‘You are not good at maths.'
‘You should study sciences.'
‘You've got so much potential, why waste it in X?'
‘You should get a real job.'
Most of us at some point in our lives have heard someone else's opinion of our capabilities, skills, possibilities. Take a moment to reflect on this. What are all the various opinions that you have heard about what you are good at, or what you should develop, or what you should do with your life.
What have you done with those opinions? If you are like most of us, you have probably taken them on not as ‘opinions', but as ‘facts'. Especially, if they have come from someone you may have held in higher authority to yourself, such as parents, teachers, managers, etc. But notice that these are not facts, they are opinions. They are somebody else's assessment of you, and that's all they are, an assessment. Chances are though, that the person behind the words you heard, doesn't necessarily see that what they said wasn't the ‘truth', but in actual fact, only their ‘opinion' of you. We often hold our opinions about other people to be ‘true', to be ‘facts'.
A client of mine recently enquired about this. He's in an organisation where he got some feedback from his boss that is not consistent with the feedback he had got from others within and also outside the organisation. So he was getting a bit confused about how to take this feedback on. His boss seemed to be coming from a place of ‘I'm right about you.' Actually, for the purposes of this blog, it doesn't matter where his boss was coming from, and besides, all I have is my client's assessment, i.e. opinion, of where his boss was coming from.
So back to the point. So how he saw himself, the feedback he got outside his organisation and the feedback he was getting from his boss were not consistent, so what to do?
I recently read of a case involving school kids. There was a study that had been made of school-aged children who for whatever reason had to change schools, and how many of them actually performed significantly differently in these new environments. So somebody who in one school had been told had no hope in maths, excelled in it within another environment. Whilst another child who had been a great writer in one environment, found it difficult in the new one. The article focused on how dangerous it is to assume the abilities of our children without having them try out various environments first. So if you got told at school that you were not good at something, and you have never had the opportunity to try it out somewhere else, chances are you might still be holding this opinion of yourself that you are not good at this something. (We also have a tendency to over time take on other people's opinions of us as our own).
So in the case of my client. He was fortunate to be active in several environments, and so he was in a ‘lucky place' that he had other assessments to work with, so he wasn't about to take on his bosses feedback as the ‘only truth'. But instead we were actually able to take it to another level altogether, that the other assessments he had were also just that, opinions. So it wasn't a case of one person being more right than the other, but different people giving their viewpoints on who he is in the world. And he could choose, based on whatever criteria he felt was right for him (in this case his own assessment/opinion of how self-aware the people behind the opinions were themselves), which reality he was going to take on. It meant saying to his boss: ‘thank you for your assessment, I'm not sure I'd agree with this, but let's have a further discussion about this'. Versus taking it on as reality and saying: he said I'm this, thus that must be how it is. I'm exaggerating a bit, but not that much.
We do tend to take other people's assessments of us, our abilities and our potential quite literally and make them our reality.
So who's reality are you living?
