Evaluating yourself

Here are a series of questions for you to think about:

Your parents tell you that you were a difficult child.
Does this mean you were a difficult child?
Your friends tell you that you have a funny way of walking.
Does this mean you have a funny way of walking?
An ex-partner tells her friends you were a great lover.
Does this mean you were a great lover?
A policeman tells you how brave you are for reporting a crime.
Does this mean you are a brave person?
You don’t receive an award for a school project, but your friend does.
Does this mean your friend is better or cleverer than you?

Some people evaluate themselves, their actions and their experiences all by themselves, while others let other people do the evaluating for them. Some people do a bit of both.

There is no right or wrong way to measure how you are doing in life (or indeed if you need to do so in the first place). However, some points around this subject are worth bearing in mind:

If you rely on the judgements and opinions of other people when it comes to evaluating yourself, you can become vulnerable to what others say about you. If they say good things about you, maybe that’s great, but what if they say bad things? Where would that leave you? Which would you choose to believe? You might end up worrying what other people think about you. You might end up changing yourself to try and fit into someone else’s world, rather than your own. You might get yourself in to all sorts of tangles.

If you evaluate yourself by yourself then you get to decide what is what.
This is fine if you like yourself, or if you trust yourself, or if you are fair in your appraisal, but if you don’t like yourself or you don’t trust yourself or your self-esteem is low… what then?

More importantly, where do you stand when it comes to evaluating yourself?