Relationships are woven through almost every part of our lives. They exist not only with our partners, families and friends, but with colleagues, managers and the people we encounter throughout an ordinary day. Some relationships are close and deeply personal. Others are brief or largely practical. Yet all of them have the potential to influence how we feel.
Supportive relationships can give us a sense of connection, belonging and emotional safety. Relationships can also bring out some of our strongest emotional responses. We can feel valued and understood, but also frustrated, criticised, overlooked, rejected or misunderstood.
Whenever two people meet, there is more happening than the words being exchanged. There is what happens within each person, and what happens in the space between them.
The better we understand what happens within us, the better equipped we are to navigate what happens between us.
This is where our sense of self matters.
What is a sense of self?
Our sense of self is our understanding of who we are. It includes knowing what matters to us, what we value, what we need and where our boundaries lie. It also includes understanding what affects us and how we tend to respond when we feel challenged, criticised, rejected, overwhelmed or misunderstood.
In everyday life, this means recognising what is happening within us. For example:
This has triggered something in me.
I’m making an assumption about what that person meant.
My instinct is to become defensive.
I’m agreeing to this because I don’t want to disappoint someone.
Something about this situation doesn’t feel right for me.
That is self-awareness in practice.
A strong sense of self doesn’t mean being highly confident, fiercely independent or unaffected by other people. It means having an internal anchor: being able to adapt, compromise, change our minds and grow without losing our connection with who we are.
When we enter a relationship, we bring ourselves with us.
What happens within us affects what happens between us
We all have situations that affect us more strongly than others. We might be particularly sensitive to criticism, conflict, rejection, feeling ignored or misunderstood, disappointing someone or receiving difficult feedback. These are our triggers.
When we are triggered, we often have familiar ways of protecting ourselves. We might withdraw, become defensive, over-explain, people-please, avoid a difficult conversation, seek reassurance, shut down or try to regain control.
These responses aren’t necessarily character flaws. Often they are coping strategies we have learned because, at some point, they helped us manage difficult feelings or situations. But what once protected us may not always help us today.
In the workplace, these patterns can appear in very ordinary moments. A message from a manager asking to discuss a piece of work might quickly lead us to assume something is wrong. A colleague questioning an idea in a meeting might trigger defensiveness or make us withdraw. Or we might agree to take on more work when we are already at capacity because disappointing someone feels uncomfortable. The situations are different, but each gives us an opportunity to notice what is happening within us before choosing how we want to respond.
Greater self-awareness allows us to notice what is happening and ask:
What has triggered me here?
How do I usually respond when I feel this way?
Is that response going to help me now?
This doesn’t mean another person’s behaviour is acceptable, or that everything we feel is simply a trigger. It means understanding our own response well enough to choose what we do next.
Recognising a response isn’t the same as being ruled by it. Awareness gives us choice.
What happens within us affects what happens between us
We all have situations that affect us more strongly than others. We might be particularly sensitive to criticism, conflict, rejection, feeling ignored or misunderstood, disappointing someone or receiving difficult feedback. These are our triggers.
When we are triggered, we often have familiar ways of protecting ourselves. We might withdraw, become defensive, over-explain, people-please, avoid a difficult conversation, seek reassurance, shut down or try to regain control.
These responses aren’t necessarily character flaws. Often they are coping strategies we have learned because, at some point, they helped us manage difficult feelings or situations. But what once protected us may not always help us today.
In the workplace, these patterns can appear in very ordinary moments. A message from a manager asking to discuss a piece of work might quickly lead us to assume something is wrong. A colleague questioning an idea in a meeting might trigger defensiveness or make us withdraw. Or we might agree to take on more work when we are already at capacity because disappointing someone feels uncomfortable. The situations are different, but each gives us an opportunity to notice what is happening within us before choosing how we want to respond.
Greater self-awareness allows us to notice what is happening and ask:
What has triggered me here?
How do I usually respond when I feel this way?
Is that response going to help me now?
This doesn’t mean another person’s behaviour is acceptable, or that everything we feel is simply a trigger. It means understanding our own response well enough to choose what we do next.
