15 Secrets To Working Out Who You Really Are

Asking yourself who you are may seem like a strange question, because we all think we know the answer, but knowing the real answer (i.e. not the one we believe to be true) is crucial, whether you realize it or not.

The problem is, you grow up being told who you are by others, such as parents and teachers, and you adopt that persona – but it’s not necessarily the real you.

This means you spend a large part of your time trying to live up to other people’s expectations of who you are and how you should behave (and think, in some cases), and that, sooner or later, creates an internal conflict that does you no good.

For a long time, from my late teens until my 40s, which is from well before I was severely depressed until just before I overcame that depression, I felt like me and my brain were two separate entities, and I think part of that was an inner conflict caused by not understanding who I was.

So, the earlier in life you appreciate this and discover the real you, the better.

This article discusses why it’s important to know you you truly are, and a series of questions you can ask yourself and a process to help you arrive at the answer.

Benefits Of Knowing Who You Are

Here are a few reasons why it’s important to know who the real you is:

1. Career Choices: The better you know yourself, the more easy it will be to choose the best career (e.g. because it plays to your strengths).
2. Choosing A Partner: It is my belief, based partly on my own experience, that if you do not understand you, and what’s important to you, it makes it very difficult, it not impossible, to choose the right partner for yourself. You may find yourself attracted to people with either irrelevant or the wrong qualities, and you may not find this out until you eventually discover the real you.
3. Empathy: When you go through the exercise of determining who you are, you become aware of both your strengths and weaknesses (amongst other things), which helps you realize that nobody is perfect, that everybody is fighting internal battles you cannot see, and all of this makes you better able to see things from other people’s point of view.
4. Making Decisions: When you know who you are, you can make better (and faster) decisions – either something is congruent with the real you, or it’s not, and if you are asked to do something that goes against your core values, you can very easily reject it. This can also help you resist peer pressure, which is one of the hardest forces to overcome.
5. Mental Health: Looking at the other side of the coin, when you don’t know who the real you is, you can end up with mental health issues. I come across no end of people with issues such as anxiety or depression, and many of them are asking this very question (i.e. “how do I know who I am?” or “how do I know what to do with my life?”), because it appears they recognize that trying to live up to other people’s expectations is causing them internal conflict with consequent problems.
6. Reduced Inner Conflict: Many people do things that don’t feel right to them, but they don’t always know the reason why. This creates conflict, internally, but once you know who you are and you are then able to make sure your actions are consistent with your values, this inner conflict will decrease.
7. Self-Control: You are less likely to make poor choices (e.g. eating unhealthy foods) when you know that those choices are not being made by the real you.

Preparation Work

The questions and process that follow are not just thought exercises – it’s crucial you write all of this stuff down – either in a journal, or electronically – because you’ll need to review and mull it all over to help you arrive at your final answers.

Wherever you document all of the details you’re about to uncover, remember that this is highly personal information, so make sure you have a means of keeping it secure (e.g. a locked drawer or cabinet for a physical journal, or a way of password protecting an electronic document).

So, make sure you have whatever you need to hand before you start the next section.

Questions You Should Ask Yourself

Working out the answer to this seemingly simple question of who you are will require much soul-searching, and the help of a one or more close and trusted friends, who know you really well.

You may find answers that you don’t like, and that’s OK too, as long as you use that information to get to the truth.

So, these are the questions you need to ask yourself to help you chip away everything that is not the real you, leaving just the core:

