Getting to know your strengths, weaknesses, wants, needs, values, beliefs, habits, emotions and behaviors is an important part of growing as a person. Only when you truly know yourself can growth and change take place. It is essential to becoming the best version of yourself and provides the foundation for mastering your mindset.
self-awareness vs. Self-knowledge
Self-awareness is the capacity to see yourself clearly. To build self-awareness you must consistently pay conscious attention to your thoughts and emotions. Practicing self-awareness is important because it provides the path to self-knowledge. You cannot acquire self-knowledge without first becoming self-aware.
Self-knowledge goes beyond simply paying attention to what you think, feel and do. It is the ability to make sense of your thoughts, emotions, actions and reactions and draw conclusions about yourself.
Why Getting to know yourself is important
Self-awareness and self-knowledge are vital to mindset mastery because they help you identify and understand your core beliefs, values, personality traits, and automatic thought patterns. These are the factors that contribute to the nature and quality of your mindset, which has the power to sabotage or enhance your performance because it is the engine that drives your thoughts, emotions and behavior.
Like any other skill, developing self-awareness and self-knowledge takes practice and conscious effort. The more you learn about yourself, your strengths, your weaknesses and what makes you tick, the more opportunity you have to grow, improve and optimize your potential.
How do you get to know yourself?
Regardless of your age and whether you’re an athlete, parent or coach, getting to know yourself is important to your performance, meaning being the best at what you do. More importantly, it is the key to personal fulfillment and happiness. As you move through different phases of your career and your life, meet new people and experience new things, it is not uncommon to discover new or changing facets of yourself. Whether you feel like you’re not sure who you are or you simply want to dig deeper, getting to know yourself is an ongoing process.
Some things to contemplate when getting to know yourself include:
- your unique strengths, abilities and talents
- your goals, dreams, and desired outcomes
- your memories, knowledge and experiences, which inform what you believe about yourself, others and the world
- your attitude, perspectives, beliefs, and core values
Powerful questions
Like anything worth having, acquiring self-knowledge takes intention, effort, and perhaps most important, curiosity. One of the most fundamental and effective techniques for getting to know yourself is to ask powerful questions. As a certified mental performance coach, I am trained to ask powerful questions… the kind of questions that stimulate reflective thinking, creativity, insight and growth mindset.
A mental performance coach will guide you through an introspective process that allows you to observe, identify and clearly understand your emotional and instinctive responses. You will learn the keys to self-regulation so you can work toward shifting from emotional reactions to intentional actions. Getting to know yourself and mastering your mindset takes time. Working with a certified mental performance coach accelerates the process.
Bio: Antoinette Datoc is a certified Mental Performance Coach who specializes in helping athletes, their parents and coaches cultivate growth mindsets and mental strength. She is a competitive ballroom dancer and together with her partner (who happens also to be her husband) has accumulated 17 national championship titles and represented Team USA in three world championship events.
