How do YOU See Yourself? And, Is It True?

This is about the most personally thought-provoking question anyone can ask: “How do I see myself?” How we see ourselves dictates how we approach life, our relationships, our jobs, our families, and comprehensively our lives--all to a very large extent. We reflect how we feel about ourselves directly onto our relationships with others; yes, it’s true!

And the answer to this above question--if it lines up with the reality, that is, other people’s perceptions--can be a key to inner happiness. In it we achieve congruence, and therefore peace.

The greatest disservice anyone can bring to themselves is to have an inaccurate self-image. Regarding our happiness, the alignment of our goals, dreams and desires with our actual abilities and capacities in achieving these should be obvious but it isn’t to most people. No wonder there’s so many disappointed people in life! Life never quite measures up to their lofty (but misaligned) self-images.

For instance, if someone sees themselves as a leader yet they don’t act like a leader i.e. they don’t realise much, if any, influence, they’ll naturally become disappointed--the results regarding the outcomes of life need to be reconciled and any significant gap can only produce dissonance. When the image we produce for ourselves is inconsistent with what we experience in life we’ll yearn for a better match.

Fact is fact and the cold hard facts of life are difficult to refute. Sooner or later the person who thinks they’re especially gifted for the leadership role, for example, will discover that perhaps, in reality, they’re not. Or at least they’re not as far along the development curve as they’d like to be. It’s a humbling truth.

The sooner denial is dealt with (as part of the normal process of grieving) the sooner the person can adapt their self-image to the manifest truth before them. Embracing the truth births a freeing foundation where both a stabilising peace and an emergent growth can commence simultaneously.

If an inaccurate self-image is a grievous missing-of-the-mark for one’s life, surely an accurate self-image (in humility) is a great blessing.

This person is always seeking feedback, and more than that, they actually listen because they’re fervently (even aggressively toward themselves) seeking to reach continual self-image alignment with other peoples’ perceptions i.e. the evident reality.

How we see ourselves is huge in life. The better the alignment we have regarding our natural desires at good compared with our actual delivery in real terms, the happier and more blessed we’ll actually be.