It can be a real struggle to find yourself and to know who you are. Maybe sometimes you ask yourself: “How can I get to know myself?". I remember when I was younger, I was so scared to be my true self, and therefore, I showed versions of myself that I thought would be liked or accepted in my environment. I think these other versions became the ‘me’ I thought I really was. But at some point, I was like: “Enough! This is not who I really am!”. I wondered how I could get to know myself! I wanted to understand myself better and discover who I really was.
But how did I get to know myself? How did I discover who I am?
Well, I went on a whole personal and spiritual development journey, because it was time to find out who I was. The things I’ve learned are what I will share with you here.
I will share with you a little overview of this article. In this way you can choose to read through it or click on the topic that interests you!
Why is it important to get to know yourself? Why does it help to understand yourself better?
How to begin to find myself? How do I find out who I am? Where to start?
Say yes!
Write
Compliment yourself
Move your body & energy
Practice intuition
Consult Spirit
Do a personality test
Explore your shadow sides
Transform fear
Visualize your perfect day
What will happen if you know who you are? What is the benefit of knowing yourself?
Hopefully, it will be less of a struggle to find yourself after reading this article ;-)
Here we go!
Why is it important to get to know yourself? Why does it help to understand yourself better?
It’s only important if YOU find it important. And I believe it’s important because otherwise, you may end up living someone else’s life, you may end up being someone you are not, and you may end up being unhappy and unsatisfied.
I honestly believe that people who understand themselves and know who they are also can be a better version of themselves towards other people. So, in that sense, if we all know who we are, we can all benefit from it.
What does it mean when you know yourself?
This is actually a very deep question. And maybe one of the most philosophical ones of our times because who are we? Who am I really? Am I this body? Am I this voice in my head? Am I this personality I have? Really quickly, we arrive at existential questions if we go into depth.
If we go down this road, knowing who you are means that you know you are a spirit in a physical body and that there is a reason why you are here on planet Earth. You may even understand yourself in such a way that you have an ego that translates itself into being your personality in this life and that you have a higher self, too.
Of course, if you are reading this, you probably just want to know how you can find out who you are and how you can discover yourself or understand yourself better in daily, practical life.
Looking at it in that way, if you know yourself, in my opinion, you know:
- how you react to things
- what your shadow sides are
- what you like
- what your triggers are
- where your interests lie
- what makes your heart sing
- what you want to do in life
- what makes you scared
- what’s important to you
- and where your true purpose lies.
How to begin to find myself? How do I find out who I am? Where to start?
“How do I know who I am?” is a question that is asked often! If you want to begin to find yourself and discover who you are, it starts with looking at your life and removing the things that you can deeply feel are NOT you.
It starts with observing yourself: the decisions you make, your thoughts, your behavior, your personality, your image, or the roles you play.
Is this who you are?
Or is this who you want to be?
Ask yourself: Is this me? And listen to the answer you get.
What are you just doing out of habit? Or because you learned it this way? Or because you think people will like you because of it?
This daily observation is the first step! You can write every evening something in a book specifically for this. Or you can set a reminder on your smartphone twice a day with the question: “Are you being yourself right now?”. Listen to the first answers that come up. They will tell you what you are maybe doing that is not you at that moment.
Ways to get to know myself
Observation, as mentioned above, is the biggest way of getting to know yourself! You can discover more of yourself, too, if you meditate or practice mindfulness, for the only reason that you become more aware of your thoughts.
Your thoughts tell you a lot about yourself: whose voices are in your head? Is it things your mother told you when you were younger? Is it programming that you learned in school or what you think your friends think is cool? What ideas or topics are coming into your mind?
But what are other ways that you can get to know yourself? Let me share with you some things I did to discover myself and find out who I really was:
SAY YES: I started saying yes to a lot of things! Even though I didn’t feel like it in the beginning. I did this so I would be open to any experience and not judge it already beforehand. I would go for it and evaluate afterwards if it was something I eventually liked or not. This is a great way to try out new things! The more you try out new things, the more you will discover what it is you really like or what it is you don’t like.
WRITE: I created a consistent journal practice. For a few months, I wrote in a notebook every evening. Just freestyle writing, whatever I wanted to write! I wrote about the day (great way to write down the observations), what I did, how I felt, how it was, what bothered me, what was difficult, what went easy, what was fun or amazing! If you continue doing this for a while, you can find some common threads about yourself. You will know what you are good at and not good at, what is challenging for you, and what’s important to you.
