One of the bigger stressors in my earlier years used to be my worries about how people might perceive me.
Would they get the right impression of me?
Would they see me correctly?
Would they notice all the hard, oftentimes invisible work I was achieving?
What if they saw me wrongly?
These questions and worries often led to overthinking or fears.
Let’s take a closer look at this way of thinking:
What is the definition of wrong?
How could people get a "wrong" picture of me?
Wrong means that someone else would see me differently from how I see myself.
The underlying assumption is that I have a clear (the "right") picture of myself; big deviations from that would be categorized as "wrong" by my mind.
Especially in those personality traits and behaviors which hold big value to me.
If, for example, friendliness was very important in my life and I considered myself to be a friendly human being and someone else described me as being 100 percent grumpy and negative - that would be an issue for me.
Let‘s face the truth:
Is it possible that anyone could have the right picture of me? This would mean that the person had my picture or at least a very favorable picture of me. Let‘s think about it - that is not possible! Not a single individual, even those closest to me, would every think and feel the same way as I do. So how would they be able to have the exact same picture?
Then, the second best approach would be that we shared at least a similar evaluation of my personality traits and behaviors. Even there - impossible! Maybe possible to a small extent. Leading to the conclusion that anyone’s picture of me must be severely different from my own. So they could never have the right, "my right" picture of me.
It is very important to reflect on that point. It is not possible that another human being sees me in the right way.
So, if I categorize into right and wrong, all people must logically have a wrong picture of me.
That is the truth, if we decide to classify something into right and wrong and assess our our own perception as right.
If we try to avoid categorization, we can form another truth and state:
Everyone holds a different picture of me.
Again starting with myself, I have a certain picture of me.
Anyone else, even parents, siblings, children, or friends, would have a different picture of me.
The same accounts to supervisors, colleagues, or individuals we meet briefly: different pictures.
We don’t even have to judge whether that’s good or bad or right or wrong. Our job is to realize that it’s true and accept it.
For one person I can be great and for the next person not so favorable.
Moreover, those pictures change with time. Even people who love me dearly might feel differently some years later.
They might have experienced situations with me which had a major negative impact on them.
Their values might have changed over the years, leading them to assess my standard behaviors differently.
Their focus can change and they could feel disturbed by traits which did not matter to them in the past.
To me it can feel like I did not change at all, but all of a sudden I am not meeting their expectations any longer.
It is just not possible to keep up that "right picture" and therefore, it is important to let go of that way of thinking. It is important to create a distance between the picture we hold of ourselves and that others might have of ourselves.
Don’t forget that there are three pictures in all situations:
The first is how we perceive ourselves.
The second is how another person perceives us.
And the third is how we think the other person perceives us.
We can create acceptance and cope much better, once we realized that no one can or will think the way we think.
For me, one of the underlying fears used to be that people would not recognize and value the work I put into invisible topics.
Especially in HR, it frequently happens that we would not be sharing our topics and successes with the broad masses. Either for confidentiality or data protection reasons.
Creating situations where not many colleagues know what we are doing all day long. Or why we are not sharing openly. Which has led to wrong perceptions, misunderstandings, or lack of trust in some constellations.
And I sometimes thought that by trying harder, I could change that perception. Turn that picture into a more positive one. I wanted people to see me correctly. The whole Agnes, the entire version of me. Which of course did not work.
Letting go of that expectation from my side has helped a great deal.
Accepting that people would never ever be able to see me and assess me or my work the way I perceived it.
Maybe these thoughts will help you to rethink and calm down. Maybe you are some years younger and can already use this realization to relax and lower your expectations.
I believe in open and strong communication. I believe in doing our best to communicate well with other individuals to strengthen relationships. This is always connected with work. We can and should put effort into keeping good communication up or improve unstable communication. Accepting that we will always live in and see different worlds, leading to different pictures. That is life.
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