Cover Photo by Amos Bar-Zeev on Unsplash
How to go from zero to good, from good to great, and from great to unstoppable
This guide on learning how to become self-aware comes from five years of experimentation with journaling, mindfulness and asking the right questions to the right people (including myself). I’m hoping my experience on the topic as well as my research will greatly accelerate your ability to learn how to become self-aware.
In this guide, I teach you all the steps required to go from zero to unstoppable. It’s part of a series of guides you can find in this publication — SkillUp Ed. All the guides I’m creating come from at least 1,000 hours of practice in the skill, with additional in-depth research on the topic.
Let’s dig right in!
The first 15 hours
Learning plan
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Learning Material
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Expectations
In your first 15 hours of learning Self-awareness, you should be able to:
Start a journaling habit
Do your Ikigai once
Do your map of life once
List your skills, hobbies, passions, talents, loved ones, and more
Self-review different areas of your life
How to go from zero to good in Self-awareness
Prepare
Most of the preparation you’ll have to do for the first 15 hours is reading the right material. If you look at the skill tree above, click on the nodes that have a heart next to them to show the resources. See Journaling, Mindfulness > Finding your Why, and Feedback > Self-feedback.
During this first stage, you’re mostly going to focus on journaling. In your journal, you’ll do your Ikigai, your map of life, and brainstorm about other aspects of your life. If you want to go further than the resources we provided, feel free to do extra research about Ikigai and the wheel of life. For now, simply schedule journaling sessions in your calendar. Schedule it daily for at least 10 minutes.
This preparation phase shouldn’t take more than two hours.
Practice
The first step is to get an overview of what currently defines you. List your:
Skills — things you do well
Hobbies — things that occupy your time
Passions — things you do for fun without external incentives
Talents — things you learn fast
Loved ones — people you care about
Moments of happiness — key moments of your life or recurring events
Moments of sadness — key moments of your life or recurring events
Personality traits — things that define you as a person
Values — things you strongly believe in
Spend 1–2 hours on this.
Next, fill out your map of life.
The idea of the Map of Life is to figure out where you stand in 8 pillars of your life you care about.
To fill it out, go through each category and rate your satisfaction on a scale of 0–10, 0 meaning totally dissatisfied and 10 meaning complete satisfaction. From my experience helping people filling this out, both 0 and 10 are extremely rare (I’ve never seen it).
Another tip I can give you is to do it with someone who knows you well. We have a tendency to either be too hard on ourselves or overestimate our satisfaction. If you have a life coach, ask them to do the exercise with you.
When you’re done with your current situation, fill out the situation you’d want to be in and give it a deadline (I typically write down the last day of the month). Here are some pointers to set realistic expectations:
Don’t expect to go up by a sum of more than 1 or 2 points in a given month.
Feel free to borrow from other categories. For example, reduce your Fun and recreation by 1 point to increase your Family and friends.
For each point, note the action steps you’ll take to make it happen.
For each “Current Situation”, be as clear as possible as to why you noted the score you noted.
Spend about 1–2 hours on learning the theory and making your own map.
Next, it’s time to look at Ikigai. Its purpose is to help you channel your energy not only what you like to do, but what the world needs. Here are the steps I use to fill it out:
Brainstorm in this order: What you LOVE > What you are GOOD AT > What you can be PAID FOR, and What the world NEEDS. I find that order easier to fill out.
Brainstorm in this order: PASSION > PROFESSION > VOCATION > MISSION.
Try to make sense of where everything intersects — that’s your Ikigai, your reason for living.
My recommendation is to let your imagination run wild. Don’t picture the present. Picture the near future. Where do you want to be in less than 5 years? This isn’t an easy exercise. It took me weeks to get to the bottom of it the first time around.
Of all the methods of raising self-awareness I’m presenting in this article, Ikigai is the one that gave me the biggest breakthrough. You should spend 2–3 hours doing this.
For the coming weeks, whenever you’re faced with making a decision on doing something or not doing it, test it against your newfound “map”. Ask yourself:
Does this align with my purpose/why?
Where does it stand in my map of life?
Where does it stand in my Ikigai?
If you can’t make it fit with your purpose, strongly consider not doing it. When you make an important decision, note what it is and why you did it. The more you practice taking note of it, the more it will be second nature in your mind.
Ponder
Self-awareness is all about asking yourself questions. At this point, you’ve already done your fair share of reflection. At the end of your 15 hours, reflect on the usual questions:
What went right?
What went wrong?
How can I improve?
