Someone recently wrote with a question that felt important to share more broadly:
“How do we develop greater objectivity about ourselves? What I am wondering about is the stories we hold about how others see us, and how those can be totally skewed and completely off. How do we get back to a more normal curve of folks’ perspectives on us?”
I love this question! And will start with an existential disclaimer that we can never really know how others see us—each person is a contained, complex world of experience, perceptions, ancestry, genetics, narratives, and relations—impossible to ever get the full truth of. As Salman Rushdie so poignantly said, “to understand just one life you have to swallow the world.”
But that isn’t very useful in the context of work, so let’s bring this down to a more practical level. “How others see us” is an essential component of leadership and career development, something people often miss in the earlier stages of professional life. It’s not just our skills and abilities that move us forward, but also being aware of (and influencing) how others see us—our strengths, weaknesses, style, and impact.
Now, the fact that you asked that question means you’ve already taken the first step—you’ve realized that we don’t see the world objectively, but that our perception is always filtered through the lens of stories (as the apocryphal saying goes, “We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are.”). This is just a feature of being human, stories allow us to create efficiencies about how we understand the world so that we can take action.
But sometimes these stories can be “totally skewed and completely off”. In leadership, and in life, the ability to assess our stories for coherence with the world around us is an important skill. If we act from stories that are skewed, then the choices we make may not serve us as powerfully as we had hoped.
Interestingly, thanks to negativity bias, the stories that are most likely to be skewed are the ones that assume people don’t like us or think poorly of us in some way. From early childhood we are attuned to signals that inform us of any threat to safety and belonging, signals that are largely non-verbal. Facial expressions, body language, energy shifts, withdrawal or aggression—each family system has ways to cultivate “acceptable” behavior, and thus belonging.
That sensitivity comes with us to the workplace, and we unconsciously scan for anything that could challenge our sense of who we are and how we belong. Which means that if someone unknowingly engages in similar cues, ones that are familiar from our upbringing, we might start to experience discomfort, fear, and uncertainty. The difference is that their behavior is almost 100% not driven by the same reasons as it was in your family, but your nervous system doesn’t know that. And suddenly you are in grip of a skewed story.
Without realizing this is happening, most people take the logical next step of trying to see themselves through the other person’s eyes. But when a leader is fused with strong emotions this becomes a futile task. The discomfort of anger or shame has them “leave” themselves to observe from the outside, in an attempt to distance themselves from uncomfortable feelings. The emotion, however, isn’t left behind but comes along and gets added to the story of how others see them. There is no way for the leader to get a normal curve of understanding because they are functioning from within their own emotional constructs, like being trapped in an infinity mirror.
The Manager and Maggie
I’ve been talking a bit abstractly here, so let’s look at an example of what this looks like in a typical day at the office:
Let’s say you are the head of a team and you are in a 1:1 with a direct report. We’ll call them Maggie. You say something that feels normal and everyday to you and you notice Maggie gets quiet and withdraws. Your mom also had a pattern of withdrawing and this activates in you a subtle fear you did something wrong.
After the 1:1 you begin to wonder if you are a bad manager. Feeling the edges of shame, you disconnect from yourself and try to see through Maggie’s eyes. The problem is that when you try to do this while gripped by shame (or another strong emotion), you project your own inner critic onto her—thinking she is judging you, when that harsh voice is actually yours.
Meanwhile, from Maggie’s perspective, you happened to use a phrase that a terrible manager from her past used a lot, and her brain just flashed back to that experience. Maggie’s body was in the meeting, but her mind was ruminating in the past. She was fully hooked into this experience and it wasn’t until after the meeting that she started to come back to present and get on with her day. At which point she felt grateful to be in a place with a much more caring and capable manager.
What happened here? A single phrase whisked Maggie into a visceral experience from the past. And you, her manager, having observed the outward manifestation of Maggie’s “time travel” as withdrawal, experience a sense of alarm and twist yourself up trying to see yourself from her perspective. Which you can’t, because you are standing in your own sense of discomfort or shame about having caused Maggie to withdraw, so you can only see yourself through your own stories that you are misattributing to Maggie.
So what can we do?
Stay Connected
Trying to see ourselves from someone else’s perspective often requires us to disconnect from our own experience. And when this happens, we are most likely to find ourselves inside an infinity mirror.
So the first step is to stay connected to yourself. To be aware of and feel your thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations, without judgement, and let them bring information to you. This includes sensations that don’t feel great, and emotions we typically categorize as “negative” (there is no such thing, by the way!). Doing this without going into story or trying to immediately figure it out will strengthen your ability to observe yourself, others, and what is happening in the larger environment.
Staying connected, in the example with Maggie, would have looked like noticing Maggie suddenly got quiet and seemed to be somewhere else, and when that happened something also started to happen in you. Stay anchored in what is happening in your body—you might notice tightness in your chest, a feeling of sleepiness, streaming energy, etc. And then just note and name it: “when Maggie got quiet, I felt a a tightness in my belly and a sense of uncertainty,” and let that be enough.
This ability to note and name is something that, with practice, you can also do out loud in conversation with other people. When someone gets unusually or unexpectedly quiet in a 1:1, for example you pause and just share what you are sensing and feeling, “Something just changed and I notice I feel a sense of hesitation and uncertainty. What happened for you?”
Nothing like going direct to the source to find out what is going on. :)
Out there vs in here
A parallel process that works well with noticing and naming, is the ability to distinguish between what is happening outside of you, and what is happening inside. This is the difference between data and stories.
Data is something a camera would record, and belongs to the person or thing being observed, “out there” in the world. It is more descriptive and “factual” and has to do with the past and present. Data is not influenced by moods and emotions.
Stories add layers of meaning to data, and belong to the observer and say more about the observer and their internal world than the thing being observed. Stories are greatly influenced by moods and emotions and can be either be grounded or ungrounded. Grounded stories are backed up by observable data, while ungrounded stories tend to be based mostly on “vibes”.
As I said at the beginning of this piece, it’s not a problem that we navigate the world through stories, but we want those stories to be thoroughly grounded in data. Learning to do this as a leader can lead to greater clarity, stronger relationships, and a lot more curiosity (and if you’ve been reading me for any amount of time, you know how I feel about curiosity!).
A useful way to practice this is with the “Left Hand Column” technique developed by Chris Argyris. You can do this live in a meeting (probably don’t do it in a 1:1 until you’ve had a little practice) or reflectively about a conversation, interaction, meeting, etc.
It’s super simple:
- On a piece of paper (or digital notebook/board), create two columns.
- Label the left hand column “Stories”. This is where you will capture what you are thinking and feeling.
- Label the right hand column “Data”. This is where you put what is being said or observed.
- As the meeting progresses, simply fill out each column.
So for example, if someone says, “I’d like to see more data on that,” and that person happens to be someone you don’t particular get along with, your Left Hand Column might say something like, “So-and-so is always so skeptical and never trusts anyone… it slows us down so much!”.
That’s pretty much it. Courageous teams can actually share the Left Hand Column with each other, though that requires some additional guidance and this issue has already gone long!
So when a thought comes up about how someone is seeing you and you suspect your story might be kinda skewed, pause and look at the observable data you have. And then assess how much that data can really tell you, and where you might be filling in with extra story. As a former colleague liked to say, “In the absence of information, people fill in the apocalypse.”
Of course, asking people directly or using tools like a well-designed 360 can give you useful information about how others perceive you. But remember! You can never really know. Each person is a world, and their perception of you is filtered through their own stories. The best use of your energy is to stay grounded in your own experience, work with your own perceptive abilities, and trust that clarity within yourself creates clarity in how you show up for others.
