Do you underestimate yourself?  It's kinda sneaky how that happens.

We underestimate ourselves when we accept limitations and don't notice. Our assumptions go invisible on us. They stop looking like assumptions and simply look like the truth. We then act accordingly.

Personally I know that I have at times hugely underestimated myself. I only saw how invisible this was when kind friends pointed it out to me. But it's not easy to hear. Ever witnessed someone defending their limitations? Maybe you even tried to talk them out of it when they asserted they aren't "the kind of person who..." or "tried but can't..."  

I don't have any trouble calling to mind someone I know who can't quite see for themselves just how attractive, strong, capable, loving or giving they are.  

A quote attributed to Henry Ford is

A nice way of saying we LIVE what we think and we do not realize that we are the thinker. This is why we become blind to our constructs, assume whatever we think is true and why we hate being challenged about it.  

The whole package that makes up what I call "myself" is only a mystery to one person: Me. And it's amazing how wrong we can be about our own base assumptions of who we are. 

Underestimating yourself always arises from who you assume you are.

The question "who am I?" deserves more airplay than we give it. Not only are we not entertaining the question, we seem to be moving away from contemplative traditions in which these kinds of questions mattered. We no longer engage in pure inquiry. Are we so intolerant of mystery that we would rather be wrong than not know something.

The price we pay for this is to be overly-engaged in our assumptions. And from the assumption that there is something fundamentally limited about us arises the desire to improve who we are. 

Why improve who you think you are when you can simply look to see who you really are "before" the personality arrived that you call YOU. 

"Who am I" or better said, "What is I?"  are invitations to peek underneath the construct of ourselves, beyond the false self that we made up and just see. What came before the thoughts of "I."

I have come to appreciate these contemplations, and to enjoy following where they lead. 

Are you the limited person you think you are?  What if you are not?

This self I call me seems nothing more than a bouquet of thoughts, rather than facts. I call them me, but really they are air. They are concepts -- ideas that have nothing to do with who I am or what I am capable of  -- if I weren't so interested in what I think about myself.

We are all wearing masks. I'm not talking about the professional mask you put on to go to work, I'm talking about the mask you call YOU.  

It's the shell you've wrapped round your authentic, natural self.  Let's call it your "personality." I've had one for years and I don't know how I couldn't have one.  What gets tricky is when I think that me and my personality are the same thing.  

It is a bit like putting on a mask and then forgetting about it.  There's this weird uncomfortable feeling, but you can't put your finger on why...

If you have an uber-competent personality it may look like that serves you well. I thought mine did. And yet I had to face some inevitable facts:

1. The personality is not you.
2. The personality is actually the biggest barrier to knowing you.
3. The personality is not what people really appreciate about you.

All the time spent evaluating ourselves, measuring and comparing, has never been put on pause long enough to consider the deeper question that lies behind it.  Unless we do, we may look in the mirror many times a day and the greatest mystery on the planet remains the face staring back.

I rarely reflected on the question, "Who am I underneath who I think I am?"  I could tell you who I thought I should be. I could tell you who I was trying to become or how I was doing in relation to so-and-so. But me? On a deeper level?  Very blurry. 

I just assumed that I was my personality. I tried to make this personality of mine better and "special." I tried to make "me" into someone I would like. ( Remember "love yourself"? ... I did not succeed).  We construct a version of a person that our own constricted minds are thinking of and within those parameters, of course it's going to be an imitation version. Roll on the self-improvement ...

"Mi, a name I call myself..."

As I began to ponder "what is me?" I began to notice that the personality I had became used to referring to as "me" was entirely composed of -- just things I think about myself. There was a the tableau of traits and characteristics that I called myself, but these were no more than a bunch of thoughts I'd had. They just happened to be about something I call me.

I had made myself up out of nothing. Out of thought.

Other people did not necessarily share the view of who I thought I was and so I also incorporated their opinions into my own thinking about me.

I remember first getting a glimpse of the depth of this as I came to know Robert Holden (listen to my radio show with him) who called the ego "the sum total of all the smallest ideas you've ever had about yourself." 

It hit me that I really had constructed me. And I was terribly small.  It began to dawn that, since the personality was a construct in itself, it could never find the answer to Me. The answer was beyond the content of my own thinking.

I look out through two eyes from something I call my body.  I think the limits of my body are "me." I pass or fail a test, I think the results tell "me" something "I" am suited for or not suited for.  I get divorced and I think this means something about "me."   Thoughts. All just thoughts.  

