Finding Yourself: 20 Tips for Getting Started on Self-Discovery
The Strange Adventure of Meeting Yourself
Self-discovery may sound dramatic, like a solitary trek through the Amazon basin or an Ayahuasca vision quest, but the reality is that our most meaningful introspection takes place in ordinary life. The process is uneven, with some days feeling like lightning bolts of clarity, and other days feeling like you’re stuck in a rut. What’s certain is nobody drifts into knowing themselves by accident. You have to invest the time and effort into unraveling the inner knots of you, even if you begin clumsily. Here are twenty tips on how to know yourself better.
1. Spend Time Alone
Alone time isn’t selfish—it’s oxygen. Take a walk without headphones, sit at a café with no company but coffee. At first it feels uncomfortable, like the silence is some kind of judgment. As you sit there, thoughts will start to surface—the kind previously drowned out by constant noise.
2. Journal Without Editing
Forget grammar, forget sounding clever. Just pour your heart out onto the page. Write about the dream you had where your teeth fell out, or the way you secretly hate that certain someone in your friend group. The mess on the page eventually shows patterns in your thinking, and patterns are clues to who you are.
3. Ask “What Did Childhood Me Love?”
Before grades, jobs, and rent—what did you long to do for a living? Was it drawing, building forts, or simply running barefoot in the yard? Childhood passions are raw signals to who we are fundamentally. They’re rarely wrong, just buried under the clutter of adult obligations.
4. Try Saying No
It’s shocking how much of life can be filled with things we never wanted to do. Try skipping the party, or that extra shift, or the family dinner where everyone argues anyway. Your world won’t collapse, but you might feel lighter and a little more peaceful inside.
5. Talk to People Older Than You
Dare to ask the older generation blunt questions: what do you regret, what mattered most, what would you do differently? People in their seventies tend to strip away pretense and get straight to the heart of the matter. Their answers can jolt you awake and shift your priorities real quick.
6. Travel Differently
Skip the luxury hotels and Instagram backdrops. Instead, take the train across a country, eat street food that scares you, and get lost in neighborhoods with your Google Maps unopened. Strange places strip you down to essentials and force you to use your street smarts. You really start to notice who you are in places where nobody knows your name.
7. Learn a New Skill
Be a beginner again. Whether it’s pottery, coding, or salsa dancing, dare to start something from scratch. The early frustration is telling—do you laugh at mistakes or sulk? Do you keep going? Self-discovery hides in your reactions to new challenges.
8. Read Outside Your Comfort Zone
If you only read thrillers, grab a philosophy book and wrestle with the dense language. If you devour self-help titles, pick up sci-fi instead. The ideas you resist most sometimes reveal the limits of your perspective.
9. Pay Attention to Jealousy
Envy is not simply an unpleasant emotion but a compass toward your own unique desires. If you envy your friend’s art show or your cousin’s backpacking trip, maybe it’s because some part of you craves that too.
10. Try Therapy (or at Least Honest Conversations)
Therapy isn’t just for crises. An open, honest conversation can shed a spotlight into the deep recesses of your mind. If your subconscious self feels inaccessible, then brutally honest conversations with someone you trust can do more than polite small talk ever will.
Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash
11. Notice What Exhausts You
Some people are energized by social outings; for others, it’s an exhausting obligation. If that weekly brunch feels like a performance or your work project drains you before you even start, that’s information worth paying attention to.
12. Notice What Energizes You
Whatever gives you an infusion of life is worth noticing. Which conversations make hours fly? Which tasks make you forget to check your phone? Follow those threads and you’ll notice your life gets instantly brighter.
13. Experiment with Style
It’s amazing how a tiny change here and there can have a major downstream impact. If you’re a neutral-color sort of person, try something brighter. Change your hairstyle—it may honestly change your attitude. Sometimes the habits we get locked into tell us more than another self-help book ever could.
14. Revisit Old Places
Whether it’s uncomfortable or not, our past tells the story of our present. Go back to your childhood home, your high school football field, or the street where you had your first kiss and bask in the gush of nostalgia. How you feel about your past shows you what still matters and what doesn’t.
15. Ask “What Would I Do If Nobody Was Watching?”
Who we are in private is who we truly are. Strip away approval, judgment, and applause, and dare to confront your genuine motivations. Would you still chase promotion if it weren’t for family pressure? Would you still post vacation photos if you didn’t get a kick out of others’ envy? The honest answers are raw but clarifying.
16. Collect Small Adventures
Self-discovery doesn’t always mean quitting your job and moving to another continent. It can be something as simple as taking up Pilates, learning chess, or singing at a karaoke bar even though your voice is objectively terrible. Small adventures add up to surprising clarity.
17. Make Peace with Silence
Some people hate being in their own company. The next time you have a spare moment, dare to sit without stimulation. No podcast, no background TV, no playlist looping. Just silence. At first, it’s unbearable. Then it’s oddly comforting. Somewhere in that stillness, your own voice surfaces.
18. Write a Letter to Future You
Ten years from now, what do you hope you’ll remember and what warnings would you offer yourself? The act of writing it down forces you to reflect on lessons you might be suppressing. Later, reading it back feels like time traveling.
19. Pay Attention to Dreams
Dreams are chaotic, yes—and often without meaning. But sometimes the imagery repeats and you find yourself going through the same scene again and again. Dreams don’t give clear answers, but they can hint at what your mind is holding onto.
20. Accept That It’s Messy
Apart from the obvious finish line, there’s no certificate in life that says, Congratulations, you found yourself. Some days you’ll feel wise, other days ridiculous. That’s the point. You’re not painting by numbers here—you’re experimenting in freeform.
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