A large proportion of ourself, is relatively invisible to others; our personality, our thoughts, our history, our life experiences, our values and beliefs, our knowledge, our vulnerability, our imaginings, and so on.

These become visible when we speak and when we act.
Because it is not possible for people to communicate every aspectof their inner selves all the time we have developed a human capacity to interpret, to make assumptions and to analyse situations. We need to make sense of people’s behaviour in order to interactand so we begin the process. » Read the full article and add your comments «

When I reflect back on my past I realise that ‘not knowing’ myself created many difficulties, especially to close relationships.

When I look around me I realise that I am not alone in this, most people have been caught in the web of ‘not knowing’ at some time in their lives.
Some typical behaviours that I see of ‘not knowing’ are:

• lack of authenticity
• blaming others for personal difficulties
• criticising and judging others
• expecting others to know us » Read the full article and add your comments «

Confidence comes with believing in ourselves and valuing who we are as a person.

We can unwittingly undermine other peoples confidence by directly relating what people DO with WHO they are as a person when they have done something wrong.

For example:

Two year old Zoe has been writing on the wall, her mother comes in and says that she is a bad girl, Zoe’s confidence is affected because she relates badness to who she is rather than what she has been doing — and this becomes the pattern of her life if mother and authority figures continue to give her feedback in this way.

If her mother had said » Read the full article and add your comments «

An interesting phenomenon that occurs in relationships is where extreme behaviours exist which are mirrored as polar opposites.

For instance if you are fairly chaotic in the way that you live your life you might find yourself with a partner who consistently acts in a highly organised manner.

These extremes can have a balancing effect on a relationship as well as providing the relationship with a much wider range of skills and understanding than each individual has on their own.This means that » Read the full article and add your comments «

One way of discovering who we are is to look inside ourselves and ‘self reflect’. This is the root of awareness.

We also need to balance this by looking at ourselves in relation to others, by treating our world as one great big mirror  in which we can see many reflections of ourselves.Without others we are unable to see these reflections. We experience this reflective behaviour in many ways, much of the time out of our awareness.

For example;

• if we enjoy debate people will engage with us in debate and discussion
• if we are lively and full of fun, then the chances are that we will evoke fun and liveliness in others; they will enjoy our company:
• if we care about ourselves other people will care about us too.The opposite also happens; if we don’t care about ourselves then we might find that others don’t give us the level of caring that we would like to have;
• if we are feeling stressed, some people around us will probably show signs of stress also;
• if we deny certain feelings and emotions in ourselves the chancesare that when we see these emotions in others we will feel uncomfortable. » Read the full article and add your comments «