Recognising a response isn’t the same as being ruled by it. Awareness gives us choice.
Understanding the space between us
Every relationship creates a space between two people. We each bring our own experiences, expectations, pressures and sensitivities into that space, influencing how we interpret another person’s behaviour.
This is why two people can experience the same interaction very differently.
One person thinks they are being direct. The other experiences them as critical.
One person becomes quiet because they need time to think. The other interprets their silence as rejection.
One person offers solutions because they want to help. The other simply wants to feel heard.
We can’t always know what is happening for another person, but we can become more aware of what we are bringing to the interaction ourselves:
What actually happened?
What meaning have I given to it?
What do I know, and what am I assuming?
What am I feeling, and what do I need?
Could something be happening for the other person that I don’t know about?
This isn’t about doubting our own experience or excusing someone else’s behaviour. It is about recognising that our interpretation can influence what happens next.
Sometimes that awareness is enough to change the conversation.
Knowing what is ours and what isn’t
A stronger sense of self helps us recognise an important distinction in relationships: what belongs to us, and what belongs to the other person.
Someone can be disappointed with us without that automatically meaning we have done something wrong. Someone can disagree with us without their disagreement invalidating our point of view.
Equally, knowing ourselves means recognising when something genuinely doesn’t feel right. Something can hurt us. A relationship can ask too much of us. A way of being spoken to can be unacceptable.
The aim isn’t to decide that everything is ours or everything is theirs. It is to develop enough awareness to tell the difference.
This is where boundaries become important. A boundary isn’t simply a way of keeping people out. It is an understanding of where I end and you begin.
We can care about another person’s feelings without becoming responsible for them. We can recognise their needs without automatically placing them above our own.
Sometimes a healthy boundary simply communicates: You matter, and I matter too.
Staying ourselves in the presence of difference
Relationships inevitably bring us into contact with difference. We have different personalities, experiences, cultures, values, communication styles and ways of seeing the world. This is particularly relevant in workplaces, where people with different backgrounds, responsibilities and ways of working come together every day.
If our sense of self depends too heavily on another person’s response to us, disagreement can feel threatening. We might become defensive, try to persuade the other person, withdraw or give up our own view simply to restore harmony.
A stronger sense of self gives us another option:
I understand why you see it that way, and I see it differently.
We can be curious about another person’s perspective without having to adopt it. We can also change our minds when someone shows us something we hadn’t considered, rather than because we are uncomfortable with disagreement.
The more secure we are in ourselves, the more room there can be for someone else to be different.
We don’t have to agree in order to remain connected.
When the space between us becomes difficult
Greater self-awareness doesn’t make relationships perfect. We will still misunderstand people, make assumptions, become defensive or say something we later wish we had expressed differently. What matters is what we do next.
Can we recognise when we have made an assumption, become defensive, failed to listen or could have handled something differently?
Acknowledging our part in an interaction requires a strong enough sense of self. There is an important difference between:
I got something wrong.
There is something wrong with me.
If acknowledging a mistake feels like a judgement on who we are, we are more likely to defend ourselves or justify what happened. But when we can separate our behaviour from our worth, we have more room to take responsibility.
We can apologise, clarify, listen and learn. Sometimes we can simply say, “I don’t think that went quite how either of us intended. Can we try again?” This is repair.
Healthy relationships don’t require perfection. They require the ability to recognise when something has gone wrong and, where possible, return to the space between us differently.
Developing a stronger sense of self
A stronger sense of self develops through building a stronger relationship with ourselves. And like any relationship, that begins with getting to know the person we are in relationship with.
Understanding ourselves can mean becoming curious about how we became who we are. We are all shaped by our experiences, relationships and the environments we have lived in. Some of what we believe about ourselves, other people and relationships was formed long before we consciously thought about it.
Developing a stronger sense of self involves beginning to make those connections. We might notice that criticism affects us particularly strongly, that we find it difficult to disappoint people, that conflict makes us want to withdraw or that we quickly feel responsible for how someone else is feeling. Rather than judging these responses, we can become curious about where they may have come from