In this video, I am going to be giving you the 10 best self-discovery questions that you can ask yourself for complete and total self-awareness.
So, why is self-discovery important in the first place? Imagine that you’re playing a game of cards. You dealt five cards, and that’s the hand that you’ve been dealt. That’s the hand that you’re going to play. However, you don’t know the full rules of the game. Maybe the people that you’re playing with haven’t fully told you the rules of the game. Maybe there’s a bunch of different combinations and hands that you could play, but you’re not aware of those either. You just have these five cards you’ve been dealt and a couple of hands that you remember and these are the these are your only options. These, this is all you can play so far.
Now imagine there’s a method and a system for teaching you that. Hang on a minute there are 10 other hands I could play with this particular combination and there’s actually about five or six different rule sets to this game that I wasn’t aware of before. This is the power of self-awareness and self-discovery. Learning about your own patterns, learning about the truth of who you are, about your own issues, your own beliefs, your own habits, behaviors, patterns, and emotions and all that this other stuff. It literally opens up doors for you in your life. It opens up doors where you can live a different way.
Most people they play the hand they’ve been dealt and they never question the rules of the game. They just play it as they’ve been taught to and the results across the the span of their life is pretty damn predictable. So if you want to play a better game which will give you better results in your life in pretty much any other dimension, self-awareness is key.
So here are 10 life-changing questions that you need to ask yourself if you are serious about playing a better game with the hand that you’ve been dealt. Now, if you want to do this as you go through this video which I highly recommend you can pause the video at various intervals and actually write down your answers to these questions. If you’re gonna do that, I want you to remember one, be radically honest with yourself and two, don’t let anyone see this. You really need to have the the freedom to be able to just fully express yourself onto the page.
Question number one: What do I really believe about money, sex, relationships, friendships, family, career, spirituality? They are just a few jumping off topics, but if any other topics come up that are more pertinent to you then explore those as well. But the point is you really need to dig deeper and ask yourself what do you actually believe? You not like beliefs that you’ve been given by other people that other people believe around you but what do you really believe about these things?
Question two: Who do I admire and why? Now, this is very important. The people that we admire, they’re exhibiting traits and characteristics and qualities that exist within us but we’ve not had the full courage. We’re not fully actualized the potential of this yet but we’d like to. For one example, I admired in the TV show Game of Thrones, Robert Baratheon. Around the time that I valued and admired Robert Baratheon the character, I thought he was a real badass. It was because I was a super nice guy and I wasn’t very assertive so he was exhibiting traits that I wanted to portray. I wanted to embody in my behavior with people but I didn’t dare and my admiration for this character. That’s how my subconscious was telling me. That’s what my subconscious was telling me to integrate. So that might be the case for you in your life. Who do you admire and why?
Number three: What am I consistently envious of in other people? We don’t like feeling jealous. We don’t like feeling envious for good reason because it feels horrible. However, on the other side of what you’re envious of in other people lies a desire. If we’re jealous of another person’s amount of money, if we’re envious of another person’s, you know, if they agree with women for example they’re very popular or whatever the case is, there is at the root of that envy a desire that we have that we maybe don’t accept within ourselves. Maybe we don’t fully allow ourselves to want these things. Maybe we are scared of it, afraid of success or afraid of the failure that might come if we actually try to be more like that. Who knows? Well, the point is, ask yourself what you’re envious of in other people and don’t be afraid of what you find out.
Question four: What parts of myself do I struggle to accept? When I ask people what do you love about yourself, that’s usually the response I get. It’s usually pretty meh. I like these things, but it’s not really a question that tends to hit quite hard. However, if we look in the shadow side of us, the parts of ourselves that we don’t like to accept, that we try and push away and we bring them to the surface and pay attention to them and then hopefully we might be able to build a more accepting relationship with the parts we don’t like about ourselves. That’s going to help us feel more totally self-accepting, which is going to improve our confidence, our happiness, and just everything in life. It’s gonna make life a way more fun experience for us if we can do that.
