Last Updated on January 2, 2023 by Mike Robinson

Before you can understand other people, you must figure out who you are. The more you learn about yourself, the easier it will be to understand other people. When you have self-knowledge, you can see how internal processes work for you and others. For example, if you think your biggest insecurity is that you are shy, knowing your shyness shows itself through self-conscious body language and avoiding eye contact can help you spot the same thing in someone else.

The importance of self-analysis

Before you can analyze other people well, you must know how to analyze yourself. Analyzing yourself will help you develop the skills you need to analyze other people. When you start, looking at yourself will be much easier than looking at others. This is because, unlike when you examine other people, you won’t have to guess your thoughts and feelings. Your thoughts and feelings will be easy for you to look at and figure out because of your self-knowledge. But when you try to figure yourself out, the hardest thing is to understand and figure out why you feel or think the way you do.

Another thing that could stop you from analyzing yourself is being honest. It can be challenging to be honest enough with yourself to do a good self-analysis. But once you get past those problems, you’ll be able to figure out your strengths, weaknesses, and where your emotions come from.

Steps for self-analysis

At first, it may seem scary to start the journey of self-analysis. Most of the time, the process is different for each person. To help you understand it better, I’ll break it down into three basic steps. Let’s look at each of these steps:

1. Thinking about your good points and bad points

The first step in analyzing yourself is to consider your strengths and weaknesses. Self-analysis is about getting an accurate picture of who you are, and your strengths and weaknesses can help you do that. Getting a clear picture of yourself doesn’t mean you should only think about the things that make you proud. Instead, you should also think about the things you struggle with since your struggles make you human.

The easiest part of self-analysis is to think about what you do well and what you could do better. It would help if you started by listing what you do well. To do this, you must consider what you like about yourself, especially what others say is good about you.

Your strengths are:

• Anything you’re good at, which means anything that comes naturally to you or is easy for you to do.
• Anything you love about yourself
• Anything that other people love about you. People usually want to be around you because of your strengths.

A big part of gaining self-knowledge is understanding your strengths. Your strengths could be things like being able to understand people or getting people to do something. For example, you can add to your list of strengths the fact that people around you often tell you that you have a good attitude and are patient with them. You can also add to your list of strengths that you tend to get other people excited about things.

Examples of your weaknesses are:

• Things like you don’t like about yourself.
• Things that other people don’t like about you.
• Anything you find challenging to do.

Getting accurate self-knowledge feedback means you must be very honest with yourself when looking at your weaknesses. Think about if someone constantly asks you to work on a specific part of your character. Also, try to think of one or more bad things about yourself that make other people dislike you. For example, your friends might always say that you don’t speak up and say what you think, which could signal that you lack self-confidence. Your weakness is that you give people advice without being asked, or you tend to be messy and forgetful.

No matter your weaknesses, you should be easy on yourself.  Although thinking about your weaknesses can be tricky and make you feel vulnerable, it is an important part of self-knowledge. Remember that your weaknesses don’t mean you can’t live the life you want. Identifying your weaknesses requires you to be open and honest, but it also means you know you have some flaws and are willing to work on them.

This article, Learn How to Eliminate Self-Doubt for Good, may help you build confidence and eliminate self-doubt once you recognize your weaknesses.

After thinking about your strengths and weaknesses and figuring out what they are, the next step is:

2. Writing down how you feel and how you react to things that happen

You might require a journal and a pen for this part.  You can acquire self-knowledge by writing down your feelings and reactions. This helps you remember them and enables you to understand the information better and more quickly later on.

Writing down how you feel and react to things will allow you to step back and look at the bigger picture of your life. The best way to handle this part of your self-analysis process is to write a little about your day before going to bed. This gives you time to think about what happened that day and how it made you feel. During the day, some things will make you think of good things, and others will make you think of bad things. Instead of letting these ideas slip away without you noticing, think about them and write them down whenever you can. Writing them down will help you think about them later and figure out if the way you dealt with them was the right way. Your thoughts about these things can help you figure out how to handle similar things in the future.

3. Noting how you perceive others and their actions

This step is not entirely about analyzing people; it is about noting how you respond to people and their actions. You can also write about this step in your journal. Recording how you interpreted other peoples’ actions might help you realize whether or not your perception was accurate when you reflect on them later. For example, if someone is late, you might think they don’t care about or respect you. But when you think about it later in the day, you might realize that they might not have meant to be late.

When thinking about other people’s actions, you don’t have to focus on the bad things. You could look at a good thing that happened, like getting a gift from your partner, and how it made you feel. If getting a gift from your partner made you very happy, you might realize that getting presents is your love language. When you think back on something so good, you might realize that you like and appreciate gifts from your romantic partner more than if they did something else for you. So, knowing this can help you in your relationships in the future.

