Becoming Aware of Your Feelings
Notice your thoughts. Your thoughts are an integral part of who you are. They often guide how you feel as well as your attitude and perceptions of situations. Monitor your thoughts and recognize the content. Are your thoughts negative? Do you put yourself down, or always think something will go wrong? Which areas of your life are you most hard on yourself? Do this in every aspect of your life. You want to make sure you think about your thoughts every day and during all different kinds of activities. Try setting 5-10 daily timers to go off to remind you to evaluate how you're feeling at that moment. Being able to observe your feelings will also help you recognize that you can control your thoughts and change what you're focusing on.
Write a journal. To help you keep track of your thoughts everyday, start a journal and write about your day, your struggles, your goals, and your dreams. Analyze your journal entries and take note of their quality. Are the hopeful or bleak? Do you feel stuck or powerful? Continue to analyze your thoughts to become more aware of who you are.
Become aware of your perceptions. Sometimes our perceptions of situations lead us to make faulty conclusions about what happened or what we saw. For example, if you perceived that your friend was mad at you after lunch, you may be confused and automatically think that because her mood was low, you did something wrong. Becoming aware of your perception of her mood can help you to analyze why you jumped to the conclusion she was mad at you. When you have a situation like this, take time to analyze your actions and beliefs about what occurred. Write down what you saw, heard, or felt that made you interpret the situation in the way that you did. Ask yourself if there could be other causes for your friends mood or if there are outside factors that you are unaware of.
Recognize your feelings. Your feelings can also give you clues into who you are and why you react to certain situations or people in the way that you do. Analyze your feelings by becoming aware of your reactions to topics of conversations, tones of voices, facial expressions, and body language. Identify what you are feeling and ask yourself why you had this type of emotional response. What were you responding to? What about it made you feel the way you do? You can also use physical cues to tune you into how you are feeling. For example, if you notice you are breathing heavier or faster, so may be stressed, mad, or afraid. If you can't figure out exactly how you feel at first, keep writing down your reactions and thoughts about certain situations. You may need time and distance from a situation to recognize how you feel. You also can ask a trusted friend or family member to help go over your thoughts and reactions to help you figure out exactly what you feel. It may be hard for you to distance yourself enough from the ideas to truly know how you feel or what these things mean about you.
Analyzing Your Values
Understand values. Knowing what you value can give you insight into who you are at your core. Many values are based on your personal experiences, and some change as you learn more about yourself. Sometimes values are hard to identify because the term and concept is abstract and often vague. Your values are your beliefs and ideals that you base your choices on throughout life.
Identify your values. Identifying and defining your values will bring you closer to realizing who you are and what is important to you. In order to seek out your values, you will need to spend some time in reflection, analyzing what is important to you and which values make you who you are. Begin identifying your values by writing your answers to the following questions: Identify two people you most admire. What are the qualities they have that you admire? What is it about this person that makes them admirable to you? If you could only have three of your possessions for the rest of you life, which would they be? Why? What topics, events, or hobbies are you passionate about? Why are these things important to you? What is it about these things that make you passionate? What event made you feel the most complete and fulfilled? What about that time made you feel this way? Why?
Group your core values. You should start to have an idea about what is important to you and what you value. Try to group these ideas, moments, or things into core values to help you have a better idea of your core beliefs and ideals. Some examples of core values include courtesy, honesty, optimism, confidence, friendship, achievement, faith, friendship, kindness, justice, trust, and peace. Use these core values to understand and know yourself better. These values should help you make choices and identify what is important to you. Through analyzing yourself in this way, you are that much closer to unlocking your true self. Your may have multiple groups of values. This is normal because humans are complex and feel many different things. For example, you may value honesty, faith, competence, and confidence, values that don't necessarily group together. But these traits show you the kinds of situations and people you value around you as well as traits you likely strive for in yourself.
Discovering Your Story
Write your story. Writing your life’s story can tell you a lot about who you are as well as how you view your life’s challenges, joys, opportunities, and struggles. Writing out your personal story can give you insight into what you have learned through your experiences and how those experiences have affected you. In this way, you can analyze how your experiences helped shape who you are, which encompasses your values, attitudes, beliefs, biases, reactions, and the way you interact with your world. Remember that even though you've probably made mistakes, you're still a whole and complete human being with inherent self-worth.
Analyze your story. Once you’ve written the story of your life, analyze yourself by asking the following questions: What are the themes that are present in your story? Are you always being saved or are you the person who saves others? Does your story have a theme of helplessness or ability? Is your story a love story, a comedy, a drama, or something else? If you titled your story, what would the title be? Divide your story into chapters. Why are the chapters divided where they are? What changed? What did you learn? What are the titles of your chapters? Did you label yourself in your story? Did you label others? What do those labels mean to you and what do they say about how you see yourself, others, and the world? What kinds of words do you use to describe yourself, others, and the world? What do these descriptive words tell you about your story and how you lived it?
Decide what your analysis means. Once you write your story, you need to decide what it means. The interesting thing about writing your own story for analysis, which is called narrative therapy, is that is shows you what you think is important or crucial to your existence. It showcases those moments in your life that you feel are important or worth note. It also shows you how you view yourself and the trajectory of your life so far. For example, if you write your life as a drama, you may feel that your life is more dramatic and intense. If you wrote it as a comedy, you may think your life has been fun and upbeat to this point. If you wrote your life as a love story, maybe you are a hopeless romantic who either has great love or is hoping for one in the future.
Remember that it takes time. Even when you have followed all of these steps, you need to realize that it can take time. It is important to understand that becoming more aware of who you are, or analyzing yourself, is also an ongoing, lifelong pursuit. Who you are today or what you believe today may change in the future.
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