Gaining Self Insight & Self knowledge [Tips & Best Questions]

Would you like to increase your self-insight ? Do you feel a lack of self-knowledge or do you just want more self-knowledge? Here are ways to do this, including questions you can ask yourself. Read along…

What is self-knowledge, or self-insight?

Self-knowledge means that you yourself know what you can do well and what you can do less well.  In other words, you get to know yourself, including your strengths and weaknesses. This makes sense because it allows you to better manage your own expectations and the expectations of others.

Self-knowledge is the beginning of all wisdom.
– Socrates

The sections below contain powerful self-knowledge questions and exercises

Below you will find all the tips, questions and tests to increase your self-knowledge. Let’s start…

Tip 1 – Make your self-knowledge transparent: Update your CV

By updating your resume completely, you will have accomplished the greatest and the most practical part of increasing self-knowledge. So grab your CV and check carefully: What are your skills? For example, what kind of software can you operate well? What are skills with which you consistently achieve good results? What are your competencies?

Tip 2 – Which skills and competences do I need to develop?

Take a look at your resume. What would you have actually wanted to put in, while that is not yet possible? You note these skills and competences somewhere as a ‘wish list’.

Tip 3 – Look at your virtues and core quadrants

What are your personal virtues and qualities? Grab this list of virtues and keep checking which virtues you already master and which you haven’t yet.

Tip 4 – Gain self-insight with the Core Quadrant game

Ofman’s core quadrant game is a great tool for any project group, but it is also very useful for self-insight individually.

Tip 5 – Do an introspection

Grab this article with introspection questions. This is a nice set of questions to gain self-knowledge and self-insight.

Tip 6 – Ask others for feedback [Essential for self-insight]

Simply ask these two simple questions to some of the people around you who have some experience with you. Ask this question to as many people as possible and discover the trend: which answers consistently come back? If you can already spot a trend after asking about five to ten people, the exercise has already been successful.

1. What do you think are my strongest qualities?
2. What do you think are my weakest qualities?

My personal results were as follows:

My recurring strengths according to others:

• Open minded and positive
• Calm and energetic
• Analytical
• Hard worker, disciplined
• Good listener and social

My recurring weaknesses according to others:

• Slow
• I don’t express myself enough

Tip 7 – Next steps: what do you do with your weaknesses?

There are four ways to deal with your traits that are less than optimal:

1. Reframing : You can turn your limitation into something positive by looking at it differently. For example, if you are stubborn, you could say that you are a perseverer. Pushiness becomes enthusiasm. Slowness becomes carefulness.
2. Improve: You can take further training or a coach to work on your weaknesses.
3. Compensate – You don’t necessarily have to work on your weaknesses. You can also expand your strengths even further so that you can easily achieve all your goals.
4. Accept and communicate your weaknesses well: It is important to be able to tell your environment what they cannot expect from you. This is good expectation management .

Tip 8 – Give yourself feedback and ask others for feedback

Make sure you receive a lot of feedback. You can also give yourself feedback, for example with the ‘ behavior generator ‘ technique . And here you will find all articles about feedback.

Tip 9 – Take these tests for self-knowledge / self-insight

The tests below will also help you increase your self-knowledge.

• Test directly
• Overview of tests

To your success!