COMPLIMENT YOURSELF. This one is very uncomfortable for a lot of people in the beginning. It used to make me uncomfortable, too! But you have many different talents and skills! Seeing them in yourself is a way to get to know yourself. What are you good at? What do you like to do? What goes easily for you? What do you value about yourself? What are the skills and talents you already know you have? When does time move by quickly? What have other people complimented you for? What have you accomplished? You can write the answers to these questions down, or you can compliment yourself while looking in the mirror.
MOVE BODY & ENERGY: I realized that there was a huge power in moving your body and doing energy work! Deeper emotions and energies were making me feel stuck or made me feel more ‘neutral’ and ‘numb’ about things. The more I was moving my body through exercise but also through breathwork, the more grounded in my body I was, the more I started to feel again, and the more I felt I was “living my life”. I also started to choose the things that were giving me energy instead of draining my energy.
PRACTICE INTUITION: I knew that somewhere deep down within myself I knew who I was and that I just needed to find it. I decided to listen more to my own intuition and inner voice instead of what others said or what I rationally thought was the right thing. When making decisions, I would close my eyes and feel in my body if it resonated with me or not.
CONSULT SPIRIT: Ever thought of doing a spiritual reading? It helped me a lot in getting to know myself better. Even though I don’t think you should take advice from just anyone, and you should always follow what resonates with yourself, it can be very interesting to do a spiritual reading. An astrology reading can give a lot of insight about who you are in this life, your dynamics, patterns, challenges, and patterns. Aura readings, for example, are a great tool of self-knowledge as another person is connecting with your spirit and telling you things about yourself. For many people, aura readings can give great confirmations.
DO A PERSONALITY TEST: There are pros and cons to doing personality tests, but I remember the first time I did them, I felt really seen & it was a confirmation of things that I was getting to know about myself! You can do a mbti test or even a Human Design test.
EXPLORE YOUR SHADOW SIDES: Truly knowing yourself means you know ALL sides of you! The ‘good’ ones and the ‘bad’ ones. No one is perfect. We have all sides that are more difficult to deal with. Sometimes these shadow sides are even blind spots. One of the ways to discover your shadow sides is to see what is triggering you. The episode Triggers are your Teachers of my podcast may help you discover them! But once you know your triggers, you can dive deeper: How do I react to certain situations? Why am I triggered by this? How would I have preferred to see it? It can give you a LOT of information about who you are and what’s important to you!
TRANSFORM FEAR: I actively tried to transform my fears and insecurities so that I would stop comparing myself to others, so I would stop pleasing or changing myself to be accepted, and so that I would be able to recognize and set my boundaries. It's also often fears and insecurities that prevent us from being ourselves completely. So, the more we can transform these energies and blockages, the more we can truly be ourselves! It can feel so liberating!
VISUALIZE YOUR PERFECT DAY: You can just lay down and visualize it in your mind's eye, or you can write it down or draw it. Go over a whole day: you wake up and you feel good, it’s a great day, and everything is in alignment: Where are you, what do you do, what do you eat? How does your day look like? How do you behave, what do you say, how do you feel? This is a very powerful exercise to understand yourself and what you want better.
What will happen if you know who you are? What is the benefit of knowing yourself?
It’s very possible that things in your life may change! You may realize you haven’t been living the life you wanted, that you weren’t in a job that you wanted, or even not in a romantic relationship that was aligned with you.
You may eventually feel more confident and choose the things that make you happy and give you energy. It’s so much easier to be content in life when you know yourself.
On the other hand, it can also bring a challenging period in your relationships. Other people will definitely notice that you have found yourself and know better who you are. Some relationships may not survive this change and fall out of alignment.
Nonetheless, when you know yourself, you also are less scared of what other people think of you. Someone may judge you or say something about you, but if you know yourself, you know what’s true or not true and even why something may touch you.
Another benefit is that when you know yourself, you also know what you are not good at, what you still need to learn, where you make mistakes, or where you haven’t been the best version of yourself. It becomes easier to communicate this to other people if necessary because you know yourself, you know you are learning and growing, and there is nothing to be ashamed of.
I hope this article helped you or gave you inspiration to get to know yourself better. If you would like to experience an aura reading to help you on your self-discovery journey, you can always reach out to me. I offer aura readings virtually and you can read more about it here.
I also created a beautiful course, Rooted Within. It's a very comprehensive and expensive online journey that you can go through to get to know yourself better and to become Rooted Within. Going through this journey will also help you transform your fears and insecurities. More about Rooted Within here. Much love, x Ama