Learning To See Yourself

Observation Without Immediate Judgement

One of the hardest things we can learn to do for ourselves is how to look without immediately deciding what we are looking at. That sounds simple. It isn’t. We observe ourselves constantly, but observation and interpretation are not the same thing. Something happens. We experience an emotion, make a decision, react to another person, succeed at something, fail at something, or find ourselves repeating a familiar pattern.

Almost immediately, our minds begin explaining. I did that because… They did that because… This means… That’s just the kind of person I am. Sometimes the explanation is correct. Sometimes it contains part of the truth. Sometimes it is completely wrong. The problem isn’t interpretation. Interpretation is necessary if we want to understand anything. The problem is reaching an interpretation so quickly that we stop observing.

Learning To Look

A significant part of my own approach to personal development has involved learning to separate what I observe from what I believe those observations mean. That distinction gives us somewhere to begin. What actually happened? What did we think? What did we feel? What did we do? What were we expecting? What did we want? What were we afraid of? What happened afterward? These questions are different from immediately asking whether we were good or bad, right or wrong, justified or unjustified. Those judgments may have their place. But first, we need to see what happened.

There is an important reason for this. Once we become emotionally invested in an explanation, we tend to begin looking for evidence that supports it. New experiences are interpreted through conclusions we’ve already formed. We can become remarkably good at proving things to ourselves. That doesn’t necessarily make those things true.

Observation Is Not Passivity

Observing without immediate judgment does not mean refusing to make judgments. It doesn’t mean everything is acceptable. It doesn’t mean right and wrong don’t exist. And it certainly doesn’t mean endlessly analyzing ourselves while refusing to make decisions. It means allowing observation to come before conclusion.

In my own experience, intuition often functions this way. Something catches my attention. A behavior repeats. Something feels significant. Two apparently unrelated experiences begin to resemble one another. The message, as I have learned to treat it, is essentially: Pay attention to this. That is very different from: This is what it means.

We can apply the same distinction whether or not we describe the initial recognition as intuition. Something has caught our attention. Fine. Now we look. An observation can become a question. The question produces possibilities. Those possibilities can become hypotheses. Life then gives us opportunities to test them. Observe. Reflect. Recognize a pattern. Form an idea about what that pattern might mean. Test it. See what happens. Integrate what survives. Then return and observe again. The process is recursive because understanding ourselves changes the person doing the observing. We don’t return to exactly the same starting point.

We Are Both Observer And Observed

There is an obvious difficulty in self-observation: The person performing the experiment is also the experiment. We bring our memories with us. Our desires. Our fears. Our wounds. Our expectations. Our beliefs. Our previous conclusions. We cannot simply remove ourselves from ourselves and become perfectly objective observers. But perfect objectivity isn’t required. What we can do is become increasingly aware of the lenses through which we are looking.

Suppose someone says something that makes us angry. Our first observation might simply be: I became angry. Before deciding what the anger proves, we can become curious about it. What exactly triggered the anger? Was it what the person said? How they said it? What we believed they meant? What we expected them to say next? Was the anger entirely about what happened today? Did the interaction resemble something older? Were we defending a principle? Protecting a boundary? Defending our pride? Were we frightened? Embarrassed? Exhausted? There may be more than one answer. Human beings are complicated enough to have several motives, emotions and interpretations operating simultaneously.

The purpose isn’t to interrogate ourselves until every emotion disappears. The purpose is to understand enough about the machinery producing our response that we have more choice in what happens next.

Motives Matter

Behavior tells us something. Motive tells us something else. Two people can perform exactly the same action for completely different reasons. The same is true within ourselves. We can help someone because we genuinely care about them. We can help because we want to feel needed. We can help because we’re afraid they’ll leave if we don’t. We can help because helping them benefits us. And sometimes several of those motives can exist at once. Human motives are not obligated to be simple. That is why honest self-observation eventually requires something more difficult than merely noticing our behavior.

We have to become willing to ask: Why am I doing this? And then we have to become willing to discover that our first answer may not be our deepest one. This is also where immediate judgment can interfere with discovery. If we punish ourselves every time we uncover an unattractive motive, we create an incentive to stop looking for unattractive motives. We begin protecting ourselves from our own observations. That isn’t greater self-awareness. It is teaching ourselves what not to see.

