Scott H Young

The ability to accurately perceive reality is fundamental in order to experience any personal growth or improvement. One of the most critical parts of reality we need to perceive accurately is ourselves. Unfortunately, being able to have a truthful view of our own strengths and weaknesses is incredibly difficult. Ultimately, because of our own bias, I think most of us tend to assume we are far better at truthfully perceiving ourselves than we actually are.

Fortunately, there are several ways we can improve our ability to accurately perceive ourselves. We can also use these techniques to help distinguish the events in our lives from our intrinsic sense of self-worth.

Be Mindful

There is a Buddhist meditation practice known as being mindful. In this practice you don’t ignore any of the sensations or emotions you are having, but you analyze them from a completely objective viewpoint. So, if while meditating, you are reminded of a particularly stressful moment, you would say to yourself, “Hmmm, that incident makes me feel stressful.”

Make your statement of these facts as neutral as possible, without a hint of judgement or explanation. Imagine if you were to tell me, “My shirt is red.” Notice how there is no emotion or judgement attached to that statement, it is simply fact. This is how you need to disconnect yourself from your emotions in the process of mindfulness. State reality as facts, with no sense of rationalization, explanation, guilt or judgement. It is what it is.

Taking the process of being mindful, we can apply this practice when viewing our own abilities and skills. When you think about a specific skill you have, simply state it as fact. View your skills and attributes as being completely distinct from your consciousness. It might even help to think in third-person format for this exercise. For example, instead of saying “I am wearing a red shirt.” I would say, “Scott is wearing a red shirt.”

Whenever your ego is introduced into the mix, you distort any perceptions you have. By instead viewing them from the separate stance of mindfulness, you can often get the truth you need without attaching your own personal thoughts and judgements. Ego creates the need to rationalize or distort weaknesses and to pride our strengths.

Ego tells you that you are ugly and fat, mindfulness notices that you have a few extra pounds. Notice the distinction?

Unconditional Love

Most people in our culture derive their self-worth from their successes and failures. If you are successful, then you feel worthy. If you have failed, then you don’t. This is garbage. Your intrinsic worth as a human being is completely separate from your accomplishments and mistakes. Whether you are living on the street or a wealthy philanthropist, your intrinsic worth is the same.

Adopt the practice of unconditional self-love. This doesn’t mean selfishness or conceit. This viewpoint reflects the idea that we should show unconditional love to everyone, but you can’t show unconditional love to anyone without giving it to yourself first.

If you adopt the practice of mindfulness, you can separate your ego from your skills. Once you do this, it seems silly to feel unworthy or superior because of your competency in any area. To feel low self-esteem with this approach would as ridiculous as feeling low self-esteem from saying, “I am wearing a red shirt.”

Now, of course, this is easier said than done. Keeping the ego separated from our skills and abilities can be very difficult. This is especially difficult when so much of our Western culture judges people on this very basis. I too have moments when something throws me off balance and I feel lowered self-esteem due to an event. In these times, you simply need to take a few breaths and remind yourself that your worthiness is distinct from your competency.

Get an Objective Viewpoint

My first two suggestions for improving our ability to be honest with ourselves involved how we can remove distortions by separating our ego. That process is necessary, but it can often be very difficult. There is another way you can get an accurate representation of your skills, which is through an objective viewpoint.

When getting an objective viewpoint, you are comparing your skills in a scientific way against a certain scale or standard. So if you aren’t sure whether you are actually fat or just feel that way from low self-esteem, then going to a doctor to do a health examination can give you an idea of where you stand. If you want an easy way to see how you fare, then comparing yourself to an external standard will often work best.

There is a danger, however, in using an objective viewpoint when determining your skills. Misuse of this method can create several problems:

1. If the standard is based on the average person, then it might give you a false sense of security. The average person in America today is overweight. Many are stressed, unfulfilled and unhappy. In these cases, you need to recognize that being a bit above average won’t cut it.
2. If you are using the standard to validate your sense of self worth. The purpose of this technique is to give you truth. If you are using this as a method to build or create your sense of self-confidence, re-read the second section
3. The standard might be irrelevant. Some comparisons or standards are meaningless to the overall context with our lives. This is especially true of things outside our control. Comparing your height to the average height of a person is a meaningless form of measurement. Just because you can measure it, doesn’t mean it is worthwhile.

