The Ultimate Guide to Self-Discovery

Look at it like starting a relationship with yourself. At the start of a relationship, you want to know everything about the person. The more you know them, the closer you become. The easier it is to have a healthy relationship with them. With self-discovery you are digging in and learning as much about you as possible. So, you can have the best relationship with yourself as possible.

Here are some more reasons that self-discovery is important.

Why is Self-Discovery Important?

Self-discovery enables you to improve your life in various ways, including:

• It helps you to heal emotionally. The more you know about yourself and the experiences you have had – the easier it is to heal the root cause of what has hurt you.
• Helps you stay in touch with who you are today. We change on a regular basis as we go through life. Self-discovery allows you to keep up with who you have become. Without this you end up living the life of your old self, not who you are now.
• Helps you achieve your goals faster. When you are stuck, self-discovery lets you see what parts might be because of you. For example, if you set a goal to go to the gym, but keep skipping it, self-discovery can help you see why you are avoiding it. Perhaps it is because you don’t have the energy at the end of the day. You can change it to the morning to better align with your energy. Or if you realize it is because of a limiting belief, you can work on healing the source of the belief.
• Improves your self-awareness. Self-awareness brings many benefits to your life. Including better decision making, the ability to catch yourself in the moment before you create a problem and increased confidence in yourself.
• Helps you find and be your true self. Your true self is who you came here to be in this lifetime. It is the spiritual blueprint you came into this world with. The more you know about yourself, the easier it is to re-align to that blueprint. And this leads to:
• Uncovering your purpose in life. Purpose is rarely shown to you when you are young. What you came here to do requires you to be ready for it – to truly know yourself. This occurs throughout your life as you discover more and more about who you are.

How to Know Yourself Better

Beyond what you like and dislike, self-discovery can feel mystical. To make this easier, here are a few things you can do to get to know yourself.

Explore your role in difficult life events.

We all play a part in how our relationships go, how successful we are at work and how we treat ourselves – plus many more. By being willing to see your true role and how you and your beliefs impacted the situation you can start to heal what doesn’t serve you. And be more aware of that tendency moving forward. Getting you both healing and self-awareness.

For example, if you are a people pleaser and that shows up in your relationship in the form of you never saying no. This ends up leaving you depleted, and the other person sticks around only because you take care of everything. By identifying this as your role, you can then begin to explore why you do it and then heal the original triggers.

Evaluate negative habits and routines.

This will help you get to the core of why you do things that distract you from your goals. For example, if you have a habit of emotional eating, and want to stop you can ask the following questions to begin to understand it fully.

• What was I feeling right before I started eating?
• What was I doing right before I started eating?
• Who did I interact with right before I started eating?
• What was I looking to get from the food?
• When did this start?
• What happens if I stop emotional eating?

Overtime patterns and insights will start to emerge as to why you do this. Then you can start to work on changing them!

Develop your connection to the spirit world.

There are some aspects of why you do things and who you are that you can’t see without the help of your spirit guides. No matter how much you try to figure something out, if it is impacted by a spiritual block or soul commitment you won’t see it without them.

Examples include experiences intended to reveal your purpose, heal karma, or fulfil life contracts.

Explore the surface level stuff.

While the deep dives we have talked about so far are good, so is that “surface” level stuff like what you like, want and are good at. Without this type of information you can end up taking a job that isn’t the right fit for you. Or moving to a city that is a complete mismatch to your personality.

We must know ourselves to make decisions that are right for us. Plus, this type of information changes as we age and experience life, so staying on top of our new likes ensures we make decisions based on who we are today.

Check in on your beliefs.

When we are younger, we are led to believe certain things because of how we are raised and what we are told – about ourselves and the world. As we experience life on our own, we don’t always keep the same beliefs – we develop our own.

Without taking the time to check in and see if you still believe in what you say you do you can feel out of alignment but have no idea why.

