“If you want to understand yourself better, point to your actions and ask yourself why.”

I just learned this lesson, and I have to say, it’s by far the most valuable thing I have learned in the past few years.  If you think about it, our actions are the physical manifestation of the conclusions of very complex thought processes.  So if we want to understand the underpinnings of why we do what we do, we can simply ask ourself, “Why exactly did I do that?!?”.  (I have found that this exercise works best with pen and paper and allowing for a free flowing question and answer style dialogue.)  In asking and then answering the question of why, you will be forced to reverse engineer your thoughts, emotions, and assumptions that got to you the outcome of whatever action you chose – and bring you closer than you have ever been to your core self.

One Reply to ““If you want to understand yourself better, point to your actions and ask yourself why.””

  1. My grandma, Eta Schlaffer, quiet spoken, a woman of few words,
    always felt “you have to look the truth in the eyes”‘ add the Yiddish
    twist to it.

    I took that to mean just look in the mirror. I do agree, but it was slightly
    over simplistic. Sometimes it takes an eye opening event, to allow us to read the
    the words within our eyes. I seem to look everyday, thinking I am seeing,
    but I now know better.

    What she might’ve meant was “look through our eyes
    to find our truths”. It takes time to master, but if we keep looking, the eyes are
    the conduit to our soul, and at some point, we can no longer avoid understanding
    what we see in the mirror.

Leave a Reply