Ask a friend.

Here's something nobody tells you: you are genuinely terrible at seeing yourself clearly.

Not because you're not self-aware. Not because you don't try. But because you've been living inside your own head for so long that you've completely lost perspective. It's like trying to smell your own house. You stopped noticing years ago.

A fish doesn't know it's wet. And you have absolutely no idea what you look like from the outside.

Which is where your friends come in. Lucky them.

Here's how we get ourselves wrong — and we all do, every single one of us, no exceptions:

We overestimate our flaws. The things we're most ashamed of, most convinced are written all over our faces? Most people haven't noticed. We're walking around carrying these enormous, mortifying things like they're obvious to everyone in the room, and meanwhile the room is just... living its life, completely unbothered.

And we underestimate our strengths. Not the ones we know about, those we've claimed. The ones that have been with us so long we've stopped seeing them. The things that come so easily we've assumed everyone can do them.

Spoiler: they can't. They're yours. Specific, unrepeatable, completely yours. And the people around you have been experiencing them, benefiting from them, sometimes quietly depending on them while you've been busy cataloguing everything you're not.

The gap between who you think you are and who you actually are to the people around you is one of the most fascinating places to explore. This exercise goes straight there.

The exercise is simple.

Ask three people who actually know you and crucially; who will be honest with you, to name three of your best qualities and three of your worst. No softening. No diplomatic packaging. No “well it depends.” Just their honest, unfiltered read.

Here's what happened when I did it.

The worst qualities landed differently than I expected. Most of them I already knew. Seeing them written down by people who love me didn't shock me, it just confirmed what I'd been either quietly avoiding or actively chipping away at was something to be tended to. And weirdly? That was a relief. You're not imagining it. It's real. And real things can actually be worked with. Sweet.

The best qualities were where it got genuinely surprising.

Almost without exception, the things people named as my greatest strengths were the ones I'd been overlooking or actively dismissing as nothing special. They'd name something and I'd think that's not a quality, that's just how I am.
Yes. Exactly. That's precisely what a strength is. Something so naturally yours that you've stopped counting it as anything remarkable.

That moment; reading someone put into words a quality in you that you'd never thought to claim, is one of the most quietly corrective experiences you can have. Not because it inflates your ego. Because it calibrates it.

And then something else happened. I stopped just sitting with those strengths and started asking a different question: what would it look like to actually lean into these? To stop accidentally doing them and start doing them on purpose?

Because awareness is only half the job. The real move is taking what you now know about yourself and using it as fuel. If three people independently name your ability to make others feel seen...That's not a personality quirk, that's a superpower waiting to be deployed. If everyone mentions your relentless creativity, stop treating it like a hobby and start treating it like the engine it is.

Your strengths, fully owned and consciously harnessed, are what propel you toward the highest version of yourself. Not the version you're performing. The one you actually are, turned all the way up.

One more reveal...

The impact you have isn't uniform. Different people experience completely different versions of you, not because you're performing, but because different relationships draw out different things. One person names your loyalty. Another names your creativity. A third names the way you make them feel seen.

All true. All the same person. All completely invisible to you because you've only ever been on the inside.

You are more multidimensional than you think. And you've been leaving some of your best qualities completely unclaimed simply because nobody ever handed them back to you.

Until now.

Your exercise:

Ask three people — people who've seen you at your best and your worst and who respect you enough to be straight with you — for three best qualities and three worst.

Read it without reacting. Sit with what surprises you and address what's worth leaning into or out of.

Want to go deeper? Run it across different areas of your life. Ask a past romantic partner, a family member, a colleague, someone who knew you five years ago. Compare what comes back. The qualities that show up everywhere — across every relationship, every context — those are your core. So fundamentally you that nothing can hide them.

You can't build something real from a distorted picture of yourself. So go get the accurate one.

I may not know you but I can guarantee you're more powerful and certainly more interesting than you think.

Happy hotlining!