The Challenges of Self Evaluation
We hardly take soul-searching seriously unless we are hit with a crisis like a painful relationship breakdown, a major work failure, financial crisis, death of a near and dear one or any other shocking loss.
But evaluating yourself is not as simple as boiling an egg or potato. Unfortunately, honest self evaluation is one of the hardest skills to master. One and the most important reason is that there is, in fact, no fixed “self” entity that can be evaluated. Other, but no less important, reason is that people tend to be self serving in their thoughts and thus it becomes very risky thing to do. According to psychologists or mind experts, self-serving bias is a type of cognitive bias in which an individual distorts reality in order to protect their ego or false image. This bias frequently manifests as a tendency to attribute success to the self and failure to external causes. It also creates an image of our choice: that we are always right and other are always wrong. However, it can be harmful or problematic: If we do not attribute our failures to our own mistakes or don’t see our flaws, then we are less likely to learn from our mistakes and avoid making them in the future enabling us continuing our journey towards self-improvement and reaching our true potential. Ultimately we keep moving in circles as can be the case with most people.
Thus being self aware is central to what it means to be a human consequently enabling you to evaluate yourself honestly as a true human being because it gives you wisdom and courage to recognize your strengths as well as your flaws/challenges. According to psychologists, “self-awareness is the ability to focus on yourself and how your actions, thoughts, or emotions do or don’t align with your internal standards. If you’re highly self-aware, you can objectively evaluate yourself, manage your emotions, align your behavior with your values, and understand correctly how others perceive you.”
However, for most people self evaluation involves looking into a carnival mirror, with all the information warped, distorted, and blurred. Everyone, among us, has been gifted with unique traits and at the same time has his/her share of negatives and positives. No one is perfect and everyone is, always, going through a constant and never ending change and thus learning process. Sometimes we may even regress instead of progressing.
In view of the above, we can say that accurate and meaningful self-assessment appears to be difficult or, as some would propose, even impossible. And although there are lot of benchmarks to evaluate yourself but you may still be clueless as to the efficacy of results and evaluation exercise. However, to some extent you can have an idea with reference to your so-called or not so-called goals or beliefs. Thus there are some major and popular benchmarks that can be used for a general assessment:
- RELIGION:
According to a research, there is thought to be a correlation between the way one views oneself or ones self-esteem/self image, and religious involvement. Nearly all religions encourage their respective believers to surrender to God and to judge the self from God’s perspective. And as the most people on the planet seem to be believers, it is the most acceptable and recognized standard or index for self-evaluation though mostly with reference to the moral and ethical performance/righteousness. Reportedly repentance is also believed to be the beginning of self-awareness and thus self-evaluation as it turns the heart and mind away from the self-deception of worldly success/failure, good/bad. But the problem lies in the different interpretations and understanding of one’ formal faiths and beliefs. And you may get more befuddled than unraveled. There are lot of signals and significations that might make your head spin like a Toy Top. So be careful while using this index. Moreover, religious views on the self also vary widely as the self is a complex concept: first as the subject which thinks, feels, and wills; second as the body of the self and third as the combination of the two. Moreover, most people have shallow understanding of religious teachings and believe more in rituals than believe and understand actual teachings.
- SOCIETAL STANDARDS:
Scholars agree that self has meaning only within the social context, and it is not wrong to say that the social situation defines our self-concept and our self-esteem. We rely on others to provide a “social reality” — to help us determine what to think, feel, and do (Hardin & Higgins, 1996). Thus in social context, self-evaluation usually refers to the self-perceived social ranking one has towards themselves as we are heavily influenced by the social forces that surround us. Feedback from family, friends, co workers etc. is crucial to help evaluate your weaknesses and strengths, your achievements and failures and your life direction in general. Are you rich or poor? Beautiful or ugly? Smart or not? Educated or not? Good or bad at playing video games or cricket? However, this is just a superficial and very narrow standard of self-evaluation. In a study two lower-class individuals who received a low (versus equal) share of economic resources in an economic game scenario reported more negative self-conscious emotions — a correlate of negative self-evaluation — relative to upper-class individuals.
Although both standards are used for a general self-assessment, but problem with both approaches is that a person’s self-evaluation is usually similar to the so-called self esteem (that is mostly based on our opinions and beliefs about ourselves) and thus can create confusion rather than clarity. Moreover, in both standards or criteria, we are repeatedly labeled and evaluated by others and thus when we adopt others’ labels explicitly into our self-concept, true self-evaluation can become an exercise in futility.
