What do you see in the mirror? (Saturated Market)

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What do you see in the mirror?

Strategy How well do you know yourself? Probably better than anyone else. You know your thoughts, your beliefs, and you know the real story behind you. But there's another side to you, one that you're probably aware of, but haven't gotten to know: how other people see you. And the flip-side is equally true.

As someone who spent his university career studying psychology and philosophy, I think about this stuff a lot. And I've had the opportunity to have plenty of fine examples and reminders come my way in the past month or so.

For example, there was this article by Chuck Westbrook over at IHYJ. The same boss you hate could be a great person outside the office. You might even have gotten along. But there are two sides to every person.

To further carry this example, we have a family friend at the cottage (whose name I will **** out to protect the innocent). We were all hanging out, having fun, and we got to talking about work. And we realized that while we all have loads of fun with ****, we probably wouldn't like "Suit ****".

If you're a fan of the office (on NBC), everybody's "favourite" Regional Manager, Michael Scott, is a perfect example. He sees himself as well-liked, friendly, and having a great sense of humour. But in reality, he comes across as creepy, needy, and offensive.

So many questionnaires invariably ask a question where you have to say how your friends would describe you. And of course, we all pick the option of how we WANT them to think of us, not necessarily how they really DO think of us. It's understandably hard to do; we all have a concept of ourselves and what we're good at. To have that come crashing down around us would be unpleasant to say the least.

To wax philisophical for a moment, Sartre stated that we think of ourselves as subject, and as everything (and everyone) as objects. This is our subjective reality. We are the centre, and the world is organized by its relation to us. But the experience of the Other makes us realize that WE are objects to THEM. We are pushed outside of our subjective reality and are forced to cope with theirs. This leads into the idea of the "look", that when we feel the look of the Other on us, we see ourselves from outside, and we have a moment of realization of how we are perceived.

That was a little dense (even for paraphrasing), but the gist of it is, we find it hard to look at ourselves from someone else's perspective because we don't always like what we see.

But if you can take the time to accept who you appear to be as opposed to who you want to be, it's so much easier to work through these perceptions and bring them closer in line to one another.

Until next time,