The Four Layers of Understanding Yourself
Gain an understanding of your layers (especially the third and fourth) and life will become a game
Do you really know yourself?
We think we do, but most of us only understand the first few layers — unaware of the levels beneath.
And it’s not trivial — it’s serious.
Deeply knowing who you are is the foundation of your life experience.
Not knowing ourselves to the core leads to a mediocre life — like not knowing someone else leads to a mediocre friendship.
Don’t just look at the time — look inside the watch.
First layer — the watch face
As you look at your watch, you see the design — the face, and the turning hands.
The first layer of your personality is exactly that — it’s surface level, the stuff you find on ancestry.com and records.
It’s your identity.
Your name
Your parents’ names
The city you were born in
Your heritage
Eren Candansayar. My surname was changed from Hacımahmutoğlu to Candansayar by my great-grandfather.
I was born in Brisbane, Australia, but my family is from Türkiye — Dad is from Konya, and Mum is from Sivas.
That’s me on the most surface level — my watch face.
Your parents, the place you grew up, and your deeply encoded ancestors’ genetics all play a huge role in who you are. It’s the starting point, it’s who you are at the most fundamental level. My ancestors who lived in Türkiye would’ve gone through life experiences that shaped me. Their third and fourth layers have contributed to my first layer.
But there’s more to us than that first layer.
Ask anyone successful who came from deadbeat parents, horrible living circumstances and poverty and they’ll tell you that their first layer absolutely shaped who they are — but it was the layers beneath that that truly define them.
Second layer — telling the time
The second layer of who you are is what you do.
Just like the hands of a watch spin around and display the hour, minute and second — you have duties, hobbies and tasks that you undertake all the time.
It follows the first layer in your elevator pitch when someone asks you to describe yourself. It involves your career, what you do for fun, and your likes and dislikes.
I love to keep active — I play basketball and go to the gym. I’ve been listening to rock music lately. I love dogs and I love going to the beach. I write self-improvement articles. And I’m an engineer by trade.
So now we’ve got a pretty good picture — we’re starting to see the person come together (I hope you find him interesting!).
But still, we only know his name and what he does with his time — we don’t know who he is.
So say I met you in an elevator — and I asked you to give me your personality in a 30-second pitch, but you can’t use the first two layers to describe yourself.
What do you say?
Third layer — the mechanism
The third layer is how you tick — how the cogs turn within the watch.
This is where it starts to get into the interesting stuff. A good conversation should make it here — and it starts to colour the picture of who you are.
How do you approach life?
What do you bring to the table? What are your natural gifts, and acquired strengths? What are the areas that you’re not so good at? What makes you anxious? In what situations are you confident? What brings you energy and what drains your energy?
The third layer is where the information starts to become usable.
Once you understand yourself to the third layer, you’ve gained knowledge about how to rig the odds in your favour.
You do more of what gives you energy, and less of what drains you
You leverage your strengths and work on your weaknesses
You prepare for situations that make you uncomfortable
You seek more situations that you’re confident in
+ My natural strengths are in communication. I find it easy to speak to people and understand what they need.
> I struggle with detail.+ I’m a machine when it comes to executing things I like to do.
> I stall when it’s a task I’m opposed to.+ I’m best when a place is quiet, tidy and ordered.
> I’m uncomfortable in situations that are cluttered, loud and busy+ I’m strong at maintaining a calm, pleasant demeanour
> I struggle to stay level-headed when I’m tired — I become extra emotional.
Getting to know myself on this level has made it so much easier to go through life.
I align my hobbies and career with my strengths. I love to write, and I’m transitioning into a more project manager role to leverage my strengths.
When it comes to checking the details of my writing, I make sure to take extra care, as well as checking multiple times.When I do a task I don’t like, I specifically focus on working even though I don’t like the task. I challenge myself to focus and produce quality especially when it’s difficult. I gamify my weakness.
