Knowing Oneself: A Must for Adolescents’ Personal Development
“Why do I feel this way? Why am I like this? What is happening to me?”
As adolescents, these questions have probably crossed your minds, though you might not have satisfactorily answered them for lack of ideas. This article will guide you to discover some things about yourself and provide you some knowledge and awareness about the stage you are currently in.
Knowing oneself in personal development is a must. So how can knowing yourself make you accept your strength? What is its importance?
For one thing, knowing yourself can make you accept your strengths and limitations and become better in dealing with others.
On Being an Adolescent
Being an adolescent, you would notice that you, teenagers, have many common denominators. Most of you experience many similar things. You undergo different changes such as physical, social, emotional, mental, and spiritual development.
Being aware that many of you naturally go through the same pattern of development could help you accept yourselves. Knowing and accepting yourself involve understanding and embracing not only the changes happening to you but also your strengths (what you can do) as well as your weaknesses (what you cannot do).
Explain that knowing oneself can make a person accept his/her strengths and limitations and dealing with others better
Being aware of yourself as an adolescent and of the various changes that adolescence entails helps you become better in dealing with fellow adolescents and other people in the community. As the psychologist Erik Erikson once said, “The more you know yourself, the more patience you have for what you see in others” (Ericson, n.d.).
Having a more or less accurate knowledge or understanding of yourselves enables you to experience yourselves truthfully as a unique and separate individuals.
This keeps you away from living in a lie, fantasy, imagination, or pretention. Self-awareness also empowers you to make personal improvements by building on your areas of strength and ascertaining aspects where you would like to make progresses. Self-awareness is thus undeniably very important.
When you have a problem, the first step in solving it is admitting that you have a problem, which is part of self-awareness. Introspectionor self-awareness is indeed the starting point that leads to any improvement, as self-improvement is hardly possible without self-awareness.
Self-knowledge or self-awareness is also about understanding your own habits, needs, desires, failings, and everything else that matters in your personality. The more you know about yourself, the better you are at adapting life changes that suit your needs. This is, of course, related to the famous dictum of the Greek philosopher Socrates, “Know thyself.”
This self-awareness, however, requires more than intellectual self-examination as it requires knowing something about your feelings and passions too. The more you listen to your emotions and how these affect your behavior, the better you will understand why you do the things you do. The more you know about your own passions, the easier it is to improve on those urges or habits.
How to know oneself better
Knowing yourself perfectly is hard as rebuffing every single cognitive bias you have about yourself is nearly impossible. Nonetheless, the suggested ways below can help you to have better self-awareness and to benefit from this concept:
1. Make a self-review.
Instead of merely thinking about what you must improve about yourself, think about what your teacher, parent, or boyfriend/girlfriend thinks you should do and what your friends might say. This way, you can see yourself from someone else’s viewpoint and achieve a little extra insight about yourself.
2. Set your personal goals.
Basically, self-awareness is for self-improvement, so it is sensible that you set personal objectives. Writing your own manifesto is a good way to push yourself into identifying what you want to improve about yourself.
3. Be as impartial as you can be in evaluating yourself.
As best as you can, look at yourself objectively. As much as possible, avoid all biases in assessing yourself.It is also helpful to look for some reliable friends to talk with and listen to their criticisms. In decision-making, study and fairly criticize the decisions you make. (Read also: Mga Pagbabago sa Panahon ng Adolescence: Mga Aspeto ng Pag-unlad sa Buong Katauhan)
4. Keep a journal.
Especially in solving a problem about yourself, documenting things through a journal helps as it makes you more aware of what you are doing and where problems might be coming from. If you record the little things, like food intake, playing computer games, or sleep, you might notice a larger trend that you can correct in the future.
In looking for a better understanding about your decision-making skills, write down what you think will happen with a decision you made, then wait some time and review what you wrote … continue reading
Continue reading: Passing through the adolescent stage
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Related: 10 Ways to Withstand Hurtful Trials in Life
Read also: Pagkilala sa Sarili: Mahalaga sa Pansariling Kaunlaran (Personal Development)
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