Who Am I? (Psychological Exercises to Develop Self-understanding)

One of the trickiest tasks we ever face is that of working out who we really are. If we’re asked directly to describe ourselves, our minds tend to go blank. We can’t just sum ourselves up. We need prompts and suggestions and more detailed enquiries that help tease out and organize our picture of ourselves.

This guided journal is designed to help us create a psychological portrait of ourselves with the use of some far more unusual, oblique, entertaining, and playful prompts. The questions are designed to help us cumulatively appreciate how rich our identities are and how complicated, beautiful, and sometimes painful our experiences have been.

If self-knowledge is central to a wise and fulfilled life, it is because it teaches us which of our many—often contradictory—feelings and plans we might trust, in order that we can be a little more skeptical around our first impulses and less puzzled by the ebb and flow of our moods. We can understand where some of our feelings have come from and what might be driving our convictions and our longings.