The Power of Understanding Yourself

Your Essence

Even a fine-tuned sense of self-awareness about your patterns of behavior may not enable you to understand why you behave certain ways, but metacognition can help. This is the process of analyzing the reasons for your behaviors – a way of “thinking about thinking.” It’s a deep dive into the experiences that inform your actions to explain how they boost or hinder you in reaching your full potential. Engaging in metacognition enables you to develop a deeper understanding of what makes you different and special and of what holds you back. For an analogy, think of wine. In addition to studying a wine’s hue, aroma and taste, connoisseurs study its terroir – the extent to which the vineyard environment of the grapes influences the wine.

Like wine, your environment shapes your development. When you are an infant, your mind is a blank slate. What you see, hear, learn and do in your formative years molds your “cognitive schemas” – the “policies and procedures” that rule your thinking. Metacognition shows you what makes you unique by helping you understand the “essence ...