Question five: What was I like as a child? Has this changed? How much has this changed and was there a point, an event or a series of events or a phase in my life where this began to change? What this can do is teach us the traits and the qualities that are existing within us still but at a certain point in our development we learned to repress those things but they’re not gone anywhere. They’re just a part of us that we try to stuff down and when we start to become aware of these traits, what we were like as a child, we might start to be able to make friends with this inner child part of us and bring it to more to the surface so we might be able to live in a more sort of carefree and enjoyable and creative way.
Number six: What were the times in my life when I felt truly alive? I want you to list these and I want you to write about these in detail. What were you doing at the time? How did it feel? How did that circumstance come about? For example, one of my times is when I won my two MMA fights. It was the most it’s like time sort of melted away. Life inherently meant something and everything just felt great. So, when you learn about these times in your life you learn about your values, what’s important to you, what makes life actually worth living, and then you can sort of wonder why am I not having more moments like this? And that can give you an idea as to what needs to change in order to make life more fulfilling for you.
Question number seven: If I was going to die in one year’s time, how would I spend that time? That is assuming that you don’t have some degenerative illness. Let’s just say in a year’s time you’re walking about and then just boom you’re gone. It’s quick, it’s painless, but you’re gone in that year. What would you do? What would you do differently? What would you say to people that you’re not saying? What trips would you go on? What work would you want to do? What charities would you engage with? That kind of thing. And you can ask yourself just as sort of an offshoot of that question, why are you not doing that now? Tomorrow is guaranteed to absolutely nobody. It is only down to denial and delusion that we think that tomorrow I’m going to be around. Odds are you will be, but that’s what people who die, who will die tomorrow think. So, time is guaranteed to nobody. If you were going to be dead in a year’s time, what would you do differently?
Question number eight: If I could change anything about my past, what would it be? Regrets and resentments and shameful times they tend to sit in our subconscious where they’re not fully expressed and in the subconscious they sit and they puppet our behavior and they hold us back and they keep us stuck in old patterns and cycles of habit and behavior which lead to the exact same results in our lives. So, what I want you to do is look into the past at some regrets and resentments and things like that and ask yourself what do you what do you wish would been would have been different in the past that would make life better today?
Question number nine: Is there anything right now that I am not expressing to who and why might that be? One of the things I teach guys as a principal is to come out of hiding, stop avoiding confrontation, stop avoiding communicating your desires, your needs, your wants, your thoughts, your feelings, stop hiding. If you are currently unexpressing, if you’re currently holding back and suppressing yourself, you have very little chance of feeling as happy as you could do, as feeling as confident as you could do, as well. And this leads me to my next question which is.
Number 10, if it was guaranteed that nobody would be impacted negatively by it, how would you show up to other people? How would you behave differently and what would you do?
Guys who are usually shy, socially inhibited, they lack confidence, they’re not feeling very good, maybe anxious, maybe depressed, generally speaking, these people. We also, we also care about other people, we also don’t want to hurt anybody. We’re fundamentally, we probably feel more than most people, we’re quite sensitive which is a good thing by the way and we don’t want to hurt people, so we end up changing our behavior and holding back in a bunch of different ways, but this holds us back, this this cripples us in a way, this stops our happiness. But what would you do? How would things be different if you were guaranteed, if it was absolutely guaranteed that nobody would be affected by poorly by what you did, how would you show up differently?
So self-discovery is truly important, doing this kind of self-awareness, self-reflection, doing the inner work is really important. But I want to warn you of something, this inner work is important but only when it is balanced with action. Inner work can become its own kind of distraction. It’s not uncommon for clients to come to me, for people to come to me for help and they have been in this sort of psychoanalytical trap for years without really knowing if anything changes, and then they have like a 90-day program coaching program with me and then within 90 days they have different results and their life has sort of opened up for them. It’s because they just weren’t taking action and they were a little too afraid to do so, they didn’t have the encouragement they needed.
So do the inner work, take action, bring it together and that will create meaningful, impactful change in your life. This is Ollie once again, take care and I’ll see you next time.
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Channel name: Oliver Cowlishaw