Self-discovery: what it really is, and 4 myths about it

The ideas that Sigmund Freud proposed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are no longer valid when trying to explain the behavior of the human being, but there is some truth in them: in each person, there is a gap between what they want to do and what they say they want to do. Most of our mental life is secret, and the motives that move us to perform all kinds of actions are to some extent hidden.

That is precisely why it takes on value what we usually call self-discovery. In this article we will see what exactly it is and how it has an impact on our daily lives.

• Related article: "Self-concept: what is it and how is it formed?"

What is self-discovery?

Self-discovery is a process by which we generate a concept of ourselves that is realistic and close to reality, regardless of biases that depend on our optimism (idealizing our self-concept) or our pessimism (creating an overly negative image of ourselves because of sadness or a mood under). Thus, it is a complex process, since to get involved in it you have to renounce those immediate impressions and intuitive that come to mind just at the moment in which something happens capable of appealing to our feeling of identity.

Keys to a realistic self-concept

When it comes to knowing yourself, you have to avoid easy and intuitive explanations about who you are. As a small guide, in the following lines you can find key ideas that you should take into account before launching into self-discovery.

1. The truth is hidden in self-justifications

If we human beings are experts in something, it is in creating narratives about who we are and what we do. These narratives can help us create a concept of the "I" that is coherent, consistent and easy to memorize, but at the cost of sacrificing part of the veracity of that self-concept.

Therefore, to bet heavily on self-discovery, it is worth focusing our attention on thinking about those aspects about ourselves that we like least and look for explanations about what it is that really moves us to act like this in that type of situations. After all, in these cases what we have more at hand are self-justifications and half-truths that we tell ourselves.

• Related article: "Cognitive biases: discovering an interesting psychological effect"

2. Self-discovery is not based on introspection

Many people believe that discovering oneself is basically resorting to introspection to find mental contents that had remained hidden until that moment. In other words, to achieve this, you have to do something similar to staying in a quiet and isolated place, closing your eyes and concentrating on analyzing your own flow of thoughts.

However, this view of the mind is an illusion, since it is influenced by a philosophical stance known as dualism. According dualism applied to psychology, the mind and the body are two different things, and that is why to develop self-discovery you have to try to “cancel” the body and focus only on the mental, that supposedly would have different layers of depth, since despite not being something physical, it emulates what it is and, even metaphorically, it has volume.

Thus, carry out self-discovery initiatives It is not concentrating on yourself and forgetting what is around you. In any case, we must stop to analyze how we interact with our environment during the day to day. We are what we do, not what we think.

3. The opinion of others also counts

It is not true that each of us has clearly privileged access to information about how we are.

In certain aspects of our lives it is clear that we know more than the rest, especially in relation to those facets of our own day-to-day life that we prefer keep hidden, but with regard to the global conception of who we are, friends, family and in general the people of our social circles more next they know a lot about our identity and behavior style.

In fact, unlike what happens with us, as they do not have the need to make an effort to keep the most important aspects away from their consciousness. negative about who we are, many times they are able to weigh in a more balanced way what are the strengths and imperfections that we define. Of course: it is important not to be labeled and be clear that time and experiences can change us.

4. New situations tell us more about who we are

When it comes to embarking on the path of self-discovery, it is important to completely reject essentialism. What is essentialism? It is simply a philosophical stance known for fueling the idea that things and people have a clear and distinct identity from the rest of the elements, which remains constant and resists the passage of weather.

When someone says, for example, that an old acquaintance was born from the neighborhood and will continue to be from the neighborhood Regardless of what happens to him (e.g. winning the lottery), he is holding an essentialist perspective, although be without knowing it.

Essentialism is an obstacle to self-discovery, because It is not true that we are born being one thing and die being exactly the same.

If our explanations about who we are do not suffer alterations no matter how much we continue living new experiences that give us new information about our identity, something It goes wrong. Possibly we continue to cling to those myths about ourselves through which we manufacture a self-concept automatically, without noticing it.