Introspection

This is going to be a very important post for me as I believe that introspection is the single most important character trait one can possess. Introspection builds the foundation for how you can engineer the rest of the traits you choose to acquire.

It is extremely popular for people to watch the actions of others and make "educated" guesses about those people's intentions. Many people, most in fact, pay little or no mind to their own intentions. Several that I have personally spoken to claim that their feelings seem uncontrollable to them. Fixing this is where introspection comes in. Introspection is the ability to observe and analyze your wants and actions.

Without introspection you cannot grow. I do not mean to say that you cannot change. Anyone can do that. Without introspection, however, you will not be able to change for the better consistently. This is because without introspection you won't know if your changes were for better or for worse and it's more difficult to engineer the changes intentionally. Your changes will usually be random and meaningless. After one change you may say to yourself, "Man, life is going really great right now." Then, after another, everything will be terrible again and you won't even know why.

The best way to start practicing introspection is internal dialogue or "talking to yourself". Talking to yourself ends up on the butt-end of a lot of bad jokes. Worse than talking to yourself is arguing with yourself and further in the pit of self worthlessness is losing an argument with yourself. Not only are those three perceived to be on the wrong end of the good/bad scale, but they're also in the wrong order.

Let's think about what it means to lose an argument with yourself. First, to even have a conversation with yourself means that you acknowledge that you contain multiple parts. Have you ever had part of you that wanted to steal a cookie, but another part of you told you it was wrong? How about one part of you liking another boy or girl, but another that stopped you from telling him or her? These "parts" are some of the different pieces that make up you as a person.

If you are arguing with yourself, it means that two of these pieces have a differing opinion about something. In psychology this is referred to as "cognitive dissonance" and it's a terrible thing to leave unchecked. An internal argument means that the problem has been recognized. This is the first step to fixing it.

If you "lose" said argument, then one of those pieces has learned that it was wrong. If you've been following my logic you should realize that this is a huge success. This is the first step towards positive change. In this situation, it might also mean that the other part of you may know what is right. So, now you know how to change yourself to become better.

That's the first benefit of introspection: Controlled change.

The second part is actually the trickiest: Determining if the change was actually an improvement. It doesn't really matter how confident you are when you make the change. There's is always the potential for a missed detail. Figuring out if the change works or not actually requires a mix of introspection (to make sure you're doing things correctly) and extropection (to make sure you're doing the correct things). Most people are, coincidentally, very poor at extrospection, as well. That, however, is more of a social topic, so we'll discuss that later.

For now, somebody wants to talk to you.