In addition to those basic questions, ask yourself:
Do I have a better idea of who I am?
Do I have a better idea of who I want to be?
Do I know what I have to do going forward? How about for next month, next year, and a few years from now?
Do I fully understand the map of life and Ikigai?
How can I continue my journaling practice?
How can I take my journaling to the next level?
Do I want to pursue this skill? Why? Why not?
The first 100 hours
Learning plan
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Learning material
Created with Emberly. Click here for interactive version.
Expectations
In your first 100 hours of learning Self-awareness, you should be able to:
Do successful Think Days and Self-reflection weeks
Find your life purpose
Get started on a mindfulness practice through Yoga and Meditation
Get better at self-feedback
Get better at receiving feedback from others
How to go from good to great in Self-awareness
Prepare
During this phase, you’re going to start looking into finding your life purpose, yoga, meditation, and dig deeper into getting feedback. We’ve filled out the skill tree with plenty of good resources to get you started.
Start scheduling short sessions of yoga and meditation in your calendar. Those can be as short as 10 minutes each. At this point, the goal isn’t to be good at any of them, but rather feel what it’s like to do them. You can schedule 3 sessions each per week to get started for a total of 1 hour during your week.
During this phase, you should make it a priority to schedule one Think Day per month. Essentially, Think Day is a day where all you do is reflect on your current situation and how you can improve. The goal is to get clarity about your current life situation.
If you feel like you’re lacking so much clarity that a single day of reflection isn’t enough, you should also consider doing a self-reflection week. The idea is basically the same, but for a week. You can also add some reading and entertainment time. Again, schedule it.
In total, this preparation phase shouldn’t take more than 2–3 hours.
Practice
The most important exercise to do during this phase is to find your why/life purpose. In Find Your Why, Simon Sinek proposes you go through 10–12 stories with a friend or someone who asks you lots of questions along the way, and you should get a lot closer to your purpose. Feel free to repeat the process by yourself during a journaling session or during Think Day. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t find it right away. It took me over a week of searching deeply.
Another approach I like to use to find my why is to use the 5 Whys Method. Essentially, for each reason you find, ask yourself another layer of why. Do that until it reaches a point where you can’t ask why anymore or until you’re satisfied.
A good life purpose is broad enough that if your current situation changes, it still applies. But it’s also specific enough that when you set goals and milestones, you can easily axe those that don’t fit with your purpose. That’s why it takes time to find it. Also, it should be quite short. You should be able to narrow it down to a single sentence.
Outside of those approaches, please check the resources we’ve included in the skill tree. In addition, feel free to do another round of listing your skills, hobbies, passions, and talents. The more aware you are of multiple aspects of your life, the easier this gets. I’d also consider doing another round of Ikigai and the Map of Life.
As mentioned in the preparation phase, you should schedule one Think Day every month. If this is too much, you can try for a half-day. Refer to this article on exactly how to do a successful Think Day.
I also recommended you schedule one self-reflection week. This article tells you more about it. If you find that after a few journaling sessions and a few Think Days, you haven’t yet found your purpose, you should definitely consider doing a self-reflection week.
During this phase, you should start dipping your toes into yoga and meditation. As previously mentioned, the point isn’t to become good at them, but to get a sense of what they are. Yoga is fantastic to be more aware of your body and meditation is great for being more aware of your mind. We’ve included many good resources for both in the skill tree.
I recommend practicing each for 10 minutes at least 3 times a week, for a total of 1 hour per week. If you can do more, even better. For me, yoga and meditation were some of the hardest skills I’ve learned. If you’re not physically flexible and you have a hard time calming your mind, you’ll find yourself in the same situation I was in. Don’t give up. Focus on the process, not the results. It took me 28 days of practicing meditation for 20 minutes to finally be good enough to calm my mind.
Another important aspect of this phase is to get better at giving yourself feedback but also getting feedback from others. Both of them are harder than it seems at first because until you’re truly self-aware, you lean towards your biases every time without knowing it.
So, during this phase, in addition to giving yourself feedback like you previously did, you’ll want to involve others. Regularly, you’ll want to ask people for their honest feedback about different aspects of what you do. Your key practice here is to truly listen, take notes, and not judge feedback positively or negatively. Once you gather people’s opinions, take time alone to reflect on what it means.
Note that it’s hard to get honest feedback from people. The more receptive you are to criticism, the more open people will be to give it to you. Don’t be afraid to dig deeper if you think the person is holding back. However, be mindful of their comfort level. Not everyone is comfortable giving honest feedback, even if you’re fully receptive to it.
