Last year I listened to a clip from Jason Silva on Facebook. He said, “I am not who I think I am, I am not who you think I am. I am who I think you think I am.”
I disagreed with this so strongly when I heard it. I was a person who had been hiding who I am for so long, and was fighting the labels I had been given and accepted. I was constantly searching for my authentic self and how to express it that I couldn’t accept that might come from another’s point of view.
I disagreed so strongly that his words stuck with me so I could at the very least understand them and then prove them wrong.
So I’ve been paying attention to this for a while now, and I’m really beginning to think there is something to it.
Because I can’t see myself from the outside, I don’t know how I’m being perceived. I want to know if what I think I’m trying to accomplish or the message I’m trying to send is actually happening.
I am pleased when what I’m doing is working and I want to know if I haven’t got it right yet and still have some work to do.
I don’t always detect when something is out of alignment because sometimes I have told myself a story to justify it and I’m getting in my own way. Sometimes I need someone to tell me, “Jodi, this isn’t normal behaviour for that” or “Jodi, you won’t get where you want to go if you keep doing this”.
Other people are constantly reflecting back to us who we are.
As long as you are clear about what’s important to you and who you want to be…
As long as you are willing to accept their reflection as feedback, not as a negotiation tool of your self worth, then you can use their feedback as a guidepost to sorting out whether or not you are on track.
This is how I felt about competing. Winning for me was never about seeing other people lose. It was always a gauge for myself.
Because showing horses is a judged event, we paid for someone else’s opinion about how we compared to everyone else around us. It goes against almost everything I preach on a daily basis.
But it also gives you very good feedback on where you are personally at. When I was striving to win, but coming up short, it was constant feedback that I still had much more to learn.
When I started to win more frequently, it was feedback that said I was starting to really understand my job.
This is also how I feel about people in general. Since I took the marketing seminar I have seen a huge change in myself. I understand and empathize with other people on a deeper level than ever before.
I am finding that if I see treatment towards others or myself that I think is unjust or unfair, I am passionately speaking up against it. This is new behaviour for me, and I wouldn’t have recognized it if I didn’t have other people reflecting it back to me.
Without their mirror, we don’t know who we are.
We are nothing more than a fallen tree in the forest wondering if we even made a sound.
Other people matter, not for us to please, but for us to understand ourselves.