315 Holly Worton ~ Know Yourself: How to Answer the Question of "Who Am I?"

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I’m back again, with another solo episode! Sometimes I feel like all of my mindset work and my personal development work over the past decade can all be boiled down to one thing: getting to know myself. You’d think this would be easy, wouldn’t you? But it’s taken me the better part of the last decade to let go of all the crap people have told me about myself over the years, and to put aside the masks and the layers and all the stuff that’s not actually me. It’s been a long journey, and while I definitely feel like I’ve made massive advances, it’s still a work in progress.

Today, I want to talk a little bit about how I’ve gotten to where I am, and what you can do to better know yourself. Most importantly, I’m going to share practical steps you can take today to take action toward knowing yourself better.

Listen To This Episode

What You’ll Learn

Why it’s so important to know yourself: the benefits of self-knowledge
The risks that come from a lack in self-knowledge
Why it can be so difficult for us to truly know ourselves
How to distinguish between who you are and where you are
Why this is different from your identities or roles in life

Things I Discussed

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Transcript

The transcript for this episode can also be downloaded here (no opt-in required).

Holly: Hello and welcome to the Into the Woods podcast, episode 315. This is your host Holly Worton and I am back with another solo episode. Today, I am going to talk about self-knowledge, knowing yourself, getting to know who you are at a very deep level; the true you, the real you, the authentic you, whatever you want to call it.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately, because I think this is going to be part of the topic for my next book. Sometimes I feel like all of my mindset work, and my personal development work, over the last decade of my journaling, can all be boiled down to one thing, one topic, one essence, one focus, and that is getting to know myself.

Now you think this would be easy, wouldn’t you?, it is you, how do you not know you? But it is hard sometimes, it has taken me the better part of the last decade to let go of all the crap that other people have told me about myself over the years, and to put aside the masks and the layers and all the stuff that is not actually me, to try to get to the core of what is me. It has been a long journey and while I definitely feel like I have made massive advances, and I am getting there, it is still a work of progress and I am still fine-tuning the details and I think that perhaps this is a life-long journey, that maybe we are always fine-tuning our awareness of who we are deep down, or maybe that is just me.

So, today I want to talk a little bit about how I have gotten to where I am and what you can do to get to know yourself better. And most importantly I am going to share some practical steps you can take today, tomorrow, in the future, to take action — real life action — towards knowing yourself better.

I think this is super, super, important, I think the more that we know ourselves, the easier life is, the happier we will be, there are so many benefits of self-knowledge; there are so many reasons why it is so important for you to know yourself. I honestly think that we would all be happier if we just knew ourselves at a deep level, and why is that? It is because when you know yourself, you have a much stronger inner compass, decision-making is easier, you have less inner-conflict, you have more inner-peace, because you know who you are, you know what you want in life. And, whether or not you take the action to achieve those things is up to you, but I honestly think that if you have clarity over who you are, what you want, where you want to be going, it is so much easier to take the action. I think that one of the things that a lot of people struggle with, and this is something that I have seen in the past in terms of sending out, we are talking with potential clients, a lot of people don’t know what they want, it is like they know what they don’t want, but they haven’t flipped that on its head to see what they do want. Which is why it was always so important to me to send out a questionnaire, or an intake form, to clients to help them get started thinking about what they do want. But I think it is really hard to know what you do want if you don’t know who you are and what is important to you.

So, there are certain risks that come from a lack of self-knowledge and I think the risks have to do with just making poor decisions for ourselves, not knowing what we want, not knowing what we don’t want and making bad decisions and letting ourselves be swayed by other people. And putting more faith in what other people say, rather than trusting our own judgement, trusting our own intuition, trusting our own gut. And that can really throw us off track. It can get us into situations, relationships that aren’t right for us, relationships that aren’t good for us, and that is not just personal relationships but also professional relationships. If we don’t know who we are and what we want in life, we might take a job that is really not a good fit for us, and that can be hard to get out of. Most people don’t want to be job-hopping all the time because that is a lot of work and it is really difficult, and it looks bad on your resume or CV. So, I think a lot of people will get stuck in a job that they don’t like and stay there for far too long. Because again, sometimes it is easy to see what we don’t like but we don’t know what we would rather have instead, but if you know yourself, it is so much easier to know what you want.

