Get to know yourself better!

We've discussed recently the importance of increasing self awareness if you want to live a creative and fulfilling life. Here's a fun online tool that can help you get to know yourself by making you more aware of the kind of words you frequently use. Try it some time.

A great tool for many things actually, not least producing quite interesting and thought provoking images, Wordle (Wordle.net) is an application that converts any old bunch of words into a word cloud. Exactly as it sounds, the result is a cloud of words that represents your original text by enlarging the more frequently used words in your scribbles.

So I want to suggest a nice use for it, to help you to get to know yourself a bit better. If you write a lot of letters or emails, try taking a sample of a few different letters and enter them one at a time into the text box and press go to create your word cloud.

Then give a cursory look at the resulting image and just get an impression. What does it shout out to you? Is it inspiring? Or boring? Amusing?

Then have a closer look and see what words are larger because those are the words that you're using all the time. What does it tell you about yourself? Is it all me... me... me, or does the word you feature bold and large?

Are the large words positive and constructive, empowering you to act and create, or are they negative, justifying your inaction or just simply complaining?

If you write to clients or prospects and you don't have your material edited (actually even if you do), this is a great tool to help you consider the hidden meaning of what you wrote, or at least to get an idea of the impression it could make on the reader.

But more importantly, even if you don't write for a living but you'd like to become more aware of the way you think, speak and write, this can be very revealing too.

Here's a couple of word clouds I made from the text of Protekzia.com. The first one is from almost the entire site, while the second one is from the homepage and menu. Click on each image to see it full size. What do you think?

judaism jewish

What do you say?

Judaism for grown-ups
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