Here comes a less known but very innovative and creative tool that seems more effective than the above two and it is called
Heartbeat Perception or Interoceptive Awareness (IA):
Self evaluation is not just evaluating your failure or success or right or wrong in terms of a particular goal/achievement but in the context of an overall life purpose. If you want to evaluate your whole being with reference to life’s general direction and in the context of right or wrong path, then, the best way out is to consult your inner feelings, your conscience, your heart. According to a study, the extent to which a person is aware of their internal bodily signals is known as interoceptive awareness (IA). In other words, it is conscious perception, or awareness, of sensations arising from the body or the conscious perception of bodily signals influenced by one’s experiences that give rise to an overall condition of the body, detecting signals arising from the inner organs, the processes/mechanisms of visceral sensory psychobiology, the representation and perception of physiological feedback, and more simply, the awareness of bodily signals (Barrett, Quigley, Bliss-Moreau, & Aronson, 2004; Cameron 2001; Mehling, Price, Daubenmier, Acree, Bartmess, & Stewart, 2012; Mussgay, Klinkenberg,& Ruddel, 1999; Weins, 2005).
This varies between individuals and is generally assessed using a heartbeat perception task. Other recent studies have attempted to link this sensory perception of the body from within, measured by heartbeat perceptions, to the sensory perception of the body from the outside. For example, individuals with low interoceptive awareness have been shown to experience a stronger rubber hand illusion. This suggests that the difficulty these people have attending to their internal body signals is accompanied by a less accurate sense of their bodies as perceived externally. Conversely, when people with low interoceptivve awareness pay attention to their bodies from an external perspective, during mirror self observation, this enhances the accuracy with which they perceive their internal heartbeat cues.
Leaving technical jargon aside, what our heart tells us is neither wrong nor too late.
What the above quote seems to denote is that trust this internal guidance system to lead you down the right path. The more you tune in, the more it’ll tell you. Here I am a reproducing an excerpt from the osho.ocm that seems to be the best explanation of the Buddha’s quote:
“The impatient mind is too occupied in questioning. it forgets that questioning in itself is a meaningless activity — the real thing is the answer, but for the answer you need a certain silence, peace, openness and receptivity. The mind (or logic) is incapable of these qualities; hence for thousands of years mind has been asking and asking but finds no answer.
In the world of mind there are only questions. And in the world of the heart there is only the answer, because heart knows how not to ask, how to wait — let the spring come by itself; wait like a thirsty earth, the rainclouds will come, they have always been coming. There is no need to distrust, because there is not even a single exception where trust has failed, where waiting is not fulfilled, where where patience is not immensely rewarded… The mind creates philosophies, theologies, and ideologies — they are all questions that don’t have any answer. The heart simply waits. At the right moment, the answer blossoms by itself.
But then it is also said that human heart is also or can also be deceitful. According to Bible, our hearts are deceitful because we are sinful. God created us good, yet we chose to sin and disobey God (Genesis 3).
Here is the answer:
In the bestseller novel “The Alchemist,” Santiago (Shepherd boy, the protagonist of The Alchemist who is traveling from Andalusia in southern Spain to the Egyptian pyramids in search of hidden treasure) also learns from the alchemist that each person’s heart emerges from the Soul of the World. Because Santiago’s heart connects him to the Soul of the World, Santiago must learn to listen to it properly. Santiago’s heart does not always influence him in positive ways, though. It expresses fear, yearns for Fatima, and otherwise distracts Santiago from following his Personal Legend. Santiago goes as far as to call his heart a traitor, and wonders why he should listen to such a discouraging thing. The alchemist explains that the heart never stays silent, so Santiago must come to terms with it. In other words, Santiago must learn to separate himself from the desires of his heart. Only by paying attention to his heart and understanding its “dodges and tricks” can Santiago tame it and turn it into an ally.
And lastly, according to Osho, man exists on three planes:
the head — the world of thoughts, the thinking process — the most superficial plane.
Below it is the heart — the world of feelings, emotions, sentiments — a little deeper than thought, but not the deepest. And the third is the realm of being — no thought, no feeling — you simply are.
Conclusion:
Always listen to your heart with patience and you have a right and correct measure. Actually your inner voice and feeling are the true index for the purpose of your evaluation. Know that your deeper feelings are never wrong.
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References:
i) https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/self-serving-bias
ii) https://www.betterup.com/blog/what-is-self-awareness
iii) https://therapidian.org/ethics-and-religion-talk-self-awareness
iv) plos.org./plosone/article.
