How to Boost Your Self-Awareness with One Simple Question

To change, you first have to understand.

Self-awareness is like a cheat code for your life. It’s the most powerful tool to get to know better who you should know best: You.

Higher self-awareness has made everything easier for me, and it will so for you, too.

When you’re more aware of your desires, it’s easier to find out what you want in your relationships, work, and life.

When you’re more aware of your thinking, it’s easier to identify and break negative thought patterns and limiting beliefs that hold you back.

When you’re more aware of your behavior, it’s easier to build better habits and let go of bad ones because your actions don’t go unnoticed anymore.

Self-awareness is being conscious of how you think and act, and what triggers these thoughts and behaviors.

Cultivating it is like developing any other skill. It takes work, consistent practice, and time.

But that doesn’t mean you’ll have to carve out large chunks of your day solely dedicated to practicing awareness. We all have things to do and places to be.

Here’s a little trick you can use to increase your self-awareness, all day, every day, without much effort: Ask why.

Understanding Means Power

It’s funny, sad, and astonishing at the same time that most people have no idea why they do something.

Sure, they eat because they’re hungry, have sex because they’re horny, and sleep because they’re tired.

But what if I asked you why you like a certain someone, why a certain statement triggers you, or why your eyes are glued to Instagram every night? You’d have to do some serious thinking to straighten out these question marks.

You take your life as it is without questioning or understanding why, and it robs you of growth, improvement, and prospects for a better one.

You can’t change the status quo if you never understand how it came to be. To have your life play out the way you want it to, you first have to know yourself and what you want.

The Five Whys

In the 1930s, Sakichi Toyoda, founder of the car brand millions of people trust their lives with today, encountered a severe problem. When their manufacturing machines broke, the staff would often slap on band-aid solutions, treating symptoms instead of the underlying problems. Not because they were lazy or ill-advised, but because they didn’t understand the inner workings of the problem in their entirety.

Toyoda developed a technique aimed at understanding issues and getting to their root cause. Born was the 5-Why-Method, a problem-solving approach still widely used in business today and probably the closest a company can get to self-awareness.

It’s as simple as effective. When you encounter an issue, ask why multiple times.

In Toyoda’s example, a machine had blown fuses regularly. But instead of just replacing them, Toyoda asked why they blew in the first place. Because a bearing was overloaded. Why? Because there was insufficient lubrication. Why? Because a pump didn’t draw lubricant. Why? Because a shaft was broken. Why? Because there was no strainer keeping harmful metal chips from entering. Bingo.

By going through multiple rounds of why you feel something or act a certain way, you’ll get a much better understanding of yourself.

Like most human beings, I used to be extremely tired in the morning. It got to a point where I had severe trouble getting out of bed and didn’t function at all before 1 pm. Yet, all my efforts seemed to do nothing, until I asked myself why.

Why am I tired? Because I didn’t get enough sleep. Why? Because I didn’t sleep early enough. Why? Because I couldn’t let go of my phone. Why? Because the internet is a never-ending source of distraction. Ergo, all I had to do was to turn off the internet an hour before I went to bed. No notifications, no problem.

It seems so simple when I write it out, but as the saying goes: If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

Asking why is about cultivating understanding of your inner workings. That’s where the magic happens.

The Brutal Truth

There are two sides to any medal, and anyone telling you otherwise is either selling you something or building a cult.

Awareness is no exception to this rule. Taking the cover off and digging through your inner workings is exciting and awesome until you get to the skeletons in the basement.

When you become more aware of yourself, you’ll also become aware of the behaviors and thoughts you’d rather have left undiscovered.

I became aware of my stinginess. I grew up in Swabia, amongst the most frugal people in all of Germany. Every time I make a decision, I catch myself thinking about the money involved. Not in a healthy I’m keeping track of my finances kind of way, but rather in an unhealthy, obsessive one.

I don’t want to be like that, and every time I become aware of this trait, it causes me pain. But this pain is necessary. It’s what causes me to change, inspires me to grow, and leave my old self behind.

You might not be a penny-pincher like me, but there will be other things about you you’d rather not face. Maybe you’re egotistic, disorganized, or utterly lazy.

When you uncover these parts, it will hurt. Your ego will refuse to accept it. Lazy? Me? Never. But through this pain, awareness causes growth. It causes you to take an honest look and to understand what happens within you.

And it’s this understanding of yourself that helps you find direction and meaning and create the life you want to live.

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When you become more self-aware, you’ll uncover painful truths. But the more painful they are, the more you need to face them.