This is one of the big concepts taught in The Four Agreements. We buy into the beliefs because that is what we do as kids. But they may not necessarily be our truth. We just agreed with it.

How do you start exploring this? Start small. When someone says something about you, ask yourself: Do I believe this? What do I know about myself that is different from what they said?

Then overtime you can work up to bigger beliefs.

I do also recommend reading The Four Agreements. It is a great guide for better understanding yourself. You can check out my book study of it right here.

Keep circling back around to these.

There are a few reasons why it can be beneficial to make this a regular practice and to go back and look at things you have already looked at.

• Everything we just talked about has many layers and as we learn more about ourselves, new layers emerge.
• You can miss different aspects of a situation that you are exploring. Going back helps you see things you didn’t before.
• As you do this process, you change again. It’s like peeling an onion, healing one thing will show another. Going back can reveal new things to heal and work on in the same situation.

For example, with people pleasing you may heal one of the early childhood situations that triggered your people pleasing. But then you see you are still engaging in people pleasing behaviors. You can go back and uncover another situation that impacted your belief about needing to over give. You can also go back and see that it is a habit you need to adjust and not another belief. Or even that it is more about confidence building now, and you need to explore what impacts your confidence.

Learn more about how to stop people pleasing.

Now that you have some ideas on how to get to know yourself better you need some tools to do this! All the above can be done in multiple ways, so let’s talk about some of the most effective tools.

Journaling

Journaling is a great way to ponder different ideas, explore problems, explore your dreams and the random thoughts you have. And the more that you learn about each of these areas, the more you learn about yourself.

Plus, it helps you to reach your subconscious, access your intuition and connect with your guides through automatic writing. Allowing you to get even more information on yourself.

To help you get started there are some journal prompts below that will help you with self-discovery.

Don’t like to write? Check out this article on different ways to use journal prompts that don’t include writing!

New to journaling? Check out my beginner’s article on journaling.

Meditation

When you quiet your mind and give it a chance to calm, it trains you to be more aware during the day. Over time this ability to be aware will help you see things in the moment. It creates self-awareness.

Keep in mind that a quiet mind isn’t completely silent, and that meditation is a practice – not something you have to perfect. I have been meditating daily for over 10 years, and my mind still likes to think it is running a marathon when I mediate! But I remind myself how bad it would be if I didn’t have a meditation practice!

You can also use guided mediations to help you connect with your spirit guides to be shown what you need to hear. This can take some time if you aren’t used to connecting with them or aren’t good at hearing them. Check out this article to learn more about the ways you can connect with your guides.

Here is a guided meditation I created to help you with this:

YouTube

Meditate with Andrea Podcast Episode #2

Insight Timer

Travel

One of my favorite things about travel is that you get to experience new things, people, and cultures. This naturally helps you learn more about yourself. When you expand your horizons, you by default learn more about you.

You learn everything from what you are like when your flight is cancelled, to how much you love new foods, to how much you didn’t know about a place’s history – and much more.

And travel has the added bonus of helping you with emotional healing.

Connection to spirit realm

The spirit realm can be anything you wish it to be – there is no one way of doing this. When you take the time to connect with your higher source, your spirit guides or passed on ancestors you will get information that you can’t see here.

What you can do is set the intention that you get more information around one of the areas you are working on. For example, if you are trying to see why you keep calling in partners that are emotionally unavailable, you can pray for insight into why. Or you can ask your guides what area you might not be paying attention to.

Trying new things

I love to say – “You don’t know what you don’t know.” And the only way to know is to try. So, get out there and try new things. You will learn not just if you like it or not, but often new things will show you beliefs or opinions you have that you didn’t know.

For example, a few years back I decided to try an aerial arts class. I assumed I would struggle because I believed my shoulders were weak. Turns out I didn’t struggle because my shoulders were a lot stronger than I thought. I had made the assumption that they were weak because I had only been lifting weights with them being at the very end of a session. They were already tired by the time I got to them. Just doing aerial they weren’t tired, and I was able to do more!

