There is an entire industry built around helping us become better versions of ourselves. Be more disciplined. More productive. More confident. More successful. Wake earlier. Exercise more. Think positively. Set better boundaries. Build better habits. Find your purpose.

None of those things are necessarily bad. But I think we’ve got the order wrong.

We keep trying to improve ourselves before we’ve taken the time to understand ourselves.

For years, I did exactly that. If something in my life didn’t feel right, my instinct was to work on it. Fix it. Learn something. Read another book. Set another goal. Make another change. I became very good at doing. What I wasn’t very good at was stopping long enough to understand the person doing all of it.

Because beneath our habits, behaviours and choices is a human being who has been shaped by an entire lifetime.

From the moment we enter the world, we begin learning how to exist within it. We learn what gets approval and what doesn’t. What makes us feel safe. What keeps the peace. What earns praise. What disappoints people. What we should strive for. What success looks like. What kind of person we need to be to belong.

Most of this happens long before we have the awareness to question any of it. And so we adapt. The capable one becomes more capable. The peacekeeper learns not to make a fuss. The achiever learns that doing well feels a lot like being worthy. The person who doesn’t want to disappoint anyone becomes very good at saying yes.

None of this means there is something wrong with us. It means there is a reason we are the way we are.

That distinction changed so much for me.

Instead of immediately asking, How do I change this about myself?, I became much more interested in asking, Why does this make sense for me?

Why do I automatically say yes when I want to say no? Why do I feel guilty when I rest? Why can I make difficult decisions at work but second-guess myself in my own life? Why do I keep achieving things I thought would make me happy, only to find myself wondering what’s next? Why can my life look perfectly good from the outside and still not quite feel like mine?

When we approach ourselves with curiosity instead of correction, something shifts. We begin to see that many of the things we’ve spent years trying to fix aren’t flaws at all. They’re patterns, adaptations and beliefs. Ways of operating that once made perfect sense, but may no longer fit the person we are or the life we want to live now.

And once you can see them, you have a choice.

That’s why I believe self-understanding has to come before self-improvement.

You can spend years trying to become more confident without understanding why you stopped trusting yourself. You can practise boundaries without understanding why disappointing someone feels so uncomfortable. You can chase fulfilment without ever stopping to ask what fulfilment actually means to you. You can build an extraordinary life according to every external measure and still feel strangely disconnected from the person living it.

And I think this matters even more now.

We are living in a world that is becoming increasingly good at telling us what to do. Algorithms predict what we’ll like. Technology removes friction. AI can answer our questions, organise our lives, generate ideas and make us more efficient than we have ever been.

There are enormous benefits to that. I’m not interested in fighting technology or pretending we can somehow go backwards.

But I do think the more the outside world can think, suggest and decide for us, the more important it becomes to know what is coming from you.

What you value. What you feel. What you need. What you believe. What feels right and what doesn’t. What you actually want your one life to feel like.

Because if you don’t know those things, it becomes incredibly easy to keep following what is being handed to you. Another goal. Another expectation. Another version of success. Another thing you should be doing, buying, achieving or becoming.

Maybe the next version of you doesn’t need to be better.

Maybe you don’t need another strategy for becoming someone else.

Maybe you need to understand the person who is already here.

Because perhaps real change doesn’t begin with asking, What do I need to fix?

It begins with asking:

What do I need to understand?

Until next week,

Michelle​
​Simplifying Being Human.

P.S. My book, Being Human in a Robotic World: Why Our Humanness Matters More Than Ever, is coming September 30. Pre-order your copy here. ​