Now, before I get deeper into this episode, I want to make it clear that who you are, or who you perceive yourself to be today, is not set in stone. We are always growing, we are always changing, and we are always getting to know ourselves better. So who I perceived myself to be a year ago is not necessarily who I perceive myself to be today, because I know myself better, because I have done a year’s worth of mindset work and personal development work, and journaling, and work towards getting to the core of myself. I have peeled off layers, I have peeled off masks, and here I am. I haven’t done this, but I think it would be interesting to go back and listen to the earlier podcast episodes and see who I was when I was doing those, what did I sound like, what was I talking about? Because I have definitely changed over the last six years. So, keep this in mind, who you are is not set in stone, you are who you are but that is changing all the time, as you are doing your own personal development and your personal growth work, and also, again, your perception of who you are is changing because the more you do this work the better you will be able to see yourself for who you are. So, not set in stone.

Having said that, I keep referencing these old blog posts, from 2011/2012, which are my: Who am I? Where am I? Where am I going? Podcasts; which were kind of based on a talk that I gave in September 2011, at this event that was run by my coaching school. And I think it is really important to distinguish between the first two questions: who am I and where am I? And this is something that it took me some time to distinguish myself, I wrote some of these blog posts and I ended up changing them from one category to the other because I realised that some things really are temporary and other things can help us get to the core of who we are.

So, what are these questions? So what we are going to cover today is who am I, of course, and I am going to do future episodes on the other two questions, because I think this is going to be the topic of my next book. My very first book idea was going to be around these three questions: who am I? where am I? and, where am I going? I actually wrote a big chunk of the book and then put it aside, as I started focussing on other things. Now I am getting the feeling that this is what I need to be focussing on so I am going to be bringing that out and looking through what I have written, and I think podcasting on this topic will also help me to get some fresh material and get some fresh perspectives on what I think about this.

So, if, as you are listening to these podcast episodes you have questions, please send them to me; if you have thoughts and opinions please send them to me. If this is useful to you please let me know because I think this is really interesting; and I think this is really useful; and I think that this has been the core of my life’s work with myself in terms of personal development and mindset stuff, but I don’t know if it is as interesting to other people. So I thoughts for creating a book, as I said, a workbook and an online course. I do have a very old online course which was related to business mindset which kind of walked people through these three questions, but I think this is applicable to everything, so I really want to make this more of a personal: who am I? where am I? where am I going? And how do you use this to create happiness, joy, all the good stuff in life. So let me know what you think.

So, who am I? This is such a big question and the concept of knowing yourself or “knowing thyself” goes back to the ancient Greeks and it has been ascribed to Socrates, to Pythagoras, to a number of other ancient Greeks. There is a phrase in Greek, which I am not going to attempt to pronounce, you can find it online if you Google “know thyself” and there is also a phrase in Latin. So this is a concept that was recognised as being super-important, a very long time ago and I am sure it goes back to even before the ancient Greeks and Romans because I feel like this is the core of our existence, one of our purposes in life is knowing who we are at this deep level.

So, how do you figure that out? How do you know yourself?

I think there are a lot of things that we can look at that can help us to get to know ourselves, so we can look at: what are our core values, what things are really important to us, what are our interests? What do we enjoy doing in life? What is our personality, or our temperament, like?

And this is something that I haven’t talked about in the past necessarily but bio-rhythms, when do we work the best? When do we wake up best? When is the best time for us to go to bed? Eat? You know all that other stuff, everyone is different. So for me I know that my brain doesn’t function very well in the morning which is why I don’t usually start working until around 11am and then I go into the late afternoon, sometimes evening. Late afternoon/evening is really one of the best times for me to focus, that tends to be when it is so easy for me to work on a project because I can slip into hyper-focus and hours just go by and I am really focussed on what I am doing. So, knowing your bio-rhythms is a really important part of knowing yourself, because it can make it easier to plan your life and plan your schedule and create a life that you want and that makes you happy if you are working within the hours in which you want to be doing certain things.

Goals, obviously our goals are going to change throughout our lifetimes but looking at our goals can help us get an idea for who we are and what’s important to us, what things in our lives, what activities in our lives are most important to us.

Lifestyle, knowing what kind of lifestyle you want to live and what kinds of things, what kinds of aspects that lifestyle are important to you, can give you an idea for what is important to you, which will then help you understand who you are.

Knowing your strengths is really important; knowing what you are good at can be really hard to find, really hard to figure out sometimes but really, really, important, and sometimes it helps to have other people weigh in on what your strengths are.

Conversely, your challenges; I think it is really important to understand what things are challenging for us or what our weaknesses are, I don’t like that word because, I don’t know, it is about finding areas where we need support, whether we are in a job or whether we are self-employed, and that is super-important because if you try to force yourself to do everything even the stuff that you are not good at, ugh, it is like pushing a boulder up the hill, it is really, really, difficult and I think that we can live our lives more happily, and more efficiently, and more effectively, if we can identify these challenges and find people to support us.

Mission and vision, so you know how companies will create a mission statement and a vision, do you have one of those for your life? And if not could you create one? I think that could really help us identify again what is important to us, which can help us to understand who we are.

