Your Complete Guide on How to Become Self-Aware
By: Danny Forest
Tags: Self Improvement, Education, Inspiration, Learning, Productivity

Expectations

In your first 100 hours of learning Self-awareness, you should be able to:

Do successful Think Days and Self-reflection weeks

Find your life purpose

Get started on a mindfulness practice through Yoga and Meditation

Get better at self-feedback

Get better at receiving feedback from others

How to go from good to great in Self-awareness

Prepare

During this phase, you’re going to start looking into finding your life purpose, yoga, meditation, and dig deeper into getting feedback. We’ve filled out the skill tree with plenty of good resources to get you started.

Start scheduling short sessions of yoga and meditation in your calendar. Those can be as short as 10 minutes each. At this point, the goal isn’t to be good at any of them, but rather feel what it’s like to do them. You can schedule 3 sessions each per week to get started for a total of 1 hour during your week.

During this phase, you should make it a priority to schedule one Think Day per month. Essentially, Think Day is a day where all you do is reflect on your current situation and how you can improve. The goal is to get clarity about your current life situation.

If you feel like you’re lacking so much clarity that a single day of reflection isn’t enough, you should also consider doing a self-reflection week. The idea is basically the same, but for a week. You can also add some reading and entertainment time. Again, schedule it.

In total, this preparation phase shouldn’t take more than 2–3 hours.

Practice

The most important exercise to do during this phase is to find your why/life purpose. In Find Your Why, Simon Sinek proposes you go through 10–12 stories with a friend or someone who asks you lots of questions along the way, and you should get a lot closer to your purpose. Feel free to repeat the process by yourself during a journaling session or during Think Day. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t find it right away. It took me over a week of searching deeply.

Another approach I like to use to find my why is to use the 5 Whys Method. Essentially, for each reason you find, ask yourself another layer of why. Do that until it reaches a point where you can’t ask why anymore or until you’re satisfied.

A good life purpose is broad enough that if your current situation changes, it still applies. But it’s also specific enough that when you set goals and milestones, you can easily axe those that don’t fit with your purpose. That’s why it takes time to find it. Also, it should be quite short. You should be able to narrow it down to a single sentence.

Outside of those approaches, please check the resources we’ve included in the skill tree. In addition, feel free to do another round of listing your skills, hobbies, passions, and talents. The more aware you are of multiple aspects of your life, the easier this gets. I’d also consider doing another round of Ikigai and the Map of Life.

As mentioned in the preparation phase, you should schedule one Think Day every month. If this is too much, you can try for a half-day. Refer to this article on exactly how to do a successful Think Day.

I also recommended you schedule one self-reflection week. This article tells you more about it. If you find that after a few journaling sessions and a few Think Days, you haven’t yet found your purpose, you should definitely consider doing a self-reflection week.

During this phase, you should start dipping your toes into yoga and meditation. As previously mentioned, the point isn’t to become good at them, but to get a sense of what they are. Yoga is fantastic to be more aware of your body and meditation is great for being more aware of your mind. We’ve included many good resources for both in the skill tree.

I recommend practicing each for 10 minutes at least 3 times a week, for a total of 1 hour per week. If you can do more, even better. For me, yoga and meditation were some of the hardest skills I’ve learned. If you’re not physically flexible and you have a hard time calming your mind, you’ll find yourself in the same situation I was in. Don’t give up. Focus on the process, not the results. It took me 28 days of practicing meditation for 20 minutes to finally be good enough to calm my mind.

Another important aspect of this phase is to get better at giving yourself feedback but also getting feedback from others. Both of them are harder than it seems at first because until you’re truly self-aware, you lean towards your biases every time without knowing it.

So, during this phase, in addition to giving yourself feedback like you previously did, you’ll want to involve others. Regularly, you’ll want to ask people for their honest feedback about different aspects of what you do. Your key practice here is to truly listen, take notes, and not judge feedback positively or negatively. Once you gather people’s opinions, take time alone to reflect on what it means.

Note that it’s hard to get honest feedback from people. The more receptive you are to criticism, the more open people will be to give it to you. Don’t be afraid to dig deeper if you think the person is holding back. However, be mindful of their comfort level. Not everyone is comfortable giving honest feedback, even if you’re fully receptive to it.

Ponder

Self-awareness is all about asking yourself questions. At this point, you’ve already done your fair share of reflection. At the end of each week and month, reflect on the usual questions:

What went right?

What went wrong?

How can I improve?

In addition to those basic questions, ask yourself: