By Izzy Gesell. M.ED, CSP izzy@izzyg.com www.izzyg.com

“Quality begins on the inside… and then works its way out.”  ~Bob Moawad

In the ongoing quest for quality and continuous improvement, a somewhat under-explored area is our own self-discovery. When faced with a problem, we focus our objective understanding outwardly more often than inwardly. Time and again our quality-driven discussion revolves on quantifiable strategies and tactics rather than the beliefs and convictions and we and the others involved bring to the task.

All of us have things that we do not recognize in ourselves, either because of our physical makeup or because of events in our earlier life. Our field would be well served by helping individuals spend more time on self-discovery because that would help each of us better understand the unrecognizable biases we bring into our work.

Don’t we know ourselves pretty well already? After all, we spend a lot of time in from of the mirror and a lot of time being evaluated. We’ve been analyzed through personality profiles, 360 evaluations and a host of other appraisals. Surely, we are as transparent as a newly installed pane of glass. In many ways we are more transparent to other people and they end up knowing us better than we know ourselves. So many of us have a stylized image of who we are and what we look like in the world that when we look in the mirror we tend to see the person we’d like to be, not the person we objectively are.

Think back to the first time you heard yourself on your answering machine. Very likely you thought, “That’s not what I sound like.” “That’s exactly what you sound like,” was the opinion of the friend standing right next to you. And how many of us love to see ourselves s on video? Not too many. Why? Because video shows us an unexpected perspective.

I remember the first time I saw myself on video. Back in the late-1970’s I was videotaped teaching an elementary school class. The tape was shown at a training session and there I was– on screen and in living black and white. I cringed, poked the person next to me and asked, “doesn’t TV make you look 10 pounds heavier?” He looked at me, then at the screen and said, “No, it looks just like you.” My ego deflated faster than an air mattress on a bed of nails. It was painful to see my image reflected in another person.

This ability to see ourselves reflected off other people is a powerful tool for self-discovery. We get to see a different perspective on ourselves and we can learn something about ourselves by accepting the fact that the perception is true for that person. This learning adjusts our own mirrors and filters.

Another way to use the reflecting properties of others is codified in the speeches and writings of

Byron Katie. She believes that although we’re often told not to judge others, we still do it all the time. Using her method, rather than suppress these judgments, we use them as “starting points for self-realization”. By acknowledging and investigating the judging we discover, through the mirror of those around us, what we haven’t yet realized about ourselves. Her website (www.thework.org) has the rationale and worksheets readily available.

As Wayne Dyer puts it, “When you judge another, you do not define them, you define yourself.” So start judging others and by doing that, you’ll start redefining yourself.