How many times have you looked in the mirror or at pictures and wanted to be better or different? How strongly do you long to be something or someone else? These are powerful yearnings that have personal, interpersonal, and collective significance via the suffering they can cause. Although that suffering may have a purpose – it can move people towards something positive or aim for goals – I’d like to invite a reframe. Rather than making change about self improvement, what if it was about self knowing. The move from self improvement to self knowledge is a move towards curiosity, which seems to be the doorway to self compassion. Given all the self improvement projects I see happening collectively, addressing this shift is top of mind as a real pathway to the elusive self compassion, which is perhaps everyone’s true longing. 

For the sake of brevity, I’d like to focus on collective conditioning in this post because I find it the most pervasive and powerful in the age of social media. Ray Bradbury, one of my favorite writers, shared the following in his book Zen in the Art of Writing, “Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.” This rings true when there is equal amounts of negative and positive social conditioning as it relates who people should be and how they should act, which none of us can escape as social animals. To be human is to be in relation to others through cultural values and images. 

With so many cultural values and images coming people’s way, it can be challenging to know themselves. This is especially true when a person has over-identified in their beliefs and narratives. The mind wants to make sense of these values and images (that’s its job), bringing them into a person’s awareness over and over. Yet they do not originate with that person. These are external forces, and while most of us want to adhire so we can belong (a basic human need), they can deprive self knowing and a deep, inner relationship with ourselves. 

Consider all the articles and cultural messages that push advice on how to be more beautiful, more productive, more successful, more in love, more…the list goes on. Or think of all the images that suggest standards of beauty, performance, wealth or experience. There is an underlying theme that keeps echoing through almost every medium people encounter on the regular – you are not good enough and you must change to meet standards that may not even be your own. This is the righteous path of self-improvement, which according to different studies, is worth anywhere between $9.6 billion and $11 billion USD. That’s a big market aimed at making people feel unworthy and anxious. I won’t go into why it’s so beneficial to make people feel bad about themselves—that’s a topic better handled by those who research culture crafting—but it’s important to note this collective striving, which seems to create collective suffering.

In the spirit of addressing this suffering and inviting an alternative to self improvement, I’d like to share some pathways to self knowing that I’ve found personally and professionally helpful:

• Curiosity: I’ve already mentioned the power of curiosity but what does being curious mean in day-to-day life? As a state that can be generated somatically as well as cognitively, curiosity has an expansive and soft quality. It can lead to asking questions that promote self discovery in the face of challenge. It is about asking the what, how, and who of our experience, which can help generate that expansive state. From here, it is much easier to be kind to ourselves and others. 
• Verbs vs. Nouns: Although people are considered nouns and people are encouraged to identify as a constant self (which is psychologically helpful, don’t get me wrong), it can be valuable to notice how you change and flux depending on the situation or who you are with. Taking an interest in your verbness can invite more self knowing while moving attention away from the “shoulds” of external images.  
• Internal Images: Much of this post has pointed out the external images that impact people, but humans also have internal images that come from our bodies. Dreams are one way to access these images, but there are many other practices that can support a person in getting to know their internal images, which can point towards more satisfaction. Living through these internal images, you can develop more kindness and richness that belongs to you. 

These pathways are just a few suggestions for how to move from self improving to self knowing. Making this move is a form of remembering or growing into ourselves and what’s possible. Rather than working towards ideals of perfection curated by external images, I have found that it is far more gratifying to work towards building a deeper relationship with yourself. From that relationship life takes on new dimensions of richness, which ironically might satisfy those deep longings that were at the center of the self improving in the first place.