The Easiest Way to Know Yourself Better Today

I often say no learning is ever wasted.

Nowhere is this more true than in our process of self-discovery.

The more we understand ourselves, the more we can show up in the world fully. The more we can adapt circumstances to suit our individual needs. The more we can understand others around us and how they differ.

Knowing yourself is empowering.

And it doesn’t need to be difficult or time-consuming.

Quizzes on the internet that we usually use as a distraction can actually be enlightening. It’s all about picking the right one to do.

Love Languages

Before you go, I’m single, what’s love language go to do with me, hear me out.

The Love Languages quiz is about learning what they call your “emotional communication preference”. In other words, how do you like to share how you feel. This works both ways, your preference will be both how you express your emotions to others and how you best receive the message of how someone else feels.

There are five languages:

1. Words of affirmations
2. Acts of service
3. Receiving gifts
4. Quality Time
5. Physical Touch

You might have one that dominates, you might have two. You’ll need to take the quiz to find out.

The quiz compromises of comparing 30 pairs of statements and picking which one is most true for you. So you can imagine how quick it is.

If you’re single, understanding how you give and receive love and that others receive love is pretty powerful when navigating the dating world. You can recognise when your date naturally fills that communication space. You can pick up on that your date always holds the door for you and realise he or she is likely to respond well to acts of service.

This isn’t being manipulative by the way. It’s about having an accessible framework for thinking about love and being able to communicate in a way that is most effective. If your date’s language is physical touch then you reach for their hand as you walk done the street. If your date’s language is quality time, then you don’t suggest a movie date where you can’t talk.

You begin to understand why certain things don’t work. If buying flowers didn’t quite elicit the response you expected, you now know that gifts aren’t a priority and you can redirect your energy elsewhere.

Once you’re beyond dating and into the thick of a relationship, the power of understanding love languages becomes amplified. Essentially if the need of being loved in line with their love language isn’t met then your partner will feel like something is missing in the relationship. Then the fights start. And you never get to the bottom of it because it’s always about something trivial. But the reality is your partner just wants to be complimented more often.

Even outside of dating, observing your friends and family to figure out what their love language is can be useful. Your Mum’s is acts of service so you weed her garden. Your Dad’s is quality time so you arrange a round of golf.

In all of these examples, no matter who the recipient is, it’s about communicating how you feel in the way they will respond to the most.

The Four Tendencies

Habits, habits, habits. We’re always talking about habits here.

What if I told you there’s a way to understand how you best form habits and what your individual challenges are?

Well, there is and it’s called The Four Tendencies, developed by Gretchen Rubin. There’s a whole book if you want to go all in on understanding this framework.

The Four Tendencies are about how you respond to expectations and as you would assume there are four of them.

1. Upholder – meets inner and outer expectations
2. Obliger – meets outer expectations
3. Questioner – meets inner expectations
4. Rebel – doesn’t readily meet expectations of any kind

In a nutshell, if you’re building habits and you’re an Upholder, you’re likely to just do it. Once you decide to do something, you’re on it. Obliger needs external accountability, without it they almost never build a habit. If you’re a Questioner, once you’ve justified the habit to yourself, then you’re golden. And if you’re a Rebel like me, then you value freedom above all else so habits feel restrictive. Bit of challenge.

That tiny synopsis gives you a really good idea of how useful Rubin’s framework is. Until I read her book, I could never understand why after planning out a day of things I wanted to do, I’d then get the burning desire to do anything but what was on my plan. It drove me up the wall, why couldn’t I follow any of the best productivity advice?

But now I understand and I work with myself. I leave a buffer in my day plans for me to choose what to do in the moment. I stopped trying to follow a diet or eating plan and simply told myself to eat whatever my body was telling me it wanted. So I no longer have an expectation to rebel against. I’ve given up on trying to follow a routine where I do the same things, like workout, on the same days each week. I cannot stand how suffocating that feels to me.

It is liberating to understand how I form habits and start to work with myself instead of forcing tactics on myself that I hated. No doubt, doing The Four Tendencies quiz will have a similar impact for you.

The Easy Way to Know Yourself Better

Both of these quizzes take less than fifteen minutes to complete but can provide insight that will last forever.

You can’t underestimate how often you will find situations to apply the learning in. Whether it’s to yourself in recognising that the real reason you’re annoyed at your partner is you need them to communicate more in your love language. Or if it’s a coaching client that needs above and beyond levels of justification to get on board with the changes you’re suggesting.

As soon as you learn these frameworks, you’ll start to see them everywhere. Every time you apply them you’ll discover more and the learning grows.

Tell me, what online personality quizzes do you think are worth doing?