Do you know who you truly are? If the answer is a loud yes, congratulations! Self-knowledge is a huge feat not everyone can brave through or face head-on in the first place. However, if the answer is no, don’t feel embarrassed and beat yourself up. Acknowledging that you don’t know who you are can be the first step toward embarking on a journey of soul work and self-discovery.
What’s Self-Discovery?
Self-discovery might seem like a huge, daunting, and unreachable goal, but the truth is you’re looking at this concept from the wrong perspective. Self-discovery isn’t the endpoint or the end objective; rather, it’s the destination. It’s a process of delving deep into your character.
The journey starts when you become more compassionate and curious about asking questions about your inclinations, motivations, default way of thinking, and behavior. Self-exploration can also be done by taking tests online such as the Starseed test quiz and other similar ones.
When successful, this journey helps you form your identity, determine your values, and create a life that’s authentic to your core. This pursuit may help you live a fulfilling and happy life.
Benefits Of Self-Discovery
Finding yourself and knowing more about who you are might seem self-centered. However, this is the opposite. Your core beliefs, innate gifts, aspirations, weaknesses, and personality type might not always seem to be important as you go through the motions of daily life, but awareness of these can benefit you in the long haul.
For instance, self-discovery can make daily life choices easier to tackle alone. This can certainly help save time and guesswork.
In addition, these insights can help you live your life to the fullest. When you know your strengths and capabilities, you can take advantage of opportunities that’d help you unlock your potential. With enough self-awareness, you’d know what steps to take to move closer to your dream life. Not only will this affect your well-being, but this can impact your relationships with your family, friends, peers, and coworkers.
Conversely, not knowing who you are can lead to a crisis. When you realize that you haven’t got much satisfaction from your job, this can lead you to question other life choices. While this event can be used as an opportunity to turn over a new leaf, others can’t help but drown themselves in self-pity.
Ways To Begin The Soul Work
There’s no better time for self-exploration than now. Below are ways to help you kickstart your self-discovery journey:
1. Journal Your Experiences
The journey toward self-discovery doesn’t happen overnight. It’s important to take your time to reflect on your experiences and to process your thoughts and emotions. Taking your time helps you understand and respond better to situations and not be reactive.
Journaling is an affordable and no-fail approach to jumpstart your self-exploration journey. It allows you to work through your thoughts so you can learn more about yourself. This activity allows you to brain dump all of your experiences without judgment. Later on, you can look back at these moments and assess how you’ve behaved from an objective standpoint.
Insightful introspection can help uncover your default behaviors, vulnerabilities, and things you never knew about yourself. All of these can give you insights into your personality type, providing you an opportunity to become a better person.
Furthermore, journaling can be a self-care activity you can look forward to every day. If you don’t know what to write, you can jot about things you’re grateful for, how the day went in three adjectives, or list down how you can improve for tomorrow. You may also take inspiration from journaling prompts online.
2. Go On A Solo Trip
Another way to embark on a self-discovery journey is to leave home. Stepping out from what’s familiar can be daunting, but this is often the reason people can’t learn more about themselves. Putting yourself out there can help you uncover not only fears, but skills and capabilities you never knew you had in you.
Apart from discovering new things, making an effort to try unusual activities can help inspire you to leap. For instance, accepting a job offer in another country gives you the freedom and courage to chase and live your big dreams.
Take note that going on a solo trip doesn’t imply having to travel cross-country. For other people, this can simply mean living in the next town for a couple of days or camping in the nearest national park. The goal is to expose yourself to unfamiliar situations to uncover your strengths and limitations.
By facing uncomfortable situations, you’d be compelled to do unconventional things to help you survive. For instance, you might be pushed to ask for directions and converse with the locals to navigate through the area. This activity can help strengthen your interpersonal skills and confidence. This event can also help you realize how you’re good at establishing relationships.
3. Surround Yourself With Compassionate People
Being with empathetic and supportive people can help you thrive in your self-discovery journey. They can inspire you to extend the same kindness and compassion to yourself as you delve deep into the process. Likewise, surrounding yourself with positive people eliminates the pressure of being perfect or having to hide on a mask, inspiring you to shine and own your true identity.
Considering this, make sure to choose your circle. If you have toxic loved ones, set and define margins to limit your exposure to them. Eliminating all the stress and negativity in your life can also help you focus on self-love and positive thinking, which is a part of one’s self-discovery journey.
In addition, working with a therapist can inspire your self-discovery journey. Therapy can help you acknowledge past experiences, discover the root cause of insecurities, and process complex emotions. Gaining an in-depth understanding of these crucial things can boost self-confidence. Therapy can reframe your way of thinking and transform how you see life, which significantly impacts your self-exploration journey.
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