You’re Average Because You Don’t Deeply Understand Yourself

The life-changing skill of passive introspection

Photo by Eric Brehm on Unsplash

You suffer because you don’t know yourself as well as you think. 

Just because you are yourself, doesn’t mean you know yourself.

You can’t see the house if you’re inside. 

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When you don’t know who you are, you’re going through life with someone else driving your car. 

You have zero control of how you behave. 

You’re unaware and confused: 

• You don’t know what makes you sad 

• You don’t know what makes you angry 

• You don’t understand your strengths and limitations 

And when you don’t know yourself, you don’t have an understanding of why you do things — which makes you mad at yourself. 

It ruins your self-talk because it’s the opposite of compassion for yourself — you cannot sympathise with yourself if you don’t understand yourself. 

So keep reading if you’re ready to begin the process of understanding yourself. 

Start to recognise your behavioural patterns to regain control of your life. 

Let’s dive into what it means to know yourself, and the 2 things you can do to get deeply in touch with yourself.

What is knowing yourself and how can it benefit your life? 

"Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes."

— Carl Jung

Knowing yourself is understanding who you are, and why you are that way. 

It’s understanding: 

• what makes you emotional 

• your strengths and weaknesses

• the reasons for your character traits 

For me, this idea first clicked when reflecting on my basketball performance. 

In some games I’d be calm, collected and rational; in others, I’d be skittish, frantic and even yell at referees. 

That was not the real me.

After a deep dive into myself (we’ll talk about the process next), I found the explanation was lack of sleep. 

When I’m tired, it’s like I’m someone else — a grumpy, angry and irrational version of myself. 

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It became much deeper than this when I was diagnosed with ADHD in my mid-20s. 

I finally understood why I couldn’t focus in a one-on-one conversation, or why I had an addictive personality and a bunch of other things. 

But it didn’t make me depressed. 

In fact, it was a huge relief. 

Because I finally understood myself — it all made perfect sense. 

The reason that understanding yourself can be so impactful is because you start to notice when X is about to cause Y — and you can create strategies and methods to work around your weaknesses, and to magnify your strengths. 

You can’t change who you are, but you can create an environment to best deal with yourself.

• When I know I’ve had a bad sleep, I make an extra effort to hold my tongue that day. I make sure to let my partner know how I’m feeling before I start being annoying. I do breathing exercises in the car before my basketball game to make sure I’m calm. 

• My ADHD causes focus issues, so I schedule time chunks for certain tasks, I colour-code my calendar to separate things and put distractions in another room. I pre-pack a carry a bag the night before with all my essentials because I know I’ll forget my wallet if I don’t. 

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The difficult part of getting to know yourself

"Self-awareness involves deep personal honesty. It comes from asking and answering hard questions." — Stephen R. Covey

It’s not so easy to just click your fingers and understand yourself on a deep level. 

It’s almost impossible to see from the inside. 

Have you ever heard the line: “You know me better than I know myself”?

These patterns are tough to see in yourself — but easy to spot in others, for two reasons: 

1. You’re attached to your identity — recognising weakness in yourself is very uncomfortable — in someone else, it’s quite simple.

2. You’re coloured by the lens of your own emotion — it’s difficult to assess yourself when you’re emotional but easy to see in others when you’re disconnected from the emotion. 

You can easily predict how your sibling, partner or parent is about to react — you’ve observed the patterns of this person. 

But now you need to do it for yourself. 

There’s a reason people go to a therapist to heal their mind or go to a tennis coach to smooth out the kinks in their game.

The therapist/coach can see the person/player for what they are — not what they think they are.

But you can’t go to a therapist daily.

You need to get to know yourself to understand your daily experience.

This is how you put yourself in positions to succeed, avoid situations where you’re not as strong, and work on improving yourself as a person. 

The 2 main strategies to get to know yourself  

1. Asking others 
My parents were the ones who first told me I’m not myself when I’m tired, and my tattoo artist was the one who suggested I see a psychiatrist about ADHD. 

People close to you often already know these things about you — ask them. Like we spoke about, it can be tough to spot in yourself, but easy for others. 

Going to a professional is also a really good way — but this is more of an advanced step when you’re ready for it. Not everyone wants to go to therapy right away, and that’s totally cool. When you’re ready, you’ll do it — it’s helped me a lot. 

Just a note: keep an open mind when you ask. It’s difficult to hear and admit to your flaws at first, but that’s where real growth occurs.

People close to you can be very helpful in finding out your strengths too. Ask your friends and family what they think you’re good at, and you might be surprised by their answers. It’ll help you to double down on what you’re already strong in. 

2. Asking yourself
Learn to speak to yourself — via a journal or even voice notes. 

Dumping your information into a journal or voice notes does two things: 

a) it organises the alphabet soup in your brain into a logical structure — it brings the ideas into reality so you can understand them. 

b) it allows you to read those thoughts like they are someone else’s and analyse them from a detached perspective — like how an athlete watches film of themselves to pick it apart and improve. 

A couple of queues to journal about: 

• How would I perceive myself?
  Ask yourself this question — if you spent time with yourself today, what would you think? Would you like that person? Were they being nice? 

• Why did that go wrong? / Why did I have a bad day? 
  At the end of the day, if you feel bad but don’t know why, ask yourself. Write the question out and the answers will come to you. 

• What did I enjoy today? What did I not enjoy today? 
  It’s weird to sit and try and think of strengths and weaknesses — but it can be more telling when you look for what you enjoyed. These are usually hints at your strengths and weaknesses. 

We already know the truth, we already know ourselves. We just need to take a moment to reflect on our days and consciously think about it. 

This is how you get to know yourself over the long term. 

Getting to know yourself is a high return on investment — start now

It may feel weird, it might be uncomfortable, but this is one of the best things you can do for your life. 

And it’s a lot easier than you think. 

Chances are, after you’ve read this, you’ll more passively analyse yourself and be able to dig into more about who you are. 

The journal and asking people is like the firelighter, but once the fire is burning it’s quite easy to keep it going. 

Build that self-understanding, have compassion for yourself and put yourself in positions to succeed. 

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Thank you for reading!

I’m Eren and I use stories from experiences in my life to explain self-improvement — and how you can change your life by changing your thoughts.

PS. If you subscribe to the free weekly newsletter, you’ll get my 8 spell-like reminders to say to yourself to snap out of frustration, anxiety and stress, in the welcome email.

And if you want to learn to write articles like this one — I have a free guide here: How to turn ideas in your head into articles that could change the world.

— eren

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