What Is The Reputation You'd Like To Earn With Yourself?

When you get to know people, you are, in part, building a reputation with each other. "What kind of person is he?" "How does she handle a difficult situation?" "What kind of attitude does he bring to his work?" "How does she respond to confrontation or adversity?"

Over time, we learn whether a given person is honest, whether they can be relied upon, how playful they are, to what degree their actions reflect what they say. We get a sense of their style, their likes and their dislikes.

There are multitudes of small interactions that give us information about a person's character and personality, values and integrity. Over time we come to decide whether this is the kind of person we want to spend time with, whether we like how we feel when we're with them.

And they learn and make decisions about us.

Part of what we do in this back and forth of getting to know each other is determining whose feedback matters to us. A lecture on honesty from a dishonest person, or on manners from a rude person, is not worth listening to – unless they are a formerly dishonest or rude person who has learned something important from their past.

Here is a piece that is often missing: We watch ourselves just like we watch others, and we develop a reputation with ourselves accordingly.

This is the essence of earned self-esteem.

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