Understanding yourself is knowing your interests, values, beliefs, strengths and limitations. When you are young, often you explore many different interests. As you get older, you still discover new interests, but you have a better understanding of what you might enjoy. The same thing happens with values. Over time, you learn what is most important to you. Would you drop everything for your family? Or is your career what you value most? Understanding yourself is also knowing what you believe in. Finally, everyone has strengths and weaknesses. Someone who understands themself well generally knows – I am atheletic. I am very capable of caring for people – so for instance, perhaps I would be a good person to care for an aging relative.
Taking inventory of your interests, strengths and weaknesses would be helpful in your career. First, are you in the right career? Does it match what you enjoy and value? For some people, their personal life is what is important and a career is only to pay the bills. That is fine, as long as your personal life then reflects your true passions. If someone really values helping people and that is their strength, then I would hope they are in that line of work. If not, they could consider changing their career.
Also, for a younger person with less understanding of themself, they could take classes and training opportunities to explore their interests and find out what they are good at. Or, they could interview or shadow professionals in different career fields.
My advice is – once you find your passion, try doing an internship in that career field. I knew about my interest in the environment in middle school and high school. In college, I did an unpaid internship in forestry, and that gave me the leverage I needed to ultimately get the job I have now.
Another piece of advice is that once you find your ideal career field, stick with it. Sometimes it is easy to be tempted by money. I could change to other careers that paid better, but would I be happy? Often times if you stick with what you like, the money will follow too. Even if not, what is the price of happiness?
Third, once you are in your desired career field (and same thing goes for personal interests), eventually I believe it is your duty to help and mentor younger people.
This RichardStep Marketing survey was designed to get a better understanding of what really gets under the skin of those folks out there dealing with understanding yourself. Read over the awesome answers below and see how you can tailor your business to address the frustrations of the people most relevant to your business niche market. Want more? Read the 125 other topics in the ‘Frustrations’ survey category by clicking here.
The following list are uncut and raw responses of the things this group found most frustrating in their daily lives.
Understanding Yourself
- Repeat myself or explain something more than 3 times. This frustrates me because it is annoying to have to repeat one’s self so many times. It makes me feel ignored or it makes me feel like a bad communicator.
- Getting myself motivated to work on things I enjoy in an efficient and timely manner
- Keeping myself motivated to do work. This is frustrating because I want to get it done but I am afraid of getting it wrong or going outside of my comfort zone.
- Committing myself to too many things and not having enough time to do them all well.
- Battle with myself about getting to work and to stop procrastinating. It’s frustrating because I know better yet the willpower necessary to get to it evades me… because I let it. Which is something part of me keeps trying to pretend isn’t MY fault.
- I had to explain myself for something I hadn’t done to the person who actually made the mistake.
- Do everything by myself. Nobody was there to help me. I had to cook, wash, study and do everything on my own despite being just 17
- I can not explore myself properly and for that salary is not also very high
- Last week I was disturbing myself trying to decide on going to the event or not going and I didn’t end up going and the world didn’t end lol
- I’ve had trouble motivating myself to write a paper for school. It was a small paper that shouldn’t take long to finish but I had lots of time so I didn’t get started on it right away like I wanted to.
- When some ask me something about myself its frustrating i don’t like explaining myself
- Trying to get self confidence in myself, I am still trying to achieve and it will be a big challenged to achieve it.
- I lack the self perseverance to push myself to have the skill speed and concentration that i need, and they wont fire me, no matter how hard i try, because are blood ties are to thick
- Cause nobody can help me I have to save myself . Life is a constant wheel of overworking to get to where you want to be but not knowing which way to go
- I got frustrated when i could not maintain myself or my feeling. i don’t like it when i cannot concentrate on things or my work.
- I expect as much from other people as I do myself- therefore I have a low-tolerance for people who don’t bring top performance to their job
- Trying to figure out what i’m going to do with myself that will not only support and benefit me, but others around me as well. I am at the moment truly lost in what it is I want to do.
