Ask Yourself The Right Questions
In order to know yourself you must first recognize what kind of questions you are asking yourself. Are they negative questions such as “What is wrong with me?” or “What am I doing wrong?” Asking yourself negative questions will do nothing to contribute to your coming to know yourself. What asking yourself negative questions will do is create a stream of visions in your mind’s eye filled with all the you consider to be your short comings. In addition your mood level will sink like a stone. You are not your short comings so you will not recognize yourself there you will only see what you think you are. You will see what negative things others have told you about yourself. You will not recognize yourself in those reflections either because they are not you. They are only the negative projections of the precepts and opinions of others.
Ask yourself repeatedly, as many times as it takes to dig out from under all the hats you wear and the identities and roles you take on in life, “Who am I? You will recognize when you get your right answer to that question because you will recognize yourself.
There are better questions to ask yourself than “What is wrong with me?” or “What am I doing wrong?” It is far more effective to ask yourself questions such as “What’s happening?” or “Did that remind me of something?” “What’s happening?” will allow you to look at what is right here, right now rather than tying up your energy and attention on an entire litany of happenings. This affords you the opportunity to deal with what is right here, right now as this is where you are and this is what you have control of. You have no control over the past only the present. Asking yourself, “Did that remind me of something?” will allow you to identify what area of the past has come to view and you can acknowledge it by noting when it was, where it was and what it was. This will move the incident off your present time. Another question you can ask yourself is, “Where am I?” This will serve to make you aware of where your attention has been. Your energy flows where your attention goes therefore it is vital that you be aware of what you have your attention on.
Asking yourself questions such as the above facilitate your arrival in present time. It is impossible to begin to recognize yourself if you are not here. Therefore, the first step to take in order to recognize yourself is to arrive in present time.
Celebrate Your Arrival
Once you have arrived at you, here, now, in present time your next step is to acknowledge that you have arrived here, now, in present time. It is vital to acknowledge that you are present because one of the reasons you go absent is that your presence is too often not acknowledged. You, your arrival, your communication, your ideas, the things that you do for another or others very often fail to get acknowledged and you begin to make negative decisions such as “I can’t be bothered?” or “It doesn’t matter what I do?” and on it goes. Enough of these piled on top of negative decisions are the cause you being absenting yourself from your own life.
Celebrate your presence, it is a win and winning and celebrating are partners. A win is when you set out to accomplish something and you accomplish something. You set out to find yourself and you did. You have recognized that you cannot find yourself in the past and you cannot find yourself in the future you can only find yourself in the present, right here, right now.
Increase Your Presence
Whenever you catch yourself drifting off or in a trance state, stop and ask yourself, “Where am I?” It takes practice to increase your presence. The more you practice the more presence you will have. It is vital that you arrive in your own life and there are many benefits to doing so. For one thing you have no power in the past or in the future the only power that you have is in present time. It is from present time that you influence your future. The past is a done deal.
When you have found You then you have control of Your Own Universe. When you are absent, gone, not found, elsewhere, far-off, away, hidden then your life is under the control of others and the environment.
With your increased personal presence your perceptions are more accurate and you are able to take and hold a position. It is absolutely necessary if you are to succeed in any game in life that you choose to play that you have the ability to perceive accurately and to hold a position from which you can play in your chosen game(s). If you are not playing your own game then you are playing someone else’s game and it is very easy to loose yourself in another’s game. Play another’s game and it will not be long before you no longer recognize yourself, especially if it is a negative, destructive game. Then one day, hopefully, you will wake up and ask, “Where am I?”
How to Get to Know Yourself Better: 3 Great Tips
“He who knows others is learned;
He who knows himself is wise.”
Lao-tzu
Who are you? What is your daily and weekly life really about?
Those not always easy questions to answer. So today I’d like to share three tips that have helped me to get to know myself a bit better and to see my life more accurately.
1. What part of you do you see in them?
What we see in others is quite often what we see in ourselves. And what irritates us in people may be what we don’t like in ourselves. What you judge in someone you are actually judging in yourself.
Therefore what you notice and what irritates you in others can teach you important things about yourself. Things you may not be aware of. In a way people can be like a mirror for you. A mirror that can help you to learn more about yourself, what you fear and how you may be fooling yourself.
So, what people generally irritate you? What do you often judge or criticize people for?
What can that tell you about you?
2. Do the unusual thing.
When faced with a choice in your daily life, step back for a minute and think. Then take the option that is and feels unusual for you.
If you often back down just don’t for this one time. If you often get into arguments with people then just this one time don’t and instead just let it go or treat the other person with kindness. Do the opposite of what you usually do and see what happens (while using common sense of course). Do something new and something you wouldn’t expect from yourself.
This is a fun and great way to get new experiences and to learn things about the world and about yourself that you wouldn’t if you kept going like you usually do. It’s also a great way to be surprised about life as things often turn out more positively than in your fear filled daydreams if you just take action.
Getting stuck in the same old routine until it becomes a rut can suck the life out of you. Doing the unusual thing in small and big situations, no matter how it goes, is a great way to feel alive again and to reveal aspects of yourself that may have been hidden from you.
3. Journal.
Journaling is a fine way to get a more accurate picture of yourself and your life. A few ways that I have used journaling to get to know myself and my life are:
- Journal about how you use your time. Just write down what you do during one day. Or during one week. Write down what you spend your time on and how much time you spend on each thing. You may, as me, be surprised about how much time you waste on procrastinating and pretty pointless busy work. Even if you may have an image of yourself as an effective person.
- Journal about what you think. What do you think about during a normal day? Or a week? Write it all down. By doing so you can find recurring patterns of thought such as fears or maybe that you spend a lot of time regretting what happened in the past. Or you may find that you are actually a more positive person than you may think. This is a really interesting exercise because it can help you spot both positive things and negative things about yourself and just how accurate your current image of yourself is. You’ll probably run into some surprises.
- Journal about what you eat. I used this to lose weight. If you want to lose weight you have to consume less calories that you use. So how do you know what to eat and how much? You got to monitor it in some way. I used the free and very simple Fitday.com to monitor what I eat during the day. This is essential stuff. Because the three normal and most of the time actually pretty healthy meals I ate in the past consisted of the same amount of calories I used during the day. So little progress was made. To keep things within effective and healthy limits I think it’s important to monitor what you do. But not to get obsessed about these things though. The main point is to keep an eye on what you are actually doing instead of guesstimating a whole lot.
A Little Black Pen
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