaries and stick to them; understand your limits & know when it´s ok to push them and know what will work for you & what simply won´t in work or private life. By being aware of yourself you learn how to better relate to others and why some people seem to always drive you up the wall. 

Funny enough, most people go through life without taking the time to “really” get to know themselves. They know what they like and what they don’t in terms of food and other people’s behaviours, but that’s about it.

When faced with questions like “who are you, what are your values & what are your strengths”, many people tend to freeze up or answer in vague, evasive terms i.e. „I am a normal, good, hardworking person.“ You can trust me… I work in HR for over 10 years, led countless job interviews and trained HR professionals in approaches to the hiring process. 

In an interview, these questions seek to explore persons’ talents or perhaps touch slightly on key aspects of their personality. This is done to better understand the potential fit of the candidate for the role at stake, not deep dive into a philosophical rabbit hole or conduct an unwanted & amateur psychotherapy session. And yet… I would argue, that even VERY senior people are seldom intimately aware of their talents and tendencies.

 Awareness of the self is a necessary first step in figuring out how to optimally function in this world. If you underestimate it (like I stubbornly did for some years), you may seek things, relationships and situations, that go against your nature, deplete you of energy and rob you of joy. But if you want to be truly happy and successful in life, it’s important to go much deeper than just awareness. That means combining the intellectual understanding of self with emotional acceptance and supportive action.

Self-awareness – self-acceptance – supportive action

I.e. it´s not enough to know I´m strongly introverted. It will serve me best to make peace with my predisposition. Dissolving my anger at my chronic inability to enjoy parties and ceasing to push myself into something that ultimately frustrates me, will free up energy that went into „going against myself“. This energy can then be re-directed into coming up with ways of connecting with like-minded people while being in line with who I am.

Without decent self-awareness, we can’t really make deliberate and focused changes in our life. If we don´t have an accurate understanding of who is doing the change, what needs to change & why, we approach life in a “trial and error” fashion.

One of the reasons I enjoy coaching so much and suggest to my clients to learn a bit about themselves even before they work with me is that the coaching process itself is aimed at building self-awareness – self-acceptance and supportive action. With decent „groundwork “ in self-awareness, the coaching is so much more effective and faster for the client. 

Self-awareness work is an especially powerful first step when you wish to:

• Gain self-compassion and create effective self-care
• Understand what makes you happy and create more of that in your life
• Navigate things, situations & environments that deplete you of energy
• Understanding why some people just “get on your nerves” and how to work with it
• Refine your professional strengths & navigate your weaknesses
• Create healthy, emotionally intelligent & supportive relationships with partners, children, family, friends, community etc. 
• Become an effective leader
• Identify & navigate your triggers

How to go about it? Self-awareness can be nurtured in two basic steps. Firstly you get introspective and become intimate with your personality, motivations, strengths, weaknesses, emotions, thought patterns, triggers etc. Secondly, you seek to understand how you impact other people and the world around you.

Ready to start your self-awareness journey?

1. Take a look back & ask yourself:

• What are the most significant moments in my childhood or youth that shaped who I am today?
• Who are the most important people in my childhood or youth and why?
• How was I parented & what values were being instilled in me? Which of them I still keep, which ones I discarded and which of them I yet wish to let go of?

• Take a look inside and around & ask yourself:

• What kind of activities and tasks energise me? I forget time goes by when I’m doing…?
• What am I naturally good at? What are my strengths? What are my weaknesses?
• What sets me off? What things or behaviours do I despise?
• What are the qualities that make up my character? What is my personality like?
• What matters most in my life?

• Speak to a few trusted friends, family members & colleagues :

• How do people close to me perceive you? How would they describe me in 3-5 words?
• What do people close to me perceive as my strengths? Weaknesses?
• What do they value about you the most?

Once you gather this information you can start putting the puzzle together. The tricky part can be, sorting out which “pieces of the puzzle” resonate with you as true. Sometimes the way others see us or even we see ourselves is distorted and it takes some time and effort to really get to the root of things.

A good rule of thumb is also to keep in mind that, personality is not static. While many may suspect that people’s personalities are fixed in childhood, new research suggests that most people’s personalities evolve throughout their lives and guess what? It apparently often changes for the better as we age. 🙂 (source) 

The same goes for motivators, strengths, weaknesses, emotions, thoughts, triggers etc. While some of them may be more dominant for us, they are still dynamic and as we evolve, mature or intentionally work with them they may shift and evolve too. Self-awareness then is not a “once done” thing. Instead of getting stuck in any “labels” it may be useful to stay mindful of the changes within you, by including self-discovery practice in your annual schedule.

It sounds unreasonable to complete 5000 piece puzzle alone in one evening, no? Just like that, the puzzle of self-awareness is an intricate work that asks for attention and commitment and some assistance from outside may come in handy. The results however are very much worthwhile 🙂

Luckily some tools make the process much easier and faster. In a professional context, there are fantastic psychodiagnostic and assessment tools for different roles and work contexts that I enjoy working with. Here I will focus on user-friendly and readily available assessments you can do on your own.

• For discovering personal values, I like to use this visually engaging free online assessment, that doesn’t let you „get away“ with your automatic choice and really helps you really refine what’s important to you. 

5. Good next step is exploring character strengths with this free online assessment by VIA Institute of Character.
6. When it comes to talents and strengths, how they relate to our work & private life as well as how others perceive us based on them, I like to use the Clifton Strengths assessment by Gallup. This is a paid assessment but well worth the investment thanks to its thoroughness, usefulness for personal and professional development and user-friendly reports. 
7. When it comes to taking a look at your personality, you may find Jungian typology enjoyable and quite intuitive to understand. It sheds light on our tendencies and preferences in the context of introversion vs. extraversion, how we gather information from the world, how we make decisions & how we deal with the outside world. The basic 30 question version of this online assessment is a good starting place with a nice user experience and easily understandable and relatable descriptions of personality archetypes.

• For my clients, I like to dive even deeper and take with them a thorough look at their personality tendencies in the context of personal life, ideal career choice, current career choice, relationships and partners. In addition, we also look at how they tend to deal with stress and preferred coping mechanisms for their personality type. For this, I use the Golden Personality Profiler, which is a thorough 116 question personality assessment with a practical and insightful report for the client to keep and use for personal growth. This assessment should be always interpreted by a professional. If you are curious, you can learn more about the assessment and offer for my clients here.

So, are you ready to get more intimate with yourself? 😊