Also creating a bucket list, so, what are the things that you want to do in your life? Years ago when I used the Leonie Dawson, the name changed over the years, but it was The Amazing Biz And Life Planner, then she split it up into Business Planner and Life Planner, but she would always have a list of 100 things she wanted to do each year. And, I wish I had those, I threw them all away, every time a New Year would come I would throw away the old one and I really wish I still had those because a lot of the things that I didn’t achieve, or I didn’t manage to do in those years, but I am noticing now, that now I am starting to do some of the things that I had written down a few years back. So I think it is really useful to make a bucket list or a list of 100 things that you want to do, whether or not you start working through them to achieve them, to do them, it is really useful to help you see what kinds of things you want to do with your life, what kinds of things are important to you. So a bucket list is really useful for helping to get to know who you are.

Another useful question to ask: who do you admire? Whether it is people in your personal life, or people you know online, or celebrities, or whatever. Who do you admire and why? What is it about them that makes you admire them? Look at what drives you, what motivates you in life? Is it money? Is it making a difference? Is it providing for your family? Is it winning? Maybe you strive to be the best in whatever It is you do; you want to be number one? Or maybe it is just bettering yourself independently of what other people are doing, or independently of how you compare to other people? What motivates you to do whatever it is, your business, stuff in your life? The goals you have, what drives you to achieve those goals?

Next, look at why, why do you do what you do? And that could be the bigger things like why did you want to have a family, if you have children? Why do you have the business that you have? Why do you have the career or job that you have? Down to smaller things, why is that you go to the gym every day? Why do you do a particular sport that you do? Why do you do these things? That can help you get to know yourself.

I have already said what’s important to you and have suggested some ways to help you figure that out, but also what is important to you in terms of priorities, how do you determine your priorities. So I have done podcast episodes and I will link to those in the show notes, but basically, we all have a limited amount of time in a day and in a week, how do you determine what’s going to get done first? What are the most important things?

So these are all ways that we can get to know ourselves and I have skipped ahead in my outline for this episode, and what I have skipped over is why it can be so hard for us to get to know ourselves, and I think that is because if we start out with a wavering confidence or self-esteem, it can be easy for us to place value in what other people think of us over what we think of ourselves. And we hear so much over the years about who we are, when we are children we hear our parents either telling us who we think we are or talking about us to other people. We hear out teachers giving their opinions of us, whether it is feedback to our parents, or during class, “oh, so and so is a good reader”. “So and so is really bad at paying attention.” “So and so is a troublemaker.” So you know we pick these things up and then once we grow up and have jobs we get feedback from our bosses, from our colleagues, and we are constantly getting feedback from people about who we are and what we are like and sometimes that stuff is accurate, and can be useful, but a lot of times it is not. A lot of stuff is filtered through other people’s perspectives and it may or may not be valid, because it may or may not be subjective, so take things that other people say about you with a grain of salt. Sometimes it is useful, sometimes it is not, but I think you always need to weigh that about what you know to be true about yourself. And if you haven’t dug deep into the core of yourself that makes it a bit harder, but that’s okay, because you can start any day to get clear on who you are.

Now, I know I have also done podcast episodes in the past, talking about identity, I did one episode that I will link to those in the show notes about how to step into a new business identity, and I think identity is a little bit different than what I am talking about now. What I am talking about is the core of who you are, which again I said is not set in stone, but it is kind of like your authentic-self deep down, the core of who you are, that centre of your being. And, I think we can step into and out of different identities, or different roles, during our lifetimes. So you might step into the identity of a new business, or you might step into the identity of being an author, or you might step into the identity of being a parent, but that’s not who you are at the core, it is just one of the roles in your life. So I think that’s also really important to distinguish.

So some of the ways, although there are other ways you can get to know yourself, if you are one of those people who are addicted to quizzes, like the personality test, like the Myers Briggs, and I have done an episode on that which I will link to in the show notes which I think is also really interesting. So kind of personality tests, certain quizzes that you will see online, there are lots of different ways and diagnostics to help you can get a glimpse into who you are, and I think all of this stuff adds to each other, I think all of this stuff kind of refines the focus on your vision of who you are at the core. So if you like that kind of thing, the more you can do of that, obviously don’t make it a full time job, but when you come across those things, or you hear about a new one I think that can be really useful. Archetypes, if you really identify with a specific archetype that can help as well.

