A Mindful Perspective
Welcome to my podcast! I'm Nick Levesque, and I'm on a mission to help you navigate life's challenges with a mindful perspective. Join me every week as I dive deep into the realms of mindset, spirituality, and personal growth. Drawing from my own experiences, I want to provide you with tools, strategies, insights, and inspiring stories that will help you go from where you are now, to where you want to be.
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A Mindful Perspective
How to Truly Know Yourself (The Key to Self-Discovery)
Have you ever felt like you don’t fully understand yourself? You know your favorite foods and TV shows, but what about your values, fears, and deeper desires? The truth is, many of us go through life without truly knowing who we are—and that’s exactly what holds us back from real confidence, clarity, and fulfillment.
In this video, I’ll walk you through:
✅ Why most people don’t actually know themselves
✅ How to uncover your real values, beliefs, and desires
✅ Practical steps to build self-awareness and deepen your connection with yourself
✅ Why self-discovery changes everything (relationships, decisions, and happiness!)
Timestamps:
00:00 – How Well do You Know Yourself?
04:16 – Practical Ways to Start Knowing Yourself
If this video resonates, drop a comment below: What's one thing you've learned about yourself recently? Let’s build a deeper connection with ourselves together.
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👉 https://app.practice.do/me/nickspiritualcoaching/book/coaching-discovery-call?showFirstStep=false
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Hello everyone and welcome to A Mindful Perspective. I'm your host, nick Levesque, certified Spiritual Life Coach, and I'm here to share insights into my journey of mindfulness and self-discovery. Each week, we'll explore mindset, spirituality and personal growth to help you navigate life's challenges with practical strategies and inspiring stories. Let's dive in. How well do you actually know yourself? Because a lot of us spend so much time learning about other people, right? Whether that be, for example, our family members, our co-workers, our friends, our partners, our current spouse, partner, whatever it may be right, and think about a time, for example, when you went on a first date with someone okay, Maybe your current partner today. Think about how curious you were about them and how genuinely you wanted to get to know them. You were so interested in learning more about them, right? But what if we could reciprocate the time and that energy and that curiosity onto ourselves? This is really what I want to talk about in today's video is really how to get to know yourself a little better, and I want to share a few tips that I've personally integrated into my own journey of getting to know myself and building that relationship with myself, and I wanted to start this off with a quote from Jordan Peterson. That really stuck with me and what he said was one of the first ways to come to know yourself is to understand that you don't. And I think this is a really, really powerful quote because really to me, it kind of made me take a step back and really made me question, like, okay, how well do I know myself? Right, I know myself, I know who I am, but truly do I know myself much more at a deeper level, right, and it's really when I started to reassess, kind of like, what my strengths are, what my weaknesses were, what are my core values? Right, what are my beliefs about myself, about the world, all these different things, and I think these change over time as we kind of grow on our journey. Right, and this is the thing the journey of self-development and self-discovery is a lifelong journey. You don't get to know yourself just overnight, right, and building that relationship with yourself takes time, just like any other relationship that you have in your life.
Speaker 1:But I think one of the key questions or key things that we need to apply in our life when we get to know ourselves is to approach ourselves with curiosity. Right, I talk about this a lot, but really curiosity, I think is the main thing, because here's the thing when you start to get to know yourself, you need to really be open to everything about yourself, right? Yes, it's important to understand your core values and you know what do you like to do, what don't you like to do, all these different things. But it's also taking a look at those parts of yourself that may have been suppressed or repressed, the traumas, all these different things, right? So it's really about kind of you know, having this 360 degree view of your life and being like okay, right, I know myself here, I know myself there. What don't I know about myself? What do I need to explore? As an example, right, it's just to say that when you apply curiosity and compassion to your journey of self-discovery, I think it becomes a little bit easier, because then, instead of attacking yourself when you're finding new things, you start to look at it again with just curiosity and being like, okay, why am I thinking this way? Right?
Speaker 1:Where do these beliefs come from? Are these beliefs even my own? Right? A lot of the beliefs that we hold, for example, aren't even our own. They could be introjected beliefs from our parents. As an example, right? So, hypothetical scenario maybe you grew up in an environment where your father was always saying things like men don't cry, men need to be, you know, tough, all these different things. Men don't show emotion. So maybe, as a man in your 40s now, you're starting to reevaluate those beliefs and you're like, holy, like what's going on here, right, like this is something I'm noticing about myself now.