- I am sure that i can do better but i am feeling myself not confident.
- I hate being late and it happened thi week I pride myself in being early.
- Not getting immediate feedback as to how I can improve myself.
- Wait for someone to do something I asked of them. DId it myself.
- The most frustrating thing was getting yelled for defending myself. It was frustrating because it was unfair.
- Trying to find a solution with a head strong person I found myself at a loss but not a failure
- Adapt to a workload that I have made impossible to accomplish myself.
- Not able to connect with people efficiently,not able to express myself properly
- Not knowing what am I good at and not being able to find it out myself.
- The most frustrating thing I have encountered in the past week is myself. I am a work in progress.
- At work today 80% of the work i did was just repeating the work that myself and others had already done. This was frustrating because it would have been far more efficient to have allowed us the details of the previous review.
- Not been able to follow my routine, as am not doing what I mentally see myself doing
- The most frustrating thing ive done is figure out what I want to do with myself. I don’t have the will to change, but I want to.
- I believe what is most frustrating is that sometimes I can be too hard on myself. I always set high expectations, and when I feel I do not uphold those expectations, I become disappointed.
- Its frustrating becuz it feels like I am made for a higher expectation ffor myself
- I am bored with my work. I don’t have that excited feeling and have to force myself to get things done. My supervisor does not help because he is not a good leader, is hardly around, and does not seem to do anything.
- One of the most frustrating thing I have had to deal with is school. I stress myself out about assignments that do not need stressing over.
- Making decisions because i am very indecisive which makes me quite frustrated at myself.
- Trying to write my life story, it’s frustrating because i don’t like to talk about myself.
- I don’t know if I know what I want in life or where my life is going. I need to find myself but don’t know how.
- Uh… I have no idea… I took a quiz… Does that count? Probably not, I’m unsure of myself… That probably counts.
- Sticking to my diet with the hope of losing a big deal of weight, but then when i put myself on scale, only lost 2 pounds.
- I don’t know, these past couple days have been pretty good actually. I’m frustrated some with myself because I keep procrastinating and it’s going to ruin me, but I can’t seem to get frustrated enough to make myself actually do the work.
- Personal appraisal at work as I’m not a particularly confident person and I hate talking about myself.
- It seems I am quite useless. I know I should study hard for the core subjects but I can’t make myself to take action to those that I am not interested. Plus, there are just to much temptation surrounding me :(
- Facing the fact that I suck at everything and it’s so frustrating because it makes me want to kill myself.
- I done very little thats quite frustrating. I am unemployed and am finding it very hard to motivate myself.
- My mom and dad having a divorce, and not know whats going to happen next, being home alone and being by myself most of the time for the past months.
- I’ve had to deal with a lot of dumb people. It was frustrating because I don’t understand why I must explain myself to someone who should be more knowledgeable than they are. Their ignorance irks me.
- Procrastinating on work I need to do. It is frustrating because I know I should but I just can’t seem to make myself get up and what needs doing at time I should get done
- I’ve been having to pack to move and it’s frustrating because I don’t know if anyone can cover my lease also I’ve been having to do it by myself.
- The most frustrating thing is one sided relationship. It happened at school. There’s another guy that is interested in her, but I was not upset and force myself to stop. However, whenever i see her, i feel stuffy in my chest and want to vomit and feel frustrated and anger.
- I am not so good at managing things. Now I have to leave my country to work abroad. So many things that need to be done. I hate when I have to deal it all by myself.
- I have so many choices which may be lead to better place but it take riks too. the making decision progress is difficul. but i analyzed the situation and aks myself what i really want to find the best path to go.
- I am trying to get admission to a MBA course but I find it extremely frustrating to explain the same to my mother for two reasons first I can’t convince my mother and secondly I’am myself not sure of it whether it suits me or otherwise.
- I am graduate and am performing duties as clerks, as i feel that my job nature is not to be well acknowledged to others having no powers and social importance. i want to know the exact path for further studies by which i can establish myself