3 Simple Ways To Get To Know Yourself Better.

After all, you can only give to others what you’ve learned to give yourself.

The topic of getting to know yourself, or self exploration, has been at the forefront of our history and can be argued might have even started at the beginning of celestial existence.

Anybody that has taken the time to honestly look into this has undoubtedly come across some roadblocks. After all, each major religion and spiritual practice claims to have the exact answer to this topic. Yet, those who seek continue to struggle.

I am writing this to grant some solace to those who have been seeking and still genuinely feel lost. I am not here to steer you towards any religion or spiritual practice, however I would like to acknowledge and commend you for beginning the journey of seeking in the first place.

It is my conviction that to seek out the answers to one’s Self is also to seek the answers to the universe and to learn about life as a whole.

The following three exercises allowed me to gain some stability in this journey and I promise you, friend, that if you are seeking genuinely, and only you would know if you are, that you will pull in your way to freedom and understand yourself in ways you’d have never imagined.

1) Journal. Hand to paper.

While not everyone may be a writer, everyone can understand their own writing. Keep this in mind when I say that it is of the upmost importance to document your journey.

When you write something down it seems to leave an impression on you. I’ve found this to be true from testing out different methods of journaling. From typing on a word document, to keeping notes on my phone, all the way to video blogging. All of these were done, of course, for myself and shown to nobody else.

Writing something down really allows you to recall much better than any other format of documentation. I’m sure there is some science behind this, but for now we’ll leave that for another article.

I remember deciding to keep a journal and at the end of the first year began to look back at all the things I had written.

It was as if I was reading the story of my own personal growth.

I could see how I changed. When I changed. Best of all, I could pinpoint what changed me.

When you can isolate the thing that helped you grow, and you can see for yourself in plain black and white that it’s true, you will undoubtedly have unlocked a catalyst for your unending expansion.

This is a feat that cannot be measured. This is a commodity that will make you infinite.

2) Question Everything.

This may take you down a rabbit hole, but humor me for a moment. How do you genuinely know what you know? To be more specific: How do you genuinely know that the idea or belief you hold to be true is yours? How do you know it didn’t come from somewhere else?

This can become quite existential. However, I believe it to be simple at its core and is a fundamental building block for the foundation of getting to know ourselves.

Think about how many friends you grew up with that had passionate opinions about anything at all. Politics, religion, economic class, even sports. Now think about a time when you realized that their so-called “truth” was a verbatim opinion of one of their parents.

You realized, quite quickly, that they didn’t even know their idea wasn’t even theirs. Yet, they stuck to it. They were willing to lose friendships over it. They were behaving like a robot on full automaticity.

Now think about how many of those you might have yourself. Questioning our own beliefs can help us to learn so much about ourselves.

This doesn’t mean assuming everything you’ve come to know is wrong or a lie, quite the opposite. It’s merely observing and really looking at what you’re passionate about. Are you sure that’s your passion? Where did you hear it first? Did it really come from you?

All important things to think about. This will best distinguish what we’ve been raised to believe in comparison to our own personal truth.

3) Don’t Settle.

This is an easy game to think with. It is my conviction that when one settles what they are really doing is raising their willingness to go against what they’ve already decided. In essence, settling is going against your own set decision.

This, of course, would cause turmoil in one’s Self. If you have ever had a leadership or managerial role in any group or workplace you already know very well how frustrating it is to have someone directly oppose what you have told them to do. After all, you’re running the show and you’re looking out for the interest of the group with your orders.

Now imaging how upset you’d be if the person opposing you was you.

That’s enough to drive anybody mad.

By choosing never to settle you are not only taking more responsibility for yourself, but you are also going to pull the veil back on your own behavioral patterns.

This last exercise must often times be done in tandem with exercise 2) Question Everything. For example:

Imagine you are going out to the movies with some friends. You’ve always had a particular palate for movies and know you can be picky about which ones you are willing to sit through in the first place.

Your friends suggest seeing a romantic comedy, a type of movie you’ve already decided you are opposed to. Before making the decision to politely excusing yourself from the group and seeing something else ask yourself: Why don’t I like romantic comedies?

1st outcome: You bring up a memory from your childhood in which your father stated that romantic comedies are for sissies. So you adopted this anecdote as truth for you would not want any disapproval from your father.

This is irrational. And you chose to see the movie, opening a whole new genera of great films that you had missed-out on all along.

2nd outcome: You think back to all the romantic comedies you’ve sat through and found that they are genuinely not your cup of tea. You’d rather not waste any more of your time or money by sitting through another. You know this to be true. It didn’t come from anywhere or anyone. It came from you.

You politely excuse yourself from the group and keep in your own integrity. You’ve refused to settle, and you’ve come to more certainty about yourself in the process.

The journey of self discovery is quite the adventure. It’s one I have spent the last ten years of my life pursuing. I have gone through many trials and tribulations along the way, however the entire journey has been worth it. This is absolutely true for me.

I don’t want you to go through as many of the growing pains as I had to, friend. For I had no guide, no mentor, and no direction. I was aimlessly wandering hoping to stumble upon cosmological truth.

While I cannot make any guarantees for your journey, friend, I can give you some of my greatest convictions that, while simple, I’ve found to be quite powerful in their use.

Use them well. Let me know what you’ve come to learn about You.

With All Due Respect,

Richard Landeau