Speaker 1:That is probably a belief that was passed down from the family environment that I grew up in, right, so these types of things also, sometimes even the inner critic that we have, right, that harsh inner voice that we have, oftentimes isn't even our own, but it's shaped through our childhood environment, right so, in the family dynamic that we grew up in and all these different factors that come into play. But what I'm trying to say is, like, oftentimes we attack ourselves, but once we can start creating distance from that voice and approaching it with curiosity, right, and being like why do I speak myself this way? Right, like what is going on here? What is the purpose of me attacking myself all this time, all these different things, right, and just again applying that sense of curiosity, I think really, for me personally, is what really changed my life, because it made me understand that some of the things that I was holding on to, the beliefs, the stories, all these different things weren't even my own. And then I had the choice I could actually choose to rewrite my own story, right, to rewrite my narrative and be like, okay, these are the things that I want to believe now, these are the things that I personally believe. Now, right, take everyone else out of the equation. What is that you believe, right? What are your beliefs about yourself, about the world, and so many different factors, right? So this is really why I think it's so, so, so important. But, again, this work isn't always easy, because it's not only looking at the fun stuff, it's also looking at the hard stuff as well, right? So, which I think is very important.
Speaker 1:The second thing that I want to share is to spend more time alone, spend more time by yourself. I think this is such a good way to really develop that relationship with yourself and also get to know yourself a lot better. And when I'm talking about spending time with yourself, I'm not talking about total isolation here, right? Obviously, we are creatures of. You know, we're tribe animals. We need to be part of a tribe. That's completely fine, but I also think learning to, you know, but be in solitude a bit more and being by ourselves, I think, is such a powerful thing, right, and whatever. However, you want to do that and experience that for you, that's completely fine.
Speaker 1:Just to give you an example like, I, have a few friends that love to solo travel, right, so they will. You know, they will pick a spot for themselves that they've wanted to go to. The solo travel thing from all of them is really that, hey, this is one of the best ways to get to know yourself. It's also a way to do some inner work, self-exploration. You meet new people, but you also go where you want to go. You're doing something for yourself and I think what better way to get to know yourself and to build that relationship with yourself than to go somewhere in the world where you've always wanted to, right, you're generally doing that for yourself, right?
Speaker 1:So solo travel could be something. It could be something like journaling, for example, where maybe you decide, hey, I want to dedicate some more time to journaling, to work through a few things. Maybe you've got specific prompts for yourself, like what's working, what's not working in my life, where do I want to go in five years? All these different things or you just let it free flow. Right? There's no right or wrong way to journal, in my personal opinion. Right, it's about what comes through on the paper. Okay, so these are different ways that you can definitely get to know yourself. So many, there's so many different ways. I can't list them all here. Okay, but also think about things that you haven't done, that you'd like to do, that you'd like to try.
Speaker 1:I think one of the greatest ways to get to know ourselves is to try different things in life, and I know that sounds so simple, but like, think about all the things that you haven't had time for or that you haven't done yet, because of whatever reason. It may be right, why don't you take time to try those things, even if no one wants to join you and I think this is something I've noticed in myself personally and other people is, a lot of times we're not going to do something because no one's accompanying us, right? So maybe we have plans, okay, maybe we want to do something like going axe throwing as an example, right? Just that's what we want to be doing. We want to go axe throwing or horseback riding or something of the sort. Right, let's stick with horseback riding for a moment. So we want to go horseback riding, we invite a friend, okay, and then all of a sudden they cancel last minute and they're like, okay, well, we'll go sometime else, right, but you really wanted to do it. You've never done it. You really wanted to try it and you don't go, it's okay. But like, why aren't you going? Even though they're not going, that's completely fine.
Speaker 1:Go alone, get out of your comfort zone. I know sometimes doing stuff alone can be a little weird, a little awkward, but do something alone. You don't always need to have someone there, right? Again, like we talked about earlier, take yourself out on dates, right, and I think for me, this is something that I've really enjoyed doing. Either it's just going to the movies by myself, going for coffee by myself, doing something that I've wanted to do. Even sometimes, if someone says no, it's like you know what I'm going to go myself, right, and I think these are really good ways to get to know yourself and, again, to build that relationship with yourself. So just take a moment to think about that. Like, what could I do to get to know myself a little better?
Speaker 1:The third thing I want to share is to start listening to your intuition a little more. I think this is so, so, so important, because oftentimes I think what can happen if I'm speaking for myself personally here, for many years, whenever I had a decision to make or something I wanted to do, as an example and I wasn't sure I would always tune out externally I would be asking multiple opinions, multiple perspectives from different people before even checking in with myself and seeing what I wanted, right? So you know, I think I was more worried about what other people thought and their own approval of something that didn't really matter to them, right, because the truth is it only mattered to me and really what I wanted and what was best for me, right? So I think, personally, what I've started doing is really just trusting that, trusting myself, trusting my intuition to guide me when I'm a bit at a crossroads about something, right, and sometimes for me personally, the way I started developing this was even with the smaller things, right Now, of course, I want to make something very clear Obviously, if we've got a partner or we're making big life decisions like moving somewhere, know, maybe we're moving to different countries, maybe we're buying a house, all these different things, and, yes, sometimes having a professional opinion is fine.
