3 Ways Self-knowledge Makes You Strong
We are often blind to what our emotions are trying to tell us and they are the basis for self-knowledge. It can be hard to pay attention when your head is piled high with tasks, appointments, and the endless list of everyday worries that seem impossible to solve.
Yet, when we pay attention and develop a deeper awareness, we have everything we need to make choices that move our lives in alignment with our needs and desires.
It is impossible to say how much of this is a natural or an acquired ability, but it has been part of humankind’s evolutionary process since the beginning.
We evolved to be aware of our environment and learn from our experiences to create a future full of purpose. This means that, without self-knowledge, your life will end up being filled with regret and regret leads to suffering. The longer you put off pursuing self-knowledge, the more times you’ll have to reinvent the wheel only end up making things worse.
The process is simple. At the same time, it requires you to be patient with yourself. When you’re unsure, it takes time to figure it out what you’re feeling rather than making a snap judgement that isn’t really accurate. This is how self-knowledge makes you emotionally strong.
Here is your 3 part recipe to increase your self-knowledge and emotional strength.
Here is your 3-part recipe to increase your self-knowledge and emotional strength.
1. Identify your emotions.
When you are uncertain of yourself, introspection is the way to go.
Identify the emotions you are experiencing at the moment. What is your gut feeling? Your breath? Your heart?
Characteristics of an emotion include clarity, intensity, and pleasure or pain. If you don’t know what an emotion feels like, here are some examples for you to explore more closely:
Anxiety – The immediate sense of irritation that may be present when faced with a particular situation.
Disillusioned – The feeling that everything is not as good as it seems.
Excited – A state of intense arousal, often with an accompanying sense of joy.
Sad – A feeling of discomfort lacking clarity. It’s more like a vague melancholy.
Anger – Clear sensations in your body signaling the need to take action and be defensive against certain situations.
Joy – The highest and most enjoyable emotion experienced by humans. It is a state of permanent happiness and contentment felt after great success or accomplishment.
It’s important to be as specific as possible with your emotions. This is one of the times in life where nuance matters a lot. Clarity about your internal state makes a difference. It’s too easy to get swept up in the immediate emotion put it in a broad category when really, it might be something much more subtle.
Take for example anger and sadness. Many people become angry when they’re sad. They don’t want to experience loss and instead become angry as a way of pushing the feeling away.
I’ve had this experience when I moved across country.
I didn’t really want to move, in fact I loved where I lived and often thought, “man I love it here.” But, when it came time to begin the moving process, I started to pick out all of the flaws and justify why it would be better to live elsewhere. I pushed away the fond feelings for a place I loved as a way of making it easier to focus on the future.
This process prevented me from acknowledging my experience of loss and the sadness I felt. Instead of letting go, feeling sad and being in the present I was misaligned with myself. In the end, it made the transition more difficult and take longer than expected to settle into the new location.
2. Put your experiences into context.
Make a short list of 3 moments of your life that made you feel strong.
When you are doing this exercise, pay attention to the emotions that are present during each of the three experiences.
What emotions were present for these three events? What characteristics did they have?
Once you have this information at hand, it’s time to put them into context. As if you were explaining your life story to someone new, explain each of these three moments. This exercise requires a non-judgmental outlook – it’s just the observable information, not an evaluation of them.
It’s helpful to make a note for yourself, on your phone, in a journal or a sticky note that you put somewhere so you can see it often. Reminders like this help you to keep the emotion and experience top of mind, so it becomes part of what you do during the day.
This is another way that self-knowledge makes you strong.
Make a short list of 3 moments of your life that made you feel strong.
When you are doing this exercise, pay attention to the emotions that are present during each of the three experiences.
What emotions were present for these three events? What characteristics did they have?
Once you have this information at hand, it’s time to put them into context. As if you were explaining your life story to someone new, explain each of these three moments. This exercise requires a non-judgmental outlook – it’s just the observable information, not an evaluation of them.
It’s helpful to make a note for yourself, on your phone, in a journal or a sticky note that you put somewhere so you can see it often. Reminders like this help you to keep the emotion and experience top of mind, so it becomes part of what you do during the day.
This is another way that self-knowledge makes you strong.
3. Determine what your future plans need to be.
What would you do differently if you knew what your emotions were telling you?
Simply imagine yourself in the future.
If you know what was going on inside of you at the time, would this future change?
Which ones?
Why?
What do you need to do in order to bring this future about, or how can it be brought about easier or faster?
A word of warning.
Many people think that they can skip over numbers 1 and 2 above and go right for number 3 to create a more aligned future. But it just doesn’t work that way. It would be a lot less painful and messy if it did, but it doesn’t.
Alignment takes time and reflection to really know yourself and your needs. Don’t shortchange yourself by moving past this quickly. Most of us were never taught anything about emotions or feelings, other than being told what is “appropriate” to feel for someone else’s convenience. There can be a lot of unpacking judgements in this phase.
Shaping your life into one where you draw on your sense of inner calm and self-knowledge makes you emotionally strong, so you can live your life in the way that is fulfilling for you.
It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day drudgery of life and forget that we are all just one step away from creating our ideal futures.
Conclusion
No one is born emotionally strong.
It’s a learned skill that you can master at any point in your life. The process is simple but takes time to know more about yourself with each step.
- Identify your emotions.
- Put your experiences into context.
- Plan for the future based on the two previous steps.
Self-knowledge makes you strong and able to handle anything with clarity, alignment and grace.
