Know Thyself

Most people want to change in some way, but how do we understand who we currently are?

One popular approach is the life narrative. We look back on our whole lives, from childhood up to the present moment, and search for the threads that we believe define who we are. We search for salient memories and interpret the past through our current selves and desires.

A quick caveat. I think the life narrative approach often over emphasizes the impact of one’s childhood. They may assume that childhood influences are the most important in your life. They may assume that childhood influences are inescapable. I don’t believe either of these things are true. Post-childhood experiences can be extremely influential—I say as someone who has lost both parents and a child as an adult. I also do not believe that childhood experiences are inescapable. Childhood trauma should not be ignored, but it need not define one’s life.

That caveat aside, I do think there is value to generate whole life narratives. However, a narrative on its own can easily become a just-so story—an untestable narrative which is accepted because it sounds compelling.

A second popular approach to self-understanding is to assess ourselves in the present moment. We love assessments! Most people have take a personality test like the Big Five personality assessment or the more popular Myers Briggs. Many of us enjoy BuzzFeed assessments matching us to Hogwarts houses or Disney characters even though we think they’re kind of silly. Behavioral tools such as 360 assessments can give us a broader picture of how others see us.

These assessments vary widely in quality. The common thread is that they assess who we are based on our current beliefs and behaviors. They may include some questions about our past, but they do not try to explain our present in terms of our past. This is both their strength and their weakness. The strength is that high quality assessments are reasonably objective. Their weakness is that they take each of us as a single point in time when really we are each a dynamic system influenced by our past.

The real power comes when we merge these two. Look at what assessments tell us about our present self. What seems good? What seems bad? What seems self evident? What seems surprising? Now, look at your narrative history and connect up the past and the present. Are there parts of our past we should celebrate for making us who we want to be? Are there parts that create stumbling blocks? Having this holistic understanding helps us find a path forward that is more likely to lead to success.