How writing helps self-knowledge
Why writing is important to my business success and your personal success through Self-knowledge.
This is Part 22 in a series of articles about the “self.”
WRITING 1: WORK AND YOU
My business is Self-Knowledge College.
My sister site is Dropout to Dean’s List (for at-risk students).
My work is helping people know themselves so they can make better decisions for themselves and find success on their own terms in their personal and professional lives.
It involves teaching people to know themselves and self-knowledge by itself isn’t going to attract many people on it’s own.
It’s not “sexy” enough.
It doesn’t provide an immediate, downloadable result for $100, much less $47.
OBJECTIONS TO OUR WORK
People have a lot of psychological, emotional and mental objections (most of them unconscious) to the idea of learning more about themselves.
- First, they think they already know themselves pretty well since they know what movies, sports and food they prefer.
- And they know what their most productive time of day is—whether, for example, they are early birds or light owls.
- Then, if they think of self-knowledge at all they often dismiss it because they think it is too difficult, takes too long to achieve, is only for gurus on mountains in diapers, (or geniuses or Phds).
- If those don’t apply they are fearful of learning about themselves because they think they won’t like everything they learn (they won’t—but they already s have suspicions at the very least about those things). They don’t realize, yet, that they will also learn so many more many wonderful things about themselves that they also don’t know. Yet!
HOW AM I DOING?
How am I doing? I’m not sure. I have written in many forms professionally with good results but writing to you is more difficult. There isn’t a lot of feedback so far so it’s difficult to know whether I’m reaching you or not. This is an attempt to explain why writing is important for my work of helping you and important for you in your work of knowing yourself better.
WRITING 2: THE BEST WAY TO REACH YOU
I was going to say that writing is not the only way to reach you—there are such things as podcast, videos, teleseminars, webinars, speaking from the stage etc., but all of them involve writing as a first step.
I have used none of these yet, except public speaking—although I intend to—but when I do, I’ll l have to write scripts, outlines, drafts of posts, courses or books, notes for Voice/over videos, scripts for on-camera videos etc.
All of them involve writing.
WRITING 3: OBSTACLES TO CONNECTION
Writing—words— are the best way to reach people because apparently something happened in their childhoods that prevented other methods of reaching them from taking effect.
What are some of these?
Poor parenting is one (often unavoidable given the problems of growing up having children (while still being children in many ways themselves) and having to take responsibility for raising them while struggling with their own education, work and lack of self-awareness.
A lack of someone, somehow, using words (and yes, non-verbal displays of affection) to reach the child and tell them of their many gifts, talents and abilities. This lack of words has led to people not appreciating themselves, not knowing themselves and therefore not loving themselves. That a part is crucial because if you don’t know yourself, you can’t love yourself—you can’t love what you don’t know.
Many people in North America are immigrants with little formal education in their own languages much less familiarity with English. Writing—basic, simple, transformative language— is necessary to reach these citizens.
WHAT I BELIEVE
My thesis is that if you don’t know yourself three bad things will happen to you in life:
- You will not be in the right line of work
- You will not be with the right person and
- You will not be happy
You won’t be happy because of the first two.
Fighting our way through life, as we all must, requires some education, either formal or informal and each of these require language. I need language—writing—to reach people on a deep level.
Our lives are filled with superficialities, meretricious attempts to distract us from our life purpose. And what if we can’t even define our purpose? You need language too, in order to probe yourself, rigorously investigate yourself to determine your authentic self. Since most of us are adults—even my at-risk students are adults—we need some way to be alerted to the notion that learning more about who we are and what we want in life is monumentally important.
Important, and while not easy—it does require work to get to know yourself—it is also amazingly interesting and rewarding. Who is more interesting, more important, not in an entitled way, but in a profound way—than you are?
Nobody.
But you can’t help anyone else unless and until you are secure and confident in yourself, in your emotional, psychological and spiritual self. Nor can you help yourself much because you don’t know who you are and what you want or what questions to ask and answer and what directions or paths to take.
WRITING 4: COMMUNICATION
Words, writing, in some form or another, is the best way to communicate, to reach people, to suggest, to seduce, to persuade to convince them they that they are important and worthy and can be better. We all want be better, to improve ourselves, but we put obstacles in our own way, we self-sabotage for myriad reasons.
Words—writing and reading— can eventually cut through the bafflegab of life.
When you know yourself you become a jet-propelled activist on behalf of yourself.
You can’t help but get better when you know yourself.
It is not possible to fail at self-knowledge if you stick with it.
It’ll take some time (and granted, you’ll never know everything about yourself because you are too complicated and life is too short) but it is easily possible to learn something new about yourself every day.
Take My Course On Self-Knowledge.
Join me in private or group work using my book, Who Are You and What Are You Doing Here? The way to know yourself and get what you want.
But first you must begin. And you begin by reading and listening to my words, through writing and speaking to you.
WRITING 5: SELF-KNOWLEDGE
Self-knowledge needs words to go deep in your job of self-detection.
It doesn’t matter if you are formally well educated or not—life has taught you many things.
I can teach you to harness those things, sort them out and prepare a system to follow things about you—or at least I can lead you to discover them.
One of the best ways to learn about yourself is to write about yourself.
That’s one of the things I will help you do if we work together.
If I say Self-Knowledge, that’s because that’s what the core, the essence of you is.
But we don’t constantly speak of Self-Knowledge in the abstract.
We use the right words to examine the presenting problems that are keeping you awake at night or causing you stress during the day.
I try to use simple, direct, clear language in my writing to examine things such as problems with time management, procrastination, goal-setting, the ability choose a college program or career path or even choosing a life partner.
We all know that one can be a life-destroyer.
IF YOU DON’T KNOW YOURSELF, YOU CAN’T LOVE YOURSELF
If you don’t know yourself you can’t love yourself because you can’t love something or somebody you don’t know.
It gets worse.
If you don’t love yourself, you can’t accept love from anyone else. Something inside you will subconsciously push that person away because you KNOW you are loveable.
This stuff doesn’t go away until and unless you address it. I have to use language, words, writing, to reach you and convince you things can be better in your personal and professional life.
You have to use them to be a gold detective of your inner self.
If you read and respond to my words.
The words, the writing, are important to me but they are also important to you if you need my assistance in gaining Self-Knowledge.
Or even if you don’t.
Join me at Self-Knowledge College.
For a FREE consultation, a strategy session, just email me at daleyfrank0@gmail.com
or call me at 647-205-5059.
There is no obligation whatsoever.
If you could do it yourself, you would have done it by now.
WRITING 6: YOU
Write to me as I do to you.
I’m with you in this.
-Frank
Previous posts:
Part 1: Do you find yourself or create it? And why bother anyway?
Part 2: Searching for yourself? Flying blind? Need a new search party?
Part 3: Be yourself. Everybody else is taken!
Part 4: Self discovery without viagra.
Part 5: Selfish vs Selfless (in women)
Part 6: Selfish. Always wrong?
Part 7: Selfishness, in the family.
Part 8: Singer Sarah Slean knows who she is
Part 9: Whatever you do, don’t be yourself!
Part 10: Self sinks soon. Save yourself!
Part 11: Be yourself, problem-solving
Part 12: Self-regard. Do you ever feel worthless?
Part 13: Be more successful. Know yourself
Part 14: Do self-help books work?
Part 15: Do what you love, but know yourself first
Part 16: Self-discovery: Destroying marriage?
Part 17: Self confidence & insecurity in dating
Part 18: Self-esteem comes with self-knowledge and self-love
Part 19: Time to see a therapist?