Perception

Do you love what you do?

In order to explore this question in more detail, I went to a workshop hosted by Do Work You Love. The workshop was about visualising my dream job as part of my dream life as well as planning the first action steps to achieve this goal.  This process was supported by a big poster named Canvas, comprising information and knowledge from different areas, such as personal development, business development, coaching and psychology.

The canvas looks at different areas in your life, such as

• Who do you want to be in the future? How do you want to live?
• Which role does the job play in your life?
• How does the job need to be in order to achieve self-realisation and to use your skills and strengths accordingly?
• What are your immediate next steps in order to get closer to your dream job and dream life?

After an introduction of all 8 participants, we teamed up in pairs of 2 to become sparring partners or dream life buddies for the next 6 weeks in order to support each other, but also to challenge each other on our visualisations. We worked on the Canvas for 2.5 hours by talking about our dreams and by asking each other questions. When the workshop was about to end, we did a final round to talk about our experiences during and after the workshop. When it was my turn to talk, I said something like “Well, my topics seem to repeat themselves, and I don’t seem to make much progress. I feel like I’ve been working on the same stuff for a while now.” When I shared this with my workshop buddies, they clarified – against my own perception – that I actually made progress and that topics didn’t repeat themselves, but that I developed them and moved them into a new dimension (e.g. more frequent, bigger etc.). The workshop organiser listed the ‘projects’ I had already started and that I was currently working on. It was only then that I realised how much I had already achieved in 2017, but that I didn’t give myself enough credit for it. I didn’t acknowledge my achievements sufficiently. Just to give you a few examples: I currently do my yoga teacher training, I hold yoga classes on a regular basis for friends and friends of friends, I have launched my blog, I have established an Instagram account called ninaspinknotes and only recently I have set up a fan page on Facebook for the same account. I read books about yoga and personal development, I listen to podcasts and I network with people to seek and give inspiration.

Hence, how can I say that I’m not making any progress? I’ve learned the following from this workshop and the feedback, thank you!!!

There may be a discrepancy between self-perception and perception of others.

Acknowledge yourself, your progress and your achievements.

After this workshop, I decided I wanted to go a step further concerning self-perception versus perception of others. I wanted to understand how I’m perceived by other people, and to reflect on what I like or dislike about the results, to understand discrepancies between self-perception and perception of others and to confirm my strengths whilst working on my perceived weaknesses. So, I used a questionnaire from the workshop and sent it to friends, family and acquaintances. It holds questions about associations with me, about emotions felt, which colour/animal or furniture I could be and what I could do more or less of. I gave people about 1 week time to get back to me and up until now I have received 20 responses.

The feedback was lovely, interesting and touching. Luckily, there was a good match on my strengths and potential for improvement, which means I am pretty well aware and have a good self-perception, yay. However, I also received a few comments that I wanted and needed to understand in a bit more detail, so I can make sense of it. A few comments to work on in the future, as they repeat themselves. And some comments to simply take note of.

Obviously I am me, with all my experiences, emotions, feelings, character and personality, and it’s not like I will become a new person based on the feedback received, but I think it’s essential to reflect on ourselves in order to grow, to improve. Hence, my path of self-reflection included being brave by asking others for their honest and direct feedback, but at the same time to trust my intuition. . This means that I can make use of my strengths even more, just by having moved them more into my conscious mind, and to be more aware of my ‘weaknesses’ or things to do less. At the end of the day, it’s like Anais Nin says:

We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.

Everybody sees the world through their own filter, and very often we are mirrored by other people. For example, if we dislike something about another person or we get annoyed about someone’s behaviour, we most likely hold this characteristic within us, too. Or it could be something we’d like to have, hence the annoyance about someone else having it or living it. If criticism gets to us, then we should probably think about the reasons why, because it is very likely it has got to do with us. If that is the case, we can and should solve this limiting belief for us first, as otherwise we will always doubt our capabilities. Once we have solved these limiting beliefs within us though, we are free, we feel good and we can simply enjoy…life!

Yours, Nina

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