The false perception of yourself

Probably you have a high esteem of yourself, and you won’t outrightly say you are a bad person. You probably think of yourself as charming, handsome or beautiful, easy to get along and much more.

What you may not realize is that this is actually how you want to be but not how you actually are. In the same way if I asked you how much you weigh, if you haven’t measured your weight recently, the number you give will always most certainly be far from the truth, a lot less than what you actually weight. Similarly, if I asked you how you would describe your social skills with your peers, you will surely say you are a very good friend who gets along with everybody

This all happens because of the perception we have of ourselves, which is very often different from the perception others have about us or reality itself. Given that we are talking about ourselves, there is always going to be a bias because we love ourselves, and this is going to push us to deny reality in favor of what we want reality to be.

Unfortunately, this wrong perception of ourselves can lead us into trouble, that's the reason why I find it important to write this article. You might have problems with your spouse, relatives, friends or maybe things aren’t working out well in your life simply because the perception you have about yourself is very far from reality and this always leads to these problems for which you never can figure out the source.

Perception : Others vs You

Looking at your relationship with others, you’ll probably consider yourself as a very good friend, but are you sure the other person will describe you as that as well, or will they say you are the most selfish person they know? The perception others have about you comes from the different interactions they have had with you and equally the information they received about you, that's why different people can have a different perception of you. Your interaction with them was either different or they received very different information about you.

Finding what others think about you can be as easy as just asking them or finding a common word which everybody characterizes you with. If the word “nice” popups up every time they talk about you then you are probably a nice guy, else if the word “selfish” is the most prevalent then you are probably selfish. When you have multiple people using the same word to describe you, then that shows you what the reality is, no matter how you feel about it.

Fortunately or unfortunately, it's very easy to change the perception people have of you simply by controlling the information they receive about you and controlling your interactions. That's how easy it is for people to think that a wicked person is the nicest person, or how it's easy to destroy the perception of a person just by feeding false information.

Perception : You vs You

What you think about yourself is most certainly inflated, when it comes to things like your weight, you can easily check the reality using equipments to measure that but for other things where there isn’t equipment to measure, things like beauty, you will have to trust the judgment of others to give you a clear assessment and the further they are related to you, the less biased they will be. Just ask a random person on the street if you are beautiful, they will probably give you an accurate assessment.

Is a wrong perception ok?

Sure, I understand, perception is relative and everybody is going to have their opinion and how they feel about you, sometimes based on things which have nothing to do with you. Nevertheless, there is a collective perception we all share which likes of make a very similar appreciation of the things we see.

You can also choose to live in delusion, thinking of yourself as beautiful or handsome, thinking you aren’t that fat or feeling like you have a good relationship with everybody. Sure, this works out for multiple reasons, one major reason being your mental health. Sometimes reality is just too hard to accept, but living in deniable also prevents you from fixing reality. Maybe knowing you are that fat could push you to fix that, or knowing that you aren’t a very likable person could push you to work harder at that.

The Rabbit hole of depression

I understand things get really complicated because caring what others think can hold you back and cause so much pain and not knowing provides a lot of relief. I am not giving any conclusive statement, the way I see it is more in the sense of this example; imagine a very bad singer singing at the top of his lungs in a room filled with people, should he care about what others think or should he just keep singing? or does it matter who decides whether he is a bad singer or not

Thanks for reading ??