“I am not what I think I am and I am not what you think I am; I am what I think you think I am.”
Charles Cooley
Charles Cooley talked of something called the “looking-glass self”.
I am not what I think I am –I don’t usually see myself for what I am.
I am not what you think I am – I seldom know what others really think of me.
I am what I think you think I am – I think about how others might be perceiving me. This is the image I have of myself, which I try to live up to.
We often see ourselves through the eyes of others.
Conforming to an Image
Sometimes then, there is the urge to conform to this image we think others have of us.
If my friends think I’m a rugged, non-emotional type, they’d think it weird if they found me crying. And because I know they’d find it weird, I’d go out of my way to avoid crying even if I wanted to.
If someone has a reputation for being a rebel or not studying or defying whatever he’s told to, people would expect him to keep up that image. If he suddenly becomes docile, he lets his audience down. There’s pressure now to perform for the crowd, to behave the way they expect him to.
If you’re not aware of it, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I’m expected to behave a certain way – there’s pressure to live up to expectations, and so I will. And every time I do this, this image builds up and gets reinforced, making it even harder to break free the next time.
Outsourcing Accountability
This self-fulfilling prophecy can work as a force for good too. Someone recently told me this is something called an “accountability partner”.
When I went to an old gym after a long time, someone told me he was surprised I hadn’t come for so long – he thought I was regular. I’d been going to another gym elsewhere, but I knew that I might have felt the need to “defend” myself if I hadn’t thought of this before.
So if you’re struggling with learning the guitar or exercising or studying, a coach who checks on you might help – you’ll be accountable to him and try to live up to his expectations.
I don’t believe in this myself – if you need someone to hold you accountable, you probably don’t want to do whatever you’re doing. You’re doing it to live up to someone else’s expectations, rather than your own.
And you depend on that person. If your coach is laidback and okay with you skipping your classes or not performing well, you’ll probably be okay with it too, because it’s his expectations that drive you. That’s the risk of putting your accountability in someone else’s hands – someone who isn’t really that affected by whether you achieve whatever you’re after.
But if outsourcing accountability helps you do better than you were doing before, there’s no reason not to do it.
Anyway, this post is about something else.
Removing Distortions
I’ve experienced the self-fulfilling prophecy many times.
If I’m not interested in art and I praise a drawing, I’m told I’m contradicting myself. Yet it’s possible to appreciate the skill it takes to depict a scene, especially if you lack it entirely, without caring for the aesthetics of it.
If people think you’re a “logical” person, they might ask you why you “waste” your time in chatting with friends, even if they do the same. As though there was a need to justify your actions.
The point of this is not to criticize others for expecting us to behave a particular way. That’s only natural and rational – we see a person’s behaviour and try to deduce patterns out of it to make sense of it.
Everyone does that, though we can try to help by not interrogating others needlessly for doing actions that don’t live up to our image of them.
The point is to be aware of the internal pressure we might create for ourselves by thinking that others expect us to behave a certain way, and then trying to live up to that.
The onus is on us, because it’s us who think that others think about us.
We can try to make an effort to keep looking at ourselves through our own eyes rather than using mirrors to see ourselves through other people’s eyes.
For that, it helps to know that this self-created pressure might exist.
And then to think about why we’re doing whatever we’re doing – is it because of the need to live up to our image? This is where our values enter – something I’ve written about here