Learning To Use The Mirror

I frequently use the mirror as a model for personal development because there is something useful about what a mirror does. A mirror does not need to approve of our reflection. It simply allows us to see it. What we do with that information comes afterward. We may dislike what we see. We may appreciate it. We may decide something needs to change. We may discover that something we’ve spent years trying to change never needed changing in the first place. But before any of those decisions become useful, we have to be willing to look.

And looking becomes considerably harder when identity becomes involved. If we need to believe that we are always compassionate, we may have difficulty recognizing our capacity for cruelty. If we need to believe that we are strong, we may have difficulty seeing our fear. If we identify completely with independence, we may have difficulty recognizing where we have become dependent. The opposite can be equally distorting. If we have decided that we are weak, broken, selfish or incapable, we may reinterpret evidence of strength, development or generosity so that it continues supporting the identity we’ve already accepted. Positive and negative self-images can both distort the mirror. The question isn’t whether we should have an identity. The question is whether our identity remains capable of receiving new information.

Patterns Require Time

One observation tells us that something happened once. It does not necessarily tell us why. Repeated observations begin to reveal patterns. That is why I place considerable value on looking at ourselves longitudinally—across time rather than only through the intensity of a particular moment. What happens repeatedly? Under what conditions? What changes it? What makes it stronger? What makes it disappear? What happens when we deliberately respond differently? Now self-observation begins turning into experimentation. If we believe a particular behavior comes from a particular motive, we can change something and observe whether the pattern changes.

Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe the result reveals that our explanation was incomplete. That isn’t necessarily failure. We learned something. And that new information becomes part of the next observation.

Other People Are Mirrors Too

We don’t learn about ourselves exclusively by sitting alone and thinking. Other people provide information. Relationships provide information. Conflict provides information. Success and failure provide information. The way we behave when frightened may show us something that peaceful reflection never could. The way we behave when given authority may reveal something that powerlessness could not. The way we respond to rejection, affection, responsibility, criticism, praise, loss or opportunity may expose parts of ourselves that were invisible under different conditions.

Other people’s perceptions can also provide useful information. But they remain observations from another position. Someone else’s interpretation of us should not automatically become our identity any more than our first interpretation of ourselves should automatically become truth. We can listen. We can compare. We can test. We can look for repetition. We can ask whether the reflection contains something we couldn’t see from where we were standing. The mirror provides information. We still have to decide what that information means.

We Are Allowed To Be Wrong About Ourselves

This may be one of the most useful permissions we can give ourselves. We are allowed to discover that something we believed about ourselves was wrong. We are allowed to discover that we misunderstood our motives. We are allowed to discover that something we once considered a strength has become a limitation. We are allowed to discover that something we considered a weakness contained a strength we hadn’t yet learned how to use. We are even allowed to discover that an understanding that was once accurate is no longer accurate because we have changed. Personal development requires the possibility of being surprised by ourselves. Otherwise, self-examination becomes little more than repeatedly confirming an identity we’ve already decided upon.

Seeing Creates Choice

The ultimate purpose of observation is not endless introspection. It is choice.

Things we cannot see can still influence us. Patterns we cannot recognize can still repeat. Motives we refuse to examine can still direct our behavior. The more clearly we can observe what is happening within us, the more opportunity we have to decide what we want to do with it. Sometimes we change what we find. Sometimes we accept it. Sometimes we strengthen it. Sometimes we redirect it. Sometimes we discover that the thing we were fighting was never actually the problem. And sometimes we simply gather more information because we don’t know enough yet. There is no requirement that every observation immediately become a conclusion. There is no requirement that every question immediately receive an answer.  Sometimes the most useful thing we can say is: I noticed this. I don’t know what it means yet. I’m going to keep looking. That leaves the door open. And if our purpose is genuinely to know ourselves rather than merely confirm what we already believe, that open door matters.

Personal development can begin in many places, but one of the simplest is also one of the hardest: Learn to look at yourself long enough to see what is actually there before deciding what it means. Then keep looking. Because the person looking into the mirror today is not necessarily the same person who will be standing there tomorrow.