Specific words can evoke strong emotions, and for some people, the word “evaluation” is one of them.
What comes to your mind when you hear “evaluation”? Does it remind you of school days, of teachers constantly evaluating your work? (perhaps with disappointing findings?)
Or maybe you associate evaluation with the workplace. Here, we have managers or other people in positions of authority who let us know, often in a formal meeting, whether we are measuring up. Or not.
Evaluation can be stressful, especially if we are feeling vulnerable about whether we are indeed meeting expectations. Discouragement can also raise its ugly head, made worse if we don’t know or understand the standard that is being used for the evaluation. How can we meet an expectation if it’s not clear to us?
Fortunately, at least in theory, evaluations are done with respect to a standard. In the workplace, our performance would be compared with a job description or a set of requirements. In a school, the evaluation is with respect to a standard of knowledge or skill.
While some may view evaluation as a judgmental, anxiety-producing experience, it has a very good and necessary purpose. For example, it’s comforting to know that your electrician has been proven to have the skills and understanding necessary to safely and competently wire your house. That proof comes from comparing the aspiring electrician’s actions and knowledge to a standard. The electrician has been evaluated.
An important component of Reality Therapy is referred to as “self-evaluation.” This is also an evaluation, however, as the name implies, self-evaluation means that we do the evaluation ourselves.
By now, you may be thinking that you’ve been doing self-evaluation all your life. Exactly! We learn a great deal through our experiences, seeing what we’ve done and how that’s worked out for us. Some of what we’ve learned is so obvious that we might not even consider it learning. For example, we don’t put our fingers in the mousetrap, do we? We’ve learned something about that, whether directly from our own experience, or, less painfully for us, through observation or the experience of others.
If evaluation compares to a standard, what is the standard we use when we’re self-evaluating?
For our mousetrap activities, we could say that the standard for a good result is “no pain.” When you think about it, the “pain-free standard” is a pretty helpful guide for a lot of choices!
However, “pain-free” is not the only standard we use for making decisions. Consider a more general standard, such as “what is important to me.” According to this standard, we would compare the results of what we’ve been doing to what is important to us. Are we making positive progress, no progress, or worse, actually getting less of what is important to us?
For example, a particular relationship might be important to us. We could evaluate how we have been communicating with that person, and whether it has led to a more pleasant, productive relationship or a more difficult, contentious one. Based on what we learn, we could then follow up by either continuing to do what we have been doing or we could make a change.
It can be a surprise when we see people, perhaps even ourselves, acting in ways that clearly lead us in directions that are opposite to what we believe that we want. Self-evaluation offers us the opportunity to really think about what’s important to us, and can help us understand why we are, or are not, making progress on what matters.
Do you self-evaluate? How do you do that?