Ponder
Self-awareness is all about asking yourself questions. At this point, you’ve already done your fair share of reflection. At the end of each week and month, reflect on the usual questions:
What went right?
What went wrong?
How can I improve?
In addition to those basic questions, ask yourself:
Have I found my why/life purpose? If not, why not? Do you know what to do next to find it?
Have I benefited from Think Day and a self-reflection week? Why or why not?
Do I understand how yoga and meditation can make me more self-aware?
Do I feel ready to dig deeper into yoga and meditation?
Have I become less judgmental of feedback? How so?
Do I generally feel more self-aware already? Why? Why not?
The first 1,000 hours
Learning plan
Click for interactive version
Learning material
Created with Emberly. Click here for interactive version.
Expectations
In your first 1,000 hours of learning Self-awareness, you should be able to:
Master Journaling, Think Day, and Self-improvement weeks
Be certain about your why/life purpose
Become quite good at yoga and meditation
Master self-feedback and getting honest feedback from others
How to go from great to unstoppable in Self-awareness
Prepare
For the most part, this phase is like the previous one, repeated multiple times. Schedule your journaling, yoga, and meditation sessions. If you can, make them a daily habit.
For feedback, Identify who you’re most likely to get honest feedback from. Tell them about your intent and keep them in the loop regularly. Think of them as an accountability buddy. For self-feedback, start thinking about new questions. Find new methods to evaluate how you’re doing in different aspects of life. You currently know Ikigai and the Map of Life, but there are other ways. By the end of this phase, you should even be able to create your own ways to evaluate yourself.
Practice
Journaling, yoga, and meditation should become a habit by this point, meaning you should do it pretty much every day. If you can schedule one hour daily for all three, that’s perfect.
For yoga and meditation, you’re going to start moving from beginner to intermediate. Once you’ve become good enough in one pose or technique, move on to a more difficult one. The biggest enemy of progress is comfort. When something has become easy, your natural instinct is to continue doing it, but that’s not how to move forward. We’ve included more advanced resources for both yoga and meditation in the skill tree above.
You should also start experimenting with different types of yoga and meditation. For example, Yin Yoga is perfect to raise your body awareness. It’s not the easiest form of yoga though. For meditation, there are so many different kinds that if one doesn’t seem to benefit you, don’t shy away from trying another. Chances are, one will be a better fit for you to get started. As you progress, you’ll start to find the other ones easier too.
During this phase, if you still haven’t figured out your why/life purpose, feel free to reflect at least once a week on it. One thing you have to make sure you do to figure it out is to try to diversify the activities you do during the week. It’s hard to find your purpose when all you’re doing is your day job, eat, sleep, rinse and repeat. Experiment with new things regularly. Eventually, something will click.
For feedback, you’ll mostly practice getting more comfortable asking for honest feedback from others. You’ll learn to ask the right questions at the right time. You’ll also learn to identify who’s a good person to ask feedback from. My personal trick is to ask people honest feedback about something I’ve done poorly (intentionally or not). If their answer is positive and they don’t point out the bad stuff, they’re not capable of giving you honest feedback. You can try to push harder by insisting on giving you even the bad feedback, but don’t be discouraged if they don’t. Most people can’t. They think they’ll hurt you.
And speaking of hurting, most people are actually hurt by negative feedback even if they asked for it. Your objective for this phase is to not be like that anymore. Any criticism is good criticism. We’re terrible judges of our own performance. It may take a while to get comfortable with people talking negatively about your performance, but that’s why you have to keep doing it over and over.
Also during this phase, try to schedule one self-reflection week every 6 months. Failing that, do it yearly. Review your Ikigai at least as regularly and do your Map of Life every other month.
Overall, it should take about 2 years to complete this phase. By this point, you’ll have such clarity that making the right decisions will be that much easier. You’ll also be more confident and happy.
Ponder
At the end of each week, month, quarter, and year, reflect on the usual questions:
What went right?
What went wrong?
How can I improve?
In addition to those basic questions, ask yourself:
Have I found my why/life purpose? If not, why not? Do you know what to do next to find it?
Have I succeeded in making journaling, yoga, and meditation a habit? Why or why not?
Do I generally feel more aware of my body and mind? How so?
Do I have the clarity to make informed decisions about my life? If not, why not?
Do I feel like I’m more receptive to feedback, both from myself and from others? If not, why not?
Have I gone further in my yoga and meditation practice? if not, why not?
What do I want to do next with this skill? Continue? Improve further? Stop? Why?