1. Accomplishments: What have you achieved in life that makes you proud, and why?
2. Circadian Rhythm: Are you a morning person or a night owl? When do you do your best work? When do you get your ideas? When is your energy at its highest and lowest?
3. Epitaph: What is the one thing you would like to be remembered for after you die?
4. Fears: What (or who) are you afraid of, and why?
5. Interests: What are you passionate about (e.g. hobbies, causes)? What captures your attention? What is it that concerns you most? What sparks your curiosity and drive to learn more?
6. Failures: What are the most important lessons you have learned in life (e.g from your own or other people’s failure)?
7. Perceptions: How do you think other people perceive you, and why?
8. Purpose: Many people go through life assuming that there is some ulterior purpose to our lives, but the truth is, our purpose is what we choose it to be. So think back to events that have been meaningful to you, and try to establish what they have in common – because that may just be your mission in life.
9. Relationships: This doesn’t just mean people you are, or have been, in a relationship with (e.g. boyfriend / girlfriend, spouse), but people in general that you interact, or have interacted with. What do you value in others, and what behaviours do you not like in others? And, importantly, why?
10. Role Models: Who do you look up to as a good role model, and why?
11. Self-Limiting Beliefs: During the first six or so years of our life, we soak up everything we hear and our young brains believe it to be true. During these years we develop our most powerful, and oftentimes most life-limiting, beliefs that can stick with us for the rest of our lives. But these beliefs may not be true! Check out the free 10 Questions report to help you identify these for yourself.
12. Strengths: What are you good at (e.g. natural talents, skills and abilities you have acquired, as well as character strengths, such as fairness or loyalty)? (See the section on Personality Profiling, below, for more options on how to identify your strengths.)
13. Traits: Are you introverted (i.e. you get your energy from within) or extroverted (i.e. you get your energy from outside, e.g. other people)? Do you let your head or your heart inform your decisions? Do you plan everything, or are you more spontaneous? Is your focus primarily on the details or the big picture? Also, what traits would you like to have that you currently don’t (or which would you like to be stronger)?
14. Values: What are the values you cherish most and would like to use as principles to guide your choices in life? Examples include:
    • Authenticity
    • Adventure
    • Balance
    • Bravery
    • Compassion
    • Challenge
    • Citizenship
    • Community
    • Creativity
    • Curiosity
    • Determination
    • Fairness
    • Fearlessness
    • Freedom
    • Friendships
    • Fun
    • Generosity
    • Growth
    • Honesty
    • Influence
    • Justice
    • Joyfulness
    • Kindness
    • Knowledge
    • Leadership
    • Learning
    • Love
    • Loyalty
    • Openness
    • Optimism
    • Recognition
    • Respect
    • Responsibility
    • Security
    • Self-Respect
    • Social Connection
    • Spirituality
    • Stability
    • Status
    • Truthfulness
    • Wealth
    • Wisdom
15. Weaknesses: What are you not so good at? What are your “vices”? Note that this doesn’t mean you have to go and attend training courses to improve these areas of your life – it just means you need to be aware of them. Why spend time and energy on something that you will only ever be OK at when you could devote that time and effort to being even better at something you’re already good at?

Personality Profiling

By this, I mean you can use some of the many character profiling assessments that are available, both online and in books.

Some of the more common ones include:

• CliftonStrengths, originally called StrengthsFinder, assesses you against 34 strengths (which are meant to represent innate talents and which therefore should not change), and ranks them in order for you,
• DiSC, which is a “non-judgmental tool used for discussion of people’s behavioural differences”, assesses people based on traits they label as Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness.
• Enneagrams, which classify people into one of nine basic personality types (Reformer, Helper, Achiever, Individualist, Investigator, Loyalist, Enthusiast, Challenger, and Peacemaker), which is your dominant type and rarely changes. It goes deeper than this, however.
• Myers-Briggs Type Indicator®, usually shortened to MBTI, assesses people on four scales (Extroversion vs Introversion, Sensing vs Intuition, Thinking vs Feeling, and Judging vs Perceiving), leading to one of 16 personality types (ISTJ, ISFJ, INFJ, INTJ, ISTP, ISFP, INFP, INTP, ESTP, ESFP, ENFP, ENTP, ESTJ, ESFJ, ENFJ, and ENTJ).

There are others, of course, but I list the above because they are all ones that I have taken at least once in my life.

A few words of caution:

1. None of these should be taken as anything more than an indicator of your personality / character type, in spite of what they claim about their scientific accuracy.
2. With some of them, such as MBTI, your results can vary each time you take the test, and this is normal.