For this one you can try and adopt my life theory – I will try just about anything once as long as it is legal.

Personality Tests

There are many different types of personality tests that you can take to learn more about yourself. There are tests for just about every area of your life – business, relationships, overall approach to life and more.

Many of them are not a lot of money and can help you understand why you do what you do!

Here are some that I have taken:

• Strengths Finder (Now known as the CliftonStrengths)
• Marketing DNA from Perry Marshall (great if you run a small business)
• DISC – helps you understand your behavior in different situations.
• Fascinate Professional Assessment – shows your communication style and this one is great for business. You can get the new book and it has the code to take the test or go directly to her site.

There are many others, pick an area you want to know more about yourself and dive in!

Self-Discovery Journal Prompts

The following are some journal prompts to get you started on your self-discovery journey.

• Who am I without this role/situation?
• What was my role in this situation? Who do I do this?
• Create a list of habits you want to change. Then pick one and ask: why do I do this? What am I getting from it?
• What makes me happy?
• What do I lose track of time doing?
• Pick one belief you are unsure of right now and ask:
  • Why do I believe this?
  • What do I believe instead?
• What am I doing in my life that feels out of line with my true self?
• What am I doing that makes me feel uncomfortable?

How Long Does Self-Discovery Take?

Self-discovery is a continuous process. Because we are always changing and growing, we need to make sure we don’t lose our personal knowledge about ourselves. That doesn’t mean you will do it non-stop all the time.

How much time you will spend on self-discovery depends on what is going on in your life.

When you are in the middle of a major life transition, then you will spend a lot more time in discovery. When life is calmer and not much new is happening, you will need less time. Although this is a great time to work through more detailed self-discovery because you aren’t busy with a life transition.

An easy way to integrate self-discovery into your life for the long term is to journal. Journaling allows you to explore things on a daily basis – allowing you to not miss new things!

You need to be honest with yourself.

Without allowing ourselves to see our truth it is hard to make true insightful discoveries. It isn’t easy looking at the hard parts of ourselves. It is much easier to blame others, gloss over our issues and outright deny our contribution to our life situations. But when you are willing to open up and be vulnerable you make progress faster. And that brings you to your true self faster!

This is also typically the biggest problem when you are stuck and can’t figure something out. Make sure you are being honest about it.

Once you learn something you need to take action.

Once you see yourself fully, you will need to make changes in your life for it to fully help you. Knowing what might be blocking you is one thing. It is another to start taking action to fix it. Action can be scary. Action can bring about more change. Which can bring you back to needing more self-discovery.

But without the action, you are simply someone who knows what the problems that you are creating are without wanting to change them.

Is there a right or wrong way to do self-discovery?

No, we are all different and will learn about ourselves in different ways. If journaling is perfect for me, but you don’t like it then maybe your approach is to go to therapy.

And in addition to different ways to do it, what you uncover is your reality and truth. You can’t get your truth wrong. That doesn’t mean you won’t change it or see different angles as you go, but that is part of the self-discovery process.

What do I do with uncomfortable feelings or memories that come up?

While uncomfortable emotions are never great, they are an opportunity to heal and move forward. Start by allowing yourself to feel the emotion. Without acknowledging it and letting your body feel it, it becomes hard to accept it and move forward. This video walks you through how to feel your emotions.

After that you can begin to work on healing the difficult emotions around that. Here is an article on different ways to start your emotional healing.

Self-discovery isn’t something you check off a list—it’s an ongoing adventure. There will be ups and downs and facing the tough stuff about yourself can feel uncomfortable. But the more honest and open you are, the more you’ll grow.

Remember, real change happens when you take action on what you learn. It might be scary, and it might push you to keep learning about yourself, but that’s how you build a life that really fits who you are. Keep exploring, keep adjusting, and most importantly, stay true to yourself as you move forward.