Why I Am a Great Person

Challenge: Why I am a great person
This is a personal challenge I came up with last year. It basically tackles the problem that we normally don’t know exactly how others see us. This is to identify how we are perceived by other people so we can get a better understanding of ourselves. Are you really intelligent? Are you really too small?

Let me first explain the goal, and then the challenge.

The Goal

Inside ourselves we have negative thoughts (“I’m not good/intelligent/handsome enough”). Other people don’t give us nearly enough positive feedback to counter them. This is bad because we tend to see them as reality, because our reality doesn’t tell us otherwise. Therefore some of these thoughts may eventually become reality.

On the other hand, we sometimes don’t know how we are perceived by others. Do they think we are too pushy? Do they think we are quiet? Is one of our qualities “normal” or a little bit extreme?

The Challenge

The problematic task is to figure out what other people think about you. (Not what you think other people think about you.) Listen carefully to what other people say about you. Part of the problem is to be “aware of” and “here in” the moment to realize that a person just said something about you.
When someone says to you “I think you are smart that you came up with this solution”, you can note down “I am smart”; with full confidence that you are.

I call this challenge “Why I Am a Great Man/Woman”. Basically a mind map where you collect the things other people say about you.

“You never listen” → looks like you may not hear everything, or you are easily distracted, or something else.
“We should drink a coffee together” → well, someone may be interested in you, which means you’re attractive.
“Man, your shelf looks so tidy!” → I am tidy.
Just as example: It took me about two months to collect only 10 of these compliments! Here is an example mind map. Note that this is not my actual mind map! Take it as an inspiration.

Obviously desperately hunting for compliments is unfavorable, but sometimes you’re going to have a chat with someone, they say something, and then just take notice.
I wouldn’t recommend to ask other people directly, or actively. Wait for them to tell you.

It shouldn’t take long. Just one of those 30-day challenges.

Note that not everything is “positive”, you’ll earn critique as well. In those cases just take notice and write it down.
You’ll also hear “compliments” which have two sides. As an example let’s take “sensible”. Men often don’t want to be sensible. Men are strong. We eat glass and drive fast cars and no men should ever cry. So “sensible” might have a certain negative tone for you, when in fact it also has its positive sides. Sensible means you are sensible enough to hear or see small physical reactions of somebody else. This means you are also sensible enough and say something like “did I say anything wrong?” more quickly than somebody who is not as sensible. Well, and it also means you don’t eat glass, because your tongue is too sensible. I’m sorry to disappoint. No glass for you anymore!

Next steps

After you’ve invested much time to collect these things, it comes the time to reap the fruits of your labor. For instance, you can leave little notes to yourself around the house, to remind you how you really are.

Here’s an idea. Open Pages, create a text box, and write “You are beautiful, I like your face” in it. Create more text boxes as needed. Print them out and leave these notes around your home. Now when you brush teeth in the morning, you are greeted with this little message. Isn’t it nice that you thought of yourself?

Another idea, if you are a little bit on the nerdy side: write a script that randomly outputs a line from a file, and display it using GeekTool, or pipe its output to notifyutil.