For me, all four tests gave me broadly similar results, which all seemed reasonable to me (but maybe that’s just confirmation bias talking), but if I could only choose one, I would go with CliftonStrengths (which, sadly, is the only one of these four where I couldn’t find a free online version of the test, probably because Gallup manage access to their test very strictly).

I like the fact that it ranks you against all of your strengths (or natural talents), and it appeared to me to be the most perceptive of them all.

So, if you choose to use any or all of the above (or any others you find), remember they are at best indicative of your personality, but you can still choose to factor those into the whole exercise of working out who you are.

And if they differ to your own assessment, then you have found something you need to dig deeper into.

Reviewing What You’ve Written

The above will probably take you a while, but that’s good – and you don’t need to do it all in a single sitting.

But once you have finished your first draft, it’s time to review it all. For example, ask yourself if:

• Can anything be better worded (e.g. to be less ambiguous or more precise)?
• Have you missed anything?
• Is what you wrote genuinely true (e.g. you may have said one of your traits is honesty, but is that actually the case or is it wishful thinking)?

The next step of the review process is to discuss it with one or more close friends, who must be somebody who:

• Is non-judgemental.
• Knows you very well.
• Will not discuss any of this with anybody else.
• You trust implicitly.

This may be an uncomfortable step for you, but having somebody else review all of the information can provide an objective perspective on some of the questions. For example, if you wrote down that you are good at communication, and your friend disagrees, that’s a clue that you may need to think about that one in more detail – why do you think it’s one of your strengths, and why does your friend think it’s not.

However, do not argue about any of this – it’s not worth losing a friend over. The only goal is for you to come up with what you think is the most accurate description of you and what’s important to you.

Putting It All Together

OK, so by now, you should have written down a lot of information, discussed it with at least one other person, and updated your notes accordingly.

It’s now time to sift through it all again, by yourself, and identify what you think represents the core you.

To a degree, of course, all of it does, but you probably have too much information for it to be useful at this stage.

The goal is to summarize it and home in on the real you, so that you could, in theory, give somebody what is often known as an elevator pitch about you.

If you’re not familiar with the concept, an elevator pitch is a statement or description of what you do you, or what your company does, or, in this case, who you are, that will let somebody else understand it (or you) in a really short timescale – i.e. during a typical ride on an elevator (or lift).

When you get it down to no more than 30 seconds (when spoken out loud), you’re at about the right length.

Given that the average person talks at about 120 words per minute, that means your elevator pitch about yourself should be around 60 words – which isn’t much, which is why you need to spend time getting to the core of what describes you and your strengths and values.

And, of course, don’t forget to write this down too!

Regular Updates

While some of the above personality profiles claim that your basic traits never change (and that is probably true for some qualities), the answers to many of the questions from above will change over time.

Some of the key information may not do, but you will certainly refine your answers as you understand more about you and life in general.

For example, your life’s purpose may change. When you are younger, your focus may be on making enough money to raise a family, but later on, when your children have grown up and left home, you may discover something that is more important to you, such as charity work or writing.

So, it’s a good idea to come back to this exercise, preferably once a year, but you could choose to do if after any significant life event (e.g. changing jobs or careers, getting married, having children).

Conclusion

As you can see, this is no five-minute exercise, but as with so much else in life, you get out of it what you put in.

The more time you spend on this exercise, and the more honest you are with your answers, the better you will understand who the real you is. And as I said above, knowing this has all sorts of benefits.

And finally, you may like to take my Brain Training Success Course, which comprises 31 lessons that will help you live your best year yet.

Additional Resources

These are suggestions for those who wish to delve deeper into any of the above:

1. CliftonStrengths
2. CliftonStrengths Book
3. DiSC
4. DiSC Book
5. DiSC TEst
6. Enneagrams
7. Enneagrams Book
8. Enneagrams Test
9. MBTI
10. MBTI Book
11. MBTI Test