Learn more about personaldevelopment with this collection
How to overcome fear of rejection
How to embrace vulnerability
Why vulnerability is important for personal growth
Ask why.
Self-explaining can give voice to impulses of curiosity that may otherwise remain unexplored. It’s about asking ourselves the question, “Why?” Now, if we really know a topic, “why” questions are not that hard.
If I asked you a why question about the town that you grew up in, the answer would come pretty easily. It’s when we don’t know something that why questions become more difficult — and create a way to develop an area of expertise.
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Summarise.
Recall, for instance, a time when you read an article and then detailed its argument for a friend. That’s a form of summarizing — you’re more likely to have learnt and retained information from that article after you did it.
Or imagine that you recently wrote an email descr...
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Make connections.
One of the benefits of self-explaining is that it helps people see new links and associations. Seeing connections helps improve memory. When we’re explaining an idea to ourselves, we should try to look for relationships.
That’s one of the reasons that a tool like mnemonics works. We’re bett...
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Talk to yourself.
When we’re engaged in a conversation with ourselves, we typically ask ourselves questions along the lines of: “How will I know what I know? What do I find confusing? Do I really know this?”
Whether we hit the pause button while listening to a podcast or stop to reflect while readin...
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Other curated ideas on this topic:
"Why" is the wrong question to ask
When introspecting, it’s common for people to ask “why”. But the question ‘why’ sucks us into an unproductive, paralyzed state. It gets us into this victim mentality.” And no matter how confident we are about the answer to “why,” we’re almost always wrong.
Self-knowledge as self-interpretation
We see ourselves making a choice, & when asked why, we just try to make as much sense of it as possible when making an explanation. But we do this so quickly and with such ease that we think we actually know the answer when we answer why.
It can make
7. Ask Questions
The key, however, is to ask open-ended questions . That is, ask questions that don’t have a simple “yes or no” answer.
It’s the difference between Do you like living here? and What do you think about living here? Or the difference between Where did you...
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