“Believe in yourself. You are braver than you think, more talented than you know, and capable of more than you imagine.
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How do we view ourselves? How do we determine if we are successful? Cute? Athletic? Smart? Slender? Heavy? Funny?
Do we answer the question based on an external definition? Growing up, it is not unusual for children to accept other’s view of them and adopt it as their own. Slender children begin to view themselves as fat when told so by slimmer friends. Bright children view themselves as ‘dumb’ when teased repeatedly, while a child of average intelligence believes he or she is the smartest in the class because his parents said so.
When the self view is determined by an external source, whether it is family, friends, or teachers, it is like viewing yourself in a mirror. It is the image that is reflected back to you by others that determines how you view yourself.
Once again, there are advantages to this approach. It is fairly easy. It doesn’t require a lot of soul searching and sometimes the image reflected back is even better than what we might have determined on our own.
Then along comes the crossroads where definitions collide, and when we begin to question the external definitions of who we are.
Bono, from the band U2, offers a stellar example: ‘Overcoming my dad telling me that I could never amount to anything is what has made me the megalomaniac that you see today.’
Many college freshman experience crossroads of self view when their high school self view no longer fits. It is not uncommon to hear college freshman utter, ‘In high school, I was always one of the smartest. Now, I am only average.’
‘It always came so easy for me in high school. I never even opened a book. I never studied. In college, my grades are falling, and now I don’t know how to study.’
The view of self in the crossroads may be battered, deconstructed, and then rebuilt. Tearing down the self as defined by others can occur gradually over a long period of time or sometimes it occurs in a brilliant epiphany, ignited by a single event, like the valedictorian mentioned earlier. For others, it may be an easy transition with only marginal changes.
As mentioned earlier, you may not enter the crossroads until your thirties—or even during midlife. And perhaps the infamous midlife crisis is just someone working through the belief crossroads.
When you transcend the crossroads and reach an inner knowing of who you are, honoring yourself with inner conviction, then you have arrived at the internal source of a self view.
Not to say that this internally grounded self view will not be challenged over time. But once you have reached this place of ‘to thine own self be true,’ events may give you pause to reflect, but you have trod the journey before so you can find your way back.
Your skill at discerning the 5 Ds (distract, deflect, dissemble, discredit, and denial) are honed so you have the ability to discern when the 5 Ds are used to influence your self view. Your ability to analyze and assess different perspectives and arrive at your own conclusions and decisions are well developed so that your self view is not easily manipulated by others.
Occasionally, retirement or a job loss can prompt someone to re-evaluate a self view. But once you have reached the inner knowing, you are able to reflect and adjust the self view with resilience. You have traveled the journey before. Furthermore, your core values are defined and these will serve to ground you with internal conviction as circumstances and events occur around you.
REFLECTION
Reflect upon how you viewed yourself when you were in the Vessel milestone of the belief journey?
Reflect upon how your view of yourself as changed when you reached the Crossroads milestone of the belief journey?
Reflect upon how your self view changed again when you attained the Self-Authorship milestone of your belief journey?
3 DIMENSional BELIEFS
Now that you have explored your self view, to give you more insights into how your GPS for navigating life’s belief journey, it helps to know there are 3 dimensions to beliefs:
Self View: How we view ourselves
Relationship View: How we construct relationships with other people
World View: How we see the world
Next, we will explore how we construction relationships with other people and how we view the world.