The ability to be honest with yourself is a critical yet difficult skill to build. As long as you use your ego to get this ‘truth’, it will be highly distorted. Developing a healthy self-image is the first step. Separate your ego from your accomplishments and failures, so you can move forward in your own personal development.

Evaluation is a critical component to making long term improvement. I feel that one of the best ways to do this is the weekly review. This review allows you to really gauge your progress and make and major decisions. Finally, because you will be able to devote around 2-3 hours to your review, a weekly review allows you to fully explore problems that you might normally ignore in a busy life.

The one big problem with weekly reviews is that they leave too large a gap. In between your extensive reviews you have seven days of wandering. Seven days is just too long to leave without doing some form of evaluation and correction of your progress. How many of you have had a bad day that turned into a bad week? While weekly reviews can give you the in-depth analysis you need, we need to find a quicker method to make minor adjustments.

So I am going to introduce to you the daily review. Daily reviews are often considered a pain by most people because they don’t feel they have enough time. While I think time spent in evaluation usually gives you far more time than you put in, trying to schedule daily reviews beyond the scope of 10-15 minutes can be incredibly difficult. Especially for you busy goal-setters!

My process for the daily review is to cut out a lot of the fluff and get straight to the point. In depth examination of your goals, your life’s progress and long evaluations are best left to when you have more time. A quick daily review can allow you to make those corrections you need to make immediately so your week doesn’t turn to garbage because of a misstep.

How was my day?

First ask yourself this question. When asking this question you need to focus on two things: what went wrong and what went right.

Quickly itemize a list of all the things that went wrong today. It would be best if you can write these things down in point form on a notepad or word processor (remember to write to solve problems!). So lets say your list looks like this:

• Didn’t exercise
• Didn’t have time to prepare a proper dinner
• Got in an argument with friend
• Didn’t work as much on project as hoped

Once you’ve got your quick list you need to write another quick list. This time itemize your accomplishments. Although the need to create the first list was obvious, this one is equally important. By finishing your list off with your accomplishments you can get a sense of the improvements you have already made. This will give you the perspective you need to tackle those challenges.

Once again your list might look like:

• Woke up early without hitting snooze button
• Didn’t eat any junk food
• Finished book

You now have your two lists complete. You will probably have 3-5 points for each one and this list should have taken you no more than five minutes. Already you probably have some ideas about how you can improve tomorrow. By listing your accomplishments as well as your challenges, you should also feel a greater sense of control and confidence in tackling the next day.

With these two lists in hand, you need to decide on one or two of those weaknesses to focus on for tomorrow. If you try to focus on more than two, chances are you will forget or lose energy. Instead, picking one or two areas ensure that they receive your attention for tomorrow.

So with our list, we might decide to circle our lack of exercise and our argument with a friend as areas we want to focus on. By doing this we are deciding that, for tomorrow, we are definitely going to exercise and we are going to try to repair any damage with our friendship. This decision isolates what is critically important for the next day. This process of selecting should only take a couple minutes.

Now that we know what we are going to focus on improving, we need to run a short visual replay of our day in our minds. Go through your day with the points you had in mind and imagine how you want the day to come out. This quick visualization exercise helps lock your areas of focus into your mind. Now, when they come up tomorrow, you will remember to follow your plan. Once you’ve finished this process your daily review is complete.

So, the process of a daily review is:

• Create a list of what went wrong.
• Create a list of what went right.
• Identify one or two areas of focus for tomorrow.
• Run a quick visualization of your day with your two focuses in mind.

In total the entire process should take about ten minutes. The real benefit of this process is that it puts you into a good emotional state for handling your next day. By making this process a regular habit before you go to sleep you can make small adjustments to stay on course throughout the week without having to give up a lot of time.

If you are used to the process of creating a to-do list as a form of daily review, then I would suggest adding this ten minute practice. Creating a list of what to doesn’t serve to evaluate how your current day went. By analyzing today you have a lot more insight into improving tomorrow.

Remember, this process can only serve to make minor course corrections. A daily review won’t give you the insights you need for modifying your entire life. So this practice cannot be a substitute for a weekly review. But a daily review can give you the power to make quick, temporary adjustments that will ensure you maintain focus throughout the week. Best of all, it only takes ten minutes!