Who Turned Out The Lights?

When I was a senior in high school, I studied Psychology. Because the course was an elective, we had students from each grade (9-12) and a good mixture of boys and girls. I have to be honest here; I found some of the younger class members to be really annoying. I don’t know if it was just because they were younger and I was A Senior, or if it was just because I didn’t much care for their personalities. You can imagine my dismay at one of our assignments: we were to write something nice about each person in the class. It was extremely difficult to say something nice about somebody I didn’t particularly like, while keeping it meaningful (IE, not copping out with something like, “You have nice hair.”)

Ultimately, the teacher wrote for each student a compilation of the nice things that were said. My list went something like this: funny, positive, outgoing, nice, funny, outgoing, positive, positive, outgoing, nice, nice, and nice. I was immediately suspicious. I’ll give them funny, but if I were writing a list about myself, “positive” and “outgoing” wouldn’t have been on there. It made me wonder: did these students know me better than I knew myself, or did they not know me at all?

While I was described as being positive, I would have considered myself to be a pessimist. However, I realized then that being positive was much more beneficial to me as a person…so I worked to change my half-empty into a half-full. I will admit that I’m not entirely positive these years later – I am still a bit moody – but I do try. I definitely wouldn’t have described myself as outgoing, and I don’t know that I would even today. I like being one-on-one, but I don’t like being in a big group. However, understanding that quiet people are sometimes mistaken as snobs, I have worked on at least greeting others and carrying on small talk.

The way we perceive ourselves and the way others perceive us are insights to who we really are. I’ve heard it said that character is who we are in the dark. That is, character is who we perceive ourselves to be, while reputation is how others perceive us. The trick is getting the two to match. I took what I thought were the better traits and made those as goals. Lucky for me, though, it was the reputation side of things that listed the better traits. It would have been much more difficult had my reputation been a list of wrongs. I’m convinced, though, that character can be changed, whatever the situation, when one has an honest heart and a willingness to try.

How about you? Do your character and reputation match? Is there anything about yourself that you need to change to be a better person?