But I think one of the best ways is just paying attention and this requires a certain amount of self-love which was of course the topic of last week’s episode, which is why I think this week’s episode, really flows on well from that. Self-love is really important in this, because you really need to be willing to take a look at who you are and accept that and love it, because if you don’t accept who you are you are going to be living someone else’s life. So if you haven’t listened to last week’s episode I am going to link to that in the show notes, please go ahead and listen to it, I think self-love is a super, super, important part of this process. However, these two episodes really go hand-in-hand because if you don’t know yourself how can you love yourself, and you have to be willing to love yourself as you grow to know yourself. So I don’t know, they are both very much interrelated, at least how I see term and I have got a lot more episodes that have to do with knowing yourself, I was just going through the list before I stated making the notes for this episode and I realised that this is such an important topic for me that it is something that I have talked about quite a bit over the years.

So what are some practical actions that you can take today? You can go through my old blog posts, who am I blog posts on my website, all that stuff needs to be refined, it needs to be updated, but it is very useful just as it is today. So take a look at those, go through those and work through those and they will give you questions, stuff to journal on. That leads me to the next thing, you can do journaling, I think it is a super, super, good way of getting to know yourself, or really tuning into where you are today, and what is going on for you but also getting to know yourself through your journaling. Again, I really regret having thrown away some of my older journals but here we are, I have got several dating back to the last few years and I find it really useful to go though, them and oftentimes I am really surprised at the level of awareness that I had. Some things that I kind of caught glimpses of, about myself, but it took a while to sink in, so it is very useful to do journaling and it can been really useful for getting to know yourself. So if you find journal prompts useful, you can find book full of journal prompts, I often share them as related to these episodes, that can be a really, really, useful way of getting to know yourself.

So ask yourself questions related to some of the things that I was talking about in this episode: so what do you like, what do you dislike? What is important to you? What are you are your values? I have got a blog post on this with a list of values you can use to circle and figure out. What are you good at? What are you not so good at? What’s really difficult for you? Who do you admire and why? I already asked this, but I need to add it in here, so that you have got it with the questions. What drives you? Is it money? Is it making a difference? Is it providing for your family? Is it being the best? Is it bettering yourself? Is it something else?

Why do you do what you do? And sometimes these questions you might find very similar questions but the wording if it is different it might trigger a different answer in you, so I think sometimes asking the questions with different words can elicit a different response. Bio-rhythms, like I said earlier, when is a good time to wake up? If you could wake up at any time of the day, what would be good for you? What works best for you? What is a good time for you to go to bed? What is the best time for you to focus during the day? When do you tend to get stuff done, and when do you find yourself being really distracted throughout the day? The same goes for meals, when is a good time for you to eat meals? Lifestyle, what kind of lifestyle do you want and why?

Your mission and vision statement for yourself, if you don’t know how to create those I think I have got a blogpost on that I will link to that in the show notes, if I do I think it is part of the “who am I” series, but you can Google online how to figure that out for yourself and write your own mission and vision statement. Like, what’s important to you and why are you here? And this is more than life purpose it is like: what do you want to achieve in your life?

So these are all things that you can ask yourself to help you get clear on who you are. And again, I think this is some of the most important work that you will do in your life, because the sooner you get started on this path, the sooner you can started coming to clarity with who you are, then doing the work that I talked about last week which is accepting who you are, loving who you are, the easier it will be for you to take the action you need to take to create the life that you want to have, which will bring your happiness, which will bring you joy, which will bring you all of the good things that you want in life and it will help you live a more fulfilling life.

So, really, I think this might be one of the most important things that you do, if not the most important thing. Knowing yourself is so, so, deeply important and this is such a multi-faceted thing. it is not like when you are creating an elevator pitch for your business, “I am the business mindset coach who helps women entrepreneurs creating a satisfying business”, I don’t even remember what mine used to be but you know what I mean… this is not like that, where you are going to create a statement that sums up who you are in one sentence. You might find that to be a useful exercise, but I think that the answer to who we are is so much more multi-faceted than that, which is why I think there are so many activities or exercises that you can do to approach that topic of who you are. So, don’t expect yourself to sum it up in a sentence. I don’t really think it works that way, our perspective might change when I work on this next book, but honestly I think it is a lot more complex than that.

I encourage you to take action today to do one thing that will help you get started on your journey of getting to know yourself at the very deep level and I invite you to send me an email [email protected] and let me know what your own action is going to be. I would love to hear from you, what has resonated with you from this episode? What has made you decide to take action and what is that action going to be? I look forward to hearing from you!!!

So, as always, please drop me a line and let me know what you thought of this episode, I really enjoy hearing from people. You can find me online and get in touch or email me at: [email protected].

And that’s all for this week, thank you so much for listening, if you enjoy this episode, please subscribe if you haven’t done so yet. Remember to visit http://HollyWorton.com/315 for the show notes on this episode.

315 Holly Worton ~ Know Yourself: How to Answer the Question of “Who Am I?”