The three steps discussed above are just some of the ways to look at yourself.

Additional ways to analyze yourself

Five-word description

This is a quick activity in which you describe yourself using a few key adjectives that best describe who you are. For example, you might use the word “compassionate” to describe yourself if you tend to care about other people. For this exercise, you should think of five words that truly represent you.

Who am I?

Another tip to gain self-knowledge is to ask, “who am I?” To figure out who you are, you must try to understand the qualities and characteristics that make up your personality. You can figure out who you are by thinking about your traits. Make a list of these traits and make a few notes about each one so you can better understand them.

There are many ways to figure out who you are, most of which involve how you think. To help you get started, here are a few questions that can help you figure out who you are.

• The different traits, habits, and qualities that make me who I am.
• Which words or phrases would my friends and family use to describe me?
• What’s my job or function in my group of friends?
•  How would someone I didn’t know think of me?
•  How do I want other people to see me?
•  What do I want people to know about me?

Identifying your core values

It’s essential to think about your values as well as your personality traits. The way you live your life should align with your core values. These values will be what you want to be and what you admire in others, like integrity, intelligence, honesty, etc. Psychologists often say that most people have about eight core values and that these values drive most of their decisions at work, at home, and in everyday life. So, for this step, list the eight values that guide you and your actions. Knowing your values will help you figure out why and how you act the way you do and what tends to drive you.

Thinking about how you got these values is an important piece of self-knowledge tah can help you learn more about who you are. Were your parents a big part of how you formed your core values, or did your values change as you grew up? Your self-analysis will be helped a lot by thinking about how and where you got your core values.

Remembering your childhood

Most of the time, our childhoods significantly affect who we are as adults. If you want to obtain self-knowledge and figure out who you are and how you act, you often must think back to your childhood. You can write down any good or bad experiences you remember in your journal and consider how they affect you now. For example, if you grew up with a strict parent and were punished harshly for breaking the rules, you might still be afraid to break the rules as an adult.

Questions to help you obtain self-knowledge

Asking yourself some in-depth questions can help you learn more about who you are. So, under this sub-topic, I will ask you some deep, thought-provoking questions to help you learn more about yourself. The point of these questions is to get you to use the analytical part of your brain and have a deep conversation with yourself. Most people never do this.

There are no right or wrong answers to these questions. All you have to do is answer them as honestly as you can. You can copy these questions into a text file and answer them there, so you can look back on them whenever you want.

Here is a list of the questions to attain self-knowledge:

• What do you do in your life that fills you with happiness?
• What are your favorite things to do, even when you’re tired or in a hurry? Why do you like to do them so much?
• Would you stay in a relationship or job that makes you unhappy or leave?
•  What would keep you from getting out of a bad job or relationship?
• What things have you done in your life that make you very proud?
• What kind of mark do you want to make on the world?
• What do you bring to the people of the world by being here?
• What would you want if you could have just one wish come true?
• How do you feel about the idea that you will leave this world one day? Which of your core values is most important to you?
• How do you think other people see you based on what you know?
• How do you want other people to think about you?
• What is one thing about yourself you wish you could change?
• How confident are you that you can make good decisions on your own? Which of your beliefs do you think holds you back the most?
• Who is your most important role model?
• Who in your life is the most important to you?
• Do you spend time with someone you don’t like even though you don’t like them? If so, who is that person, and why do you keep spending time with them?
• What is something about you that will never change, no matter what?
• How do you decide between two bad options?
• What is the one mistake you’ve made that has taught you the most?
• Does being thankful play any part in your life?
• What do you think of your parents?
• What is your relationship with money?
• Do you ever think about how old you’ll be? If that’s the case, how do you feel about it?
• How has formal education affected you, and what do you think about it?
• What do you think of when you hear the word “destiny”? Do you think your future is set in stone, or can you change it in any way you want?
• How do you feel about your life?

These questions seem very hard to answer, but if you think about them, you’ll see that they’re not. These questions help you obtain self-knowledge because they will make you think about things in a new way, and the answers you come up with will help you learn more about yourself.

Final thoughts

The ultimate goal in life is to grow and become the best version of ourselves. Sometimes we see ourselves through rose-colored glasses. Unfortunately, this is not always aligned with how other see us. This article provided you with enough information and actionable steps you can take to first understand who you are, and then change the things about yourself you don’t like. By incorporating just some of the suggestions I provided can make a difference in how others see you, and more importantly, how you view yourself.