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3 Questions to Help You Figure Out Who You Are
Self-knowledge is key to personalized self-improvement.
Posted February 5, 2025 Reviewed by Lybi Ma
We need to understand our processes to improve them.
Answer the following three questions to understand your thinking habits and how you've become the you of today.
1. Assume your top five strengths reflect the five skills you have practiced the most. Based on this, what are your top five strengths?
What we practice becomes our strengths, and then our strengths become our tools.
Think of a physical toolbox. Each time you use a tool, you put it back at the top of the toolbox, and it becomes easiest to reach for it again. Your strengths become the tools you reach for first when you approach any problem.
Start from the premise that your top strengths have been determined by what "skills" you have practiced the most throughout your life, for better or worse.
Answer this question literally and allow some irreverence. Examples: ruminating, worrying, spreadsheets, self-discipline, following rules.
Irreverence is a tool used in psychotherapy that helps people become open to insights. Your insights from this question might be uncomfortable at first, but they're also powerful and helpful.
Don't dump on yourself by only listing bad habits you've practiced. Include a mixture. Include some skills you're proud of having practiced and some facepalms.
2. What is the mindset espoused in each of the five podcasts you listen to most? Sum up each in one sentence.
If you don't listen to podcasts, substitute in another single channel of infotainment, such as blogs you read, YouTube channels you watch, or experts you follow on Twitter.
You can use an AI tool to help you succinctly identify the mindset espoused. If you're going with podcasts, feed it a list of the top five podcasts you listen to, and ask it to summarize the mindset exemplified in each in one sentence only.
If the AI tool doesn't do a good job of encapsulating the mindset, hit regenerate to get a new answer. Or, you can vary the wording. For example, ask it instead to encapsulate the worldview or ethos in one sentence. You can even try each of these variations.
Of course, you can do this cognitive work yourself too. However, getting another perspective can be interesting and give a different insight.
What does this analysis reveal about you? It should help you better understand your sources of mental strength and the types of mental strength you value most. We shape our algorithm and then our algorithm shapes us.
The mindsets you expose yourself to directly influence your problem-solving approaches, which brings us to our last question.
3. What approach did you take to the last five problems you solved or attempted to solve?
Behavioral data, what you actually did, is one of the best types of data. A guided discovery session with an AI tool may help. Ask it to help you identify the last five problems you attempted to solve, and the approaches you took.
By problems, I'm including any task you didn't already know how to do.
Here's a sample prompt you can use with ChatGPT, Claude, or another tool:
"Engage me in a guided discovery session. Ask me 15 questions, one at a time. Do not overwhelm me. Help me identify the last five problems I have attempted to solve and the methods I took. For example: seeking information, asking for help, letting my subconscious work on it, breaking it down into sub-problems, shifting my mindset, generating several ideas, thinking about the problem from different angles, comparing it to problems I've solved in the past, using mental models. At the end of the 15 questions, analyze my answers to tell me things I might not have realized about myself. Include three strengths and one or two things I could work on. Don't ask more than three questions about any one of the five problems we will discuss. We can cover all five of my most recent problems within 15 questions."
You can directly paste the above prompt to get started.
Tips:
- Via the process of answering the 15 questions, you'll likely gain insights of your own that go far beyond those the AI generates.
- If the AI tool goes in a direction that's not helpful, you'll need to redirect it. You may need to redirect its questioning or tell it why its analysis wasn't accurate if that was the case. When I tried this, I needed to redirect its questioning a few times, but the analysis was good. Your mileage may vary! What I got from this process was realizing my strategies were much more varied than I recognized.
Building the You of Tomorrow
By asking the right questions—about your strengths, the mindsets you expose yourself to, and the methods you use to solve problems—you create a clear picture of your thought habits and emotional landscape. These insights don’t just illuminate the ways you’ve developed your skills and decisions—they also offer a chance to refine and shape them.
Facebook image: Perfect Wave/Shutterstock
