If You Met Yourself, Would You Like Yourself?

An important thing you should know is the power of perspective, there is a way you see yourself which is completely different from the way others see you. Whether it's your way of communicating, your actions, tone and demeanor, they all play a role in what others think of you.

We often make an abstraction of our demeanor and tone because we can’t listen to ourselves like others can. We also instantly have a justification for our actions, which isn’t the case for others.

Finally, our communication has a backstory that we understand better than anybody else. This means that we perceive ourselves in a way that nobody else can without mentioning other factors like the environment and experiences which might shape things even much more than this.

If you met yourself, you will have a totally different perspective which might make you dislike yourself. For example, being arrogant and corny can sound fun and interesting when you do it because you understand why you do it. But if you met yourself as an arrogant and corny person, you might not appreciate it that much anymore. It's not because two people share a common personality that they are obviously going to be friends, sometimes having the same personality can achieve the reverse, it could produce dislike instead.

You are not what you like

Our likes and dislikes aren’t necessarily a part of who we are. Many people might appreciate humble persons, but that doesn’t make them humble. Others might find arrogant persons attractive, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are like that. There are many things we appreciate about others which we don’t necessarily share with them, which means that even if you met yourself, your own personality might be repulsive to you or at least not as attractive. Don’t forget that we aren’t always who we want to be. There are many people who would want to be in shape, but they are not, others who would want to work harder but are not doing so. They are not interested in their own personalities.

Reflect on your strengths and weaknesses

Unfortunately, we are full of vices that we aren’t proud of and simultaneously have a hard time getting rid of. Those alone are repulsive enough to us, and we just put up with them because we don’t have much of a choice. Meeting yourself and noticing these about yourself would certainly push you away. Do you really think every smoker is a fan of smoking, for example? Not really, they enjoy smoking, but that doesn’t really mean they are just trying to link up with every other smoker. They know smoking is bad for their health, and so they aren’t trying to get more of it.

Reflect on your strengths and weaknesses, are there traits you tolerate in yourself but hate in others? A good example of that is hypocrisy, we always give ourselves a pass when it comes to our hypocritical behaviors but find it harder to do that for others. How about your strengths? Are they attractive enough for you?

Ultimately, what kind of person do you think you are and do others think you are?

Conclusion

We are very good judges of others but terrible critics of our own selves, I don’t think you can make a fair assessment of who you are no matter how hard you try. There are always going to be biases and justifications we can give in our mind to shape the image we have about ourselves. The only sure way to get an accurate assessment of who we are is to ask others and find the traits common in everyone’s assessment of our character.

Ask a couple of persons you know what they think of you. The traits which come out in common with everyone’s assessment is probably as objective as possible. Everyone can’t be seeing the same thing, and you deny it exists. There is certainly some truth to what everybody is claiming about you.

Thanks for reading ☺️