Know thyself!

We’ve all heard this advice, but the question is how well do you know yourself?

I certainly believe that as I have matured, I have gotten to know myself better and the benefit of this of course is that I have been able to make better decisions which enables me to save time and get better outcomes. Knowing me well also helps me to recognise my emotions, the triggers and to self-manage as required.

What if we don’t have the benefit of maturity? What if we’d like to know ourselves better in the short term?

Well, there are certainly many approaches to enable this to happen, but let’s acknowledge a great starting point is to make friends with questions.

As well as being useful to gather information about ourselves, which courageous people do on a regular basis to see their blind spots, we can also use good questions for self-reflection and learning. By asking ourselves and considering good questions, we discover something—about our situation, about our values, about our wants and needs. Something that we hadn’t understood before.

For the courageous amongst you here are some great questions you can ask other people (noting you need to genuinely want to listen to the answers and be intent on making changes, provided that the feedback is valid/worthwhile).

• What do you most like about working with me?
• What do you least like?
• What would you ideally like me to change/do differently?

For those that prefer the self-reflection option (that said, I do encourage both options) then try asking yourself some of these questions regularly:

• What did I learn about me today?
• What could I do differently going forward by reflecting on today’s experiences?
• What important lesson did I learn today?

Of course, this reflection can be done daily, weekly, monthly or whenever we feel like investing some time in our own self development. Once we know ourselves better, we are far better equipped to make choices, manage challenges and show up in the world the best version of ourselves possible.

What questions are you now going to ask yourself?