Actively look for more
The only way to gain significantly greater awareness of your inward self is through looking. Life will offer you many opportunities to learn more about yourself, but it is rare when they rise above the din of the ever-available abundance of distractions that fill modern life. To discover more of what life has to teach you, you’ll have to become more perceptive to the clues life constantly provides.
More numerous valuable lessons are available above and beyond the few that present themselves to you. These can’t be learned through passive practice, but require active introspection. Introspection requires you to take action to prioritize it in spite of the daily demands of life. Prioritization of self-discovery will look different for each person, and will probably take different shapes depending on your phase of life, but will commonly feature some way of asking how you could be better, actively and honestly interrogating your life across daily, monthly, and longer time scales. You’ll have to find the time to pay more attention to your life, whether this is through taking advantage of incidental quiet moments to reflect, engaging in a specific routine by waking up earlier, going to bed later, or displacing some present activity. You’ll have to think more about what is going on within you and outside of you, reflecting regularly on recent events and looking forward to those to come.
Many people will claim that they don’t have the time or emotional energy to engage in introspection. These same people will spend orders of magnitude more time wallowing through the negative effects of their character deficiencies or ineffectively talking through them with others without ever getting to real change.1 Introspection is unavoidable for anyone who wants to become better, and it will take a lot less time and cause a lot less pain than the alternatives. It might even cost a lot less money. In fact, by sharpening your inner self, you will actually find yourself with more time and resources than you have now, because your efforts throughout the day will yield much greater progress and meaning.2
Footnotes
- 1. Perpetual therapy is one application of “ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.” (2 Timothy 3:7) ↩
- 2. Verily I say unto you, all among them who know their hearts are honest, and are broken, and their spirits contrite, and are willing to observe their covenants by sacrifice—yea, every sacrifice which I, the Lord, shall command—they are accepted of me. For I, the Lord, will cause them to bring forth as a very fruitful tree which is planted in a goodly land, by a pure stream, that yieldeth much precious fruit. (D&C 97:8-9) ↩