We minimize our capacities -- based on opinions that just float past -- and yet talk about them as facts and live the limitations as truth.  

I was reminded of this recently when I had a client here in San Diego for a 3-day retreat and I related how people walk up to me when I am on my skates and just blurt out, "I could never do that!" The truth is, they can't possibly know that. They don't have the slightest idea. But this does not stop people from deciding precisely what they will or will not believe about themselves.

When you realize that what you think you are made of is nothing more than a jumble of ideas, maybe it's time to start asking "What is beneath what I think I am?"

Related Posts...

• To Build Clientele, Meet Yourself First
  
• Mirror, Mirror, Why don't I love me?
  
• You Are More Than You Think

One day it occurred to me: for EVERYTHING I've ever done, there was a time when I had never done it before. 

Obvious. Clearly. Yet this had never struck me as deeply before.

I was speaking to a client recently and we were talking about how we are all hard on ourselves, thinking that we should be further along than we are, or moving faster than we are moving.

It is so common in coaching and in consulting that clients downplay their progress with these kinds of comparisons, forgetting to look beyond events in order to see the underlying plate tectonics.

Take my client recently. In the middle of an argument with his spouse he had the idea to slow down, listen and try to understand what was being said instead of the defense/attack strategy that was in play at the time. 

As we talked about how this had happened it was obvious to me that he was underplaying the importance of what he had done. I wondered why.  "It really wasn't going very well" and "I could have done this sooner" were threatening to wipe out the significance of a momentous occasion: in the middle of a deep quagmire, he'd actually found his bearings, had a fresh idea flash before him, acted on it and turned the conversation in a more positive direction. 

Amazingly, with no provocation and in the worst possible conditions for a new idea to arise, it did. And he listened. Yet what I heard as a sign of success, he was viewing as a near-failure.

How was that possible?

Along the course of our lives we seem to have (most of us, me included) picked up a nasty habit of thinking we should be better than we are in any given moment.  This keeps us from knowing what to look for and from perceiving what is happening on a deeper level.

Ruminating over our performances we often judge them to be less than successful ("I could have prevented that" / "I never should have got there in the first place).  We compare ourselves to standards no one really ever lives up to: "I should have been able to create an open space of pure listening."

Really?  No you couldn't have done that, because you didn't.  Are you missing what did happen, however?

No wonder people head in the wrong direction -- thinking they need to double up their efforts, or be even harder on themselves, as if the point of life were to eventually be perfect. Or nearly.

That's not to say one can't do better next time, but surely we are missing the point. The point of self-awareness and self-observiation is self-understanding -- not self-condemnation.  Seek to understand and what you see will change.  Judge something and you cannot see it at all.

Let's give ourselves a break. This self-flaggelation thing has really run its course. There is so much research out there clearly showing that the carrot and the stick do not work.(Just watch Daniel Pink below on Motivation)

Personally speaking I think it is amazing that I can even have a change of perspective in the middle of a near-brawl, much less to act on it. Compared to the number of times I've ignored by own voice of reason!

Why not look at our lives from the gentler -- yet equally true --  perspective?

Not only does that mean recognizing the significance of our small triumphs, but realizing that they are not just one-off anomalies. 

Take our example as a case in point. Consider for a moment just the fact that he got this new idea in the midst of a bad moment between two people. What does that tell you about what human beings need to do to have new ideas?

If you or I, or my client, can have a new thought in the middle of an argument, then surely there are no conditions to be met for us to "get grounded" or "be good listeners" or anything of the sort. 

What it suggests is that our ability to hear afresh and to change is natural.   Or as my client put it, "something you can count on."

This implies you don't have to be "good" or spiritually advanced, deserving, forgiving, listening attentively or any of the other pre-conditions we sometimes set up.

Imagine. You can just be going about your business and you can count on your ability to see anew just being there.

Regardless then of how badly we think we are doing when we play the game film, there is always the basic movement from: "now you don't see it / now you do." And this movement is always happening in us. We aren't making it happen with our self-development programs.  Or better said: 

We might be becoming more aware of how it's working; but we are not making it happen.

I know it's common to consider the self development pathway as one in which we get progressively better at this thing we call life. But really, everything we will ever do will always be something that one day, perhaps just the day before, we could not do or had never thought of doing, so I think this whole notion of "progress" and preconditions only gets in the way of that natural flow.

Every person on the planet knows how to shift from not knowing something one moment to knowing it. We did it with walking, talking and eating with spoons.  We've been doing it for our whole lives and we'll continue doing it.

Let's start counting on it.