I try to avoid loud and busy situations — but if I’m forced to go in, I’ll warn my partner that I might become frustrated. I’ll try to breathe extra slowly and focus on the task.
I prioritise sleep. When I can’t sleep, I try to stay quiet as much as possible. Since I’m extra emotional when tired, I try to leverage this and spend more time journalling at the end of the day: 1) it eases my mind, 2) it becomes more poetic when I write with emotion and I often find inspiration for my work through this practice
Do you see how useful that information is now that I’ve reverse-engineered the solutions?
If I didn’t know these things about myself, I’d struggle in so many situations and leave money on the table — so to speak. But instead, I’ve set myself up for success.
A short basketball player can continue to attack the rim in a straight line — but he will get blocked over and over again until he stops and analyses his actions.
He needs to assess his strengths and weaknesses, think about the situations and approach the play in a way that puts him in a position to succeed.
For you to identify these things about yourself, you’ve got to understand the fourth layer.
You’ve got to go further.
Sitting at the fourth layer is the biggest and most difficult challenge — but the most important one too.
Fourth layer — the observer
We know about ‘the watch’ now, how it looks, what it does and how it works.
But who’s looking at it?
The observer — the person beneath all of the identity, hobbies and day-to-day life — isn’t the thoughts that flood your mind, but the entity inside you that chooses which thoughts to latch onto.
It’s your soul — if you will.
You’re not the player inside the game, you’re the person with the controller playing the game.
Are you in touch with yourself? Or are you stuck in the day-to-day events that unfold around you?
People talk about meditation, journalling and other spiritual practices to become mindful — all of which I advocate for — but the most important part is just wanting to reflect and being aware to your true self.
The observer.
Take a look at your hands — you’re just a highly intelligent animal experiencing life in a weird and wacky way. You’re observing life around you. You’re not even your body — you’re not your eyes, your nose or your mouth.
You’re deeper than that.
Because if you were to be put in a pure black room, you would still have that internal monologue. You’d still exist, even with 0 sensory input.
Look at the things around you: plumbing, insulation, air conditioning, cars. Distractions everywhere — flashing billboards, people talking to you and even a handheld casino.
Re-grounding yourself
Realise you’re an observer. You’re not the watch or even the time — you’re the one looking at the watch.
Pay attention to the things that trigger your person, their strengths and weaknesses and try to put them in a position to succeed.
When you re-ground yourself, you give yourself space to compute how your physical vessel responds to everyday stimuli.
You’ll never notice that you become a big baby when you’re tired if you don’t stop and observe.
You’ll never see your strengths and weaknesses if all you do is celebrate wins and wallow in losses.
You’ll never notice your aversion to busy places if you just get frustrated over and over again — and never stop to consider the best and most succinct question of all: why?
Ask yourself: why?
Instead of taking on the pressures and burdens of life — approach it from an observer’s perspective. From curiosity.
Why did Eren behave like that?
You’ll start to see the rest of the watch come together. The mechanism suddenly starts to make perfect sense. The way the arms move to tell the time, goes from mysterious to logical.
It used to be ‘just a watch’ — and now the arms dance around each other and with one another in a beautiful display of engineering.
And it’s exponential.
Think about all the progress you can make in your life if you start observing yourself — constantly.
You’ll reach a point where nobody can tell you something about yourself that you don’t already know. That’s a position of power. You know how you work, no surprises.
Your self-confidence and self-esteem will skyrocket if you accept who you are and design a life around that — rather than going through this experience unaware and being confused as to why it’s turbulent.
My challenge to you is to ask yourself:
Do I really, truly know myself down to the fourth layer?
Answer it honestly and make an effort to get to know yourself even better than ever before.
Thank you for reading.
I’m just sharing the lessons learned on my path to building my Mental Fortress - an impenetrable and stable mind.
If you found it helpful, that’s great. I figured, why not share it with the world as I crystallise it.
And click the little like button to give me some feedback. If not, tell me why. And if you know someone who you think will like it - send it their way!
Sincerely,
Eren