Developing self awareness homework

Well this is a sorry little can of worms to have opened. Today I worked through the homework pack for the session on Tuesday for MIE. There were little exercises that you do and one was "write down the adjectives that describe you" Then there was the question the answer to which indicated that not one of the adjectives I used described how I see me, I'd answered the question "Write down the adjectives that describe how you think other people see you". Which lead to the whole sorry rehashing of the "I feel invisible" self image thing that so much of what I am revolves around. It's not that I don't think I am visible, but that I want my impact on others to be minimal - because that would be suggesting I was actually important. Quite a quandary - of course you want to matter to people, but I don't want to be inconvenient and I only want to have positive impacts on people and ... Hmmm The down side is of course I underestimate me a lot, I probably underachieve considerably and I get wound up about things too much, the up side is I can be mediator and see both sides of an argument very easily. I had forgotten the whole invisible me thing - in my newer more shiny cheery life that I have had recently so it was a surprise to find it is still alive and well lurking in my mind. Probably aggravated by certain amounts of new people of value to my partner not appearing to have warmed to me, and me being a little not sure where I stand with them, and others who have, but my line of connection is still through partner. One of those "it's been 6 months" kind of things.

So self image - not too positive but I'm quite used to living with this - I feel it drives a lot of my thirst for knowledge, however it may block my putting that knowledge to constructive use. Therefore I think the logical thing to do is to put this exploration on the back burner until I complete my PCM otherwise the potential trauma of it's resolution could significantly block the completion of the course - which wouldn't do my self image any good at all!

The final chunk of this work was a lot more positive - it was about how groups interact - public Arena/internal stuff. That was good - could spot people in may teams I have worked in as the extremes of this. Despite my potentially destructive self image I think I have a pretty healthy public arena within the group I work in - however not convinced that the "interviewer" mode that my boss seems to fall in is the best mode for the manager of our current team in light of last weeks team day. I'm not sure that it would be wise to introduce this concept to him right now though!