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Introspection
Introspection is a critical thinking skill. It isn’t just the idea of daydreaming about yourself. It’s the idea that you point your intellectual and cognitive faculties at your inner self like shining a light to try and learn more about who you are, the things that you do well, the areas of deep potential, as well as those things that you’d rather not discuss, those areas that disappoint or are underdeveloped.
That’s what introspection is at its best, and it’s a tool for any human being to have a more rounded and an enjoyable journey through this world. It shrinks the size of the space inside of us, which is full of stuff that other people know about us, but we don’t know about us. Because if you’ve got great glaring gaps inside of you that other people can see, then you’re never going to be as successful as you want to be.
There is something assuring about knowing that whenever you meet someone else, they will not tell you something about you that you didn’t already know. As I sit on the beach this summer, as I hope to anyway, if someone comes up to me and says, “You’ve put on a lot of weight since you played in the NBA.” These are true facts, by the way, because now I eat cake again. It doesn’t shock me and horrify me because I know. I’m aware, and it’s not just an external view. I understand intrinsically that I’ve made a decision about it. People who don’t have that kind of critical, granular, and objective view of themselves internally, we are reinforced against the spiteful perspectives, the cruel observations of the world around us.
The “Soul in the Dark” Exercise
Would you recognize your soul in the dark? My mother asked me this question after I had told her, after playing basketball for forty-five minutes, that I was going to play in the NBA. She didn’t respond with anything that was logical to me. She looked at me as she lay in her bed and said, “Would you recognize your soul in the dark?” It was an incredibly frustrating moment for me where I felt my mother wasn’t listening. She went on to explain that when people want to do extraordinary things, things that are off the beaten track, things where the path perhaps had not yet been forged by others, you have to know yourself with real granularity.
And that’s what the “soul in the dark” exercise that she took me through was about. This idea that if you were in complete darkness, if you couldn’t describe yourself by your physical characteristics, by your relationships, by your qualifications, or your job. If you strip all that away, could you talk about yourself in a way that actually allowed someone else to see you as distinct from the person next to you? Could I do that in a way that helps people to see who I truly was? I’m six foot nine. I am Black. These things instantly mark me unique from most of the world around me. But if I couldn’t talk about that, could I describe myself, my desires for the future, my characteristics, my internal narratives and thoughts?
The “soul in the dark” exercise is a way for people to dig deeper than that, to ask themselves questions that are more resonant and important than what we do and how we look. But more than that, the exercise helps you understand you with greater clarity, and I think a bit more charity because sometimes self-assessment, self-awareness works in one of two ways. Either it is cruel and you can’t see any of the stuff that’s good about you, but you can see all of the stuff that’s bad and you make it so hyperbolic. Or it works the opposite way, and we’ve all met these people, these people for whom they can’t see any of the negative things about them at all. And all the stuff that they’re even remotely good at, they are excellent at. They are the best at it.
Proper introspection brings that into balance. It helps people to see the things perhaps that they’ve never noticed that were skills and qualities and embrace them and enjoy them, but also recognize the areas that they need to develop and work on, the areas that might have frightened them in the past, but see them in perspective.