Speaker 1:But even sometimes, in the little things that we're doing, I think it's so important to just tune into ourselves and really, um, see what, what comes up for us, right? So, maybe I don't know, maybe you want to go to the movies and you've got two movies and you're not sure what to watch. As an example, right, you're like, oh, like, oh well, I'll ask this person, I'll ask that person, all these different things, and they, they give you multiple perspectives and then now you're confused. Right, very simple explanation here. But what I would like to do here is just tune into myself, right, and just tune into, okay, what is it that I want to be doing, right? What is it that I want to be doing right now? What feels right for me?
Speaker 1:Okay, let's say, as an example, you, maybe you're debating on moving to two, two countries, okay, country number one, country number two, doesn't matter where, and you're, you've asked a few opinions, but you're still not sure, right, but you tune into yourself, you tune into your body for a moment and you just bring that up, right, and then maybe you, you, you bring them up individually. You bring one country up, country number one, and Are you feeling, maybe jittery butterflies in your stomach in a good way. Maybe unconsciously you start to smile a little bit because you're like, hmm, oh, okay, then you tune into that Wow, that was a good experience there. And then, as an example, you bring up country number two and you start tuning into that for a moment, right, and you let your body speak for you. Maybe there's a lot of uncertainty, maybe all of a sudden you start to get really stressed, maybe, whatever, right, then you tune into that a little more and then you can, obviously, you know, you can dissect a little bit why that is.
Speaker 1:But oftentimes, right, I think our body knows what's best for us, right? I truly believe that our body knows and I truly believe that our intuition, like I said, is really kind of like this whisper of the soul. And if we tune into that and truly tune into what it is that I want, right, maybe you've, you've thought about these things and it's like, okay, what is it that I truly want? Right, and maybe you're like you know what, if I really, you know if I, if I tune into that really deeply, I really think that country number one is really where I want to be going. Right, and obviously, maybe you're not going to make a decision right then and there, but you're just practicing tuning into yourself and listening to yourself a bit more.
Speaker 1:So that's really what I want to say about trusting your intuition in the smaller things. Maybe you're deciding you want to dye your hair and you're not sure what color. Is an example, right, maybe you want to go, I don't know, maybe you want to go a blonde or maybe you want to go brunette, as an example, it doesn't matter, right? And then instead of there's nothing wrong with opinions, but maybe just tune into yourself before asking what everyone else wants, just tune in with yourself first. What is it that I want? What feels right to me in my body? What comes up? What feels right to me? So the third thing that I want to share is to truly just start listening to your intuition. The last thing that I want to share is to please consider working with a mentor, a therapist or a coach.
Speaker 1:I think this is so important in anyone's journey of self-discovery Because obviously, like I said earlier, yes, we learn about our values, our strengths, all these different things, but also we need to have the radically honest conversation with ourselves. We need to look at the parts of ourselves that maybe we don't want to face. We need to open the closet and see what skeletons that we've been just kind of throwing into that closet and the things that we haven't wanted to face. We need to understand and process as well the things that we may not have had the capacity to process at a certain time in our lives, right? So I think what I'm saying is, as you're diving into this journey of self-discovery, there's a lot of things that can come up that you may not even have been aware. That would come up right, and this is something I've seen with clients as well.
Speaker 1:So that's why I think having someone being able to reflect ideas on and help you understand stuff and process stuff and also just honestly just holds a safe container for you, right, make you feel seen, safe and understood I think is one of the best things you can do in terms of accelerating your growth into your own journey of self-discovery, right? So that's the last thing that I wanted to share, and I hope that, if you've been considering it as an example, you take that step, because it's something I've done personally. I hope that, if you've been considering it as an example, you take that step because it's something I've done personally and it's a profoundly life changing circumstance when you actually work with someone that generally cares about you. So, that being said, that's all I've got for you guys on today's episode. If you did like the episode, please feel free to leave a comment or review, share it. It really helps bring awareness to what I'm trying to do, which is really kind of, you know, spread this podcast on a broader scale to really help people just navigate everyday life challenges. So, again, with that being said, I hope you have a good week and I will catch you guys next week.
Speaker 1:Outro Music.
