02.02.08
Evaluating Yourself
Personal development is dependent on personal evaluation. In order to develop, you must know where you were, where you are and where you are heading.
There are four primary ways that you can evaluate yourself, each way having its own advantages and disadvantages. These ways are:
1) Evaluating yourself against others:
In a competitive atmosphere, the default form of evaluation is in relation to others. How much work do my colleagues do? What grades did my friends get? How much money do other people make? These are common questions that we hear and may often ask. The implicit meaning behind these questions is: How much better or worse are others doing in relation to me? Do they work more or less than me? Do they get better grades or worse grades? Are they earning more or less?
If you’re not selective about who you evaluate yourself against, this approach can be extremely unhelpful. You will be using the faults of others as an excuse for your own faults. If your colleagues are unproductive, you will see that as an excuse telling you: You can be unproductive, as long as your colleagues are unproductive. Comparing yourself against those better than you has the advantage that you can aim higher than your existing performance. You will seek to match or exceed them, giving you both a direction and an incentive to work by: I want to be better than those currently better than me. The disadvantage in this approach is that you may feel inferior to those better than you, because you are not simply admiring their achievements, but pointing out your failures, in relation to their achievements. This, however, depends largely on your attitude and perception: are you comparing yourself to others in order to determine your worth, or in order to determine the ways you need to improve? Judging yourself based on others is not an end in itself, but a means for you to develop.
A disadvantage in this approach, which we might overlook, is the possibility of adopting other people’s values and goals, without asking ourselves what would we like to accomplish, regardless of other people’s goals and points of view. If others are going to university to study medicine or engineering does not mean that we should do the same in order to develop. Such choices might not be what we want, therefore, we shouldn’t see others as the absolute standard by which we judge ourselves.
2) Evaluating yourself against an Ideal:
We sometimes aspire to fulfil an ideal we don’t see around us. We want to produce more and better than anyone we’ve met or heard of. We want to achieve things that others have not considered or dared to attempt. We have an ideal that does not exist any where on earth, and we want to be the first (and possibly the only) ones to achieve it. The difficulty in this approach comes in determining what is possible and what isn’t. We can achieve a lot in our lifetimes, but our resources remain limited. Can our ideal be achieved with our limited resources? To what extent can we increase our resources in order to bring our ideal within reach?
I wouldn’t exactly call it a disadvantage, but it certainly is a challenge: to maintain the possibility of achieving your ideal when you don’t have any visible evidence to support your vision. For you to pursue anything, you must be certain that it can be achieved partially or fully, or be prepared to find out that you’re wrong and be willing to change directions. While evaluating yourself against the best in others has the advantage that you can see that your goal is possible, since others have accomplished it, evaluating yourself against an ideal can be risky if your goal is not achievable, but far more rewarding if it can, and you’re the person to set a new standard for others to aspire to. The primary concern when evaluating yourself against an ideal is determining how realistic that ideal is.
3) Evaluating yourself against the Worst Case:
Some people spend their lives in search of excuses for their failures. Not only do they find comfort in seeing others fail, or try to blame others for their failures, they can go so low as to compare themselves to the worst case scenario. They often begin their sentences by saying: “At least…” their benchmark is not at the top, but at the bottom. They don’t seek more, but less. They don’t achieve by moving towards a goal, but by the assurance that there is some distance behind them (whether they themselves have walked that distance or not is irrelevant to them, as long as it’s there).
It doesn’t matter to them whether others are worse than them or not, but whether it is possible to be worse. Since they have not satisfied this possibilities, they think they have accomplished something. They do not seek to develop themselves, but think that they are already more “developed” than the worst case scenario. Just think about the mindset this approach is based on and you will come up with more disadvantages than I can mention in this post.
The only possible advantage of such an approach, which I can think of, but can easily turn into a disadvantage, is to raise one’s self-esteem from zero to a decimal number. That is, there are many people who have such low self-esteem that they need a way to see themselves worth something. If they don’t think they have achieved anything, they hope to raise their self-esteem by knowing they haven’t hit rock bottom. Since there is still some way to go to the bottom, it means they are some way towards the top. This can be used to motivate and inspire them to continue towards the top. But once this person realises that he’s comparing himself to the bottom, that in itself can be crushing to his self-esteem.
4) Evaluating yourself against yourself:
By far the most rewarding approach of all, and the one that best satisfies the meaning of “development” is to evaluate yourself against yourself. What were you like compared to what are you like now? Are you heading in the right direction? Are you getting better or worse? What do you need to do in order to develop from where you are to where you want to be? You can only develop if you change. In order to change, and evaluate change, you must compare yourself against your previous self.
This approach is enriching because you only take your goals into account, and don’t base your judgement on the direction others are heading in. It is also more realistic than comparing yourself to others, because your focus is on yourself and what you can achieve. And the more you know your strengths and weaknesses, the better you are at coming up with a goal to pursue. This approach can certainly make use of others and of an ideal to determine your goal and the criteria by which you evaluate yourself. But the important thing to note is that you do not want to limit the possibility of what you can become on the standard others set, even when you use them as a milestone in your own development. If you wish to develop, you will need to have an ideal to move towards, a future vision of the person you wish to become. But rather than pursue a floating ideal, you will want to see a future you that is better than the person you are today, based on the standards you hold for yourself.
This approach can also be extremely beneficial to those with low self-esteem. Rather than feel disappointed with themselves for achieving less than others, or resorting to evaluating themselves against the worst case, they can shift their focus towards the change they can make within themselves. Change towards the better is always a possibility, and if we acknowledge our abilities and make small investments in ourselves, we can make small achievements that we can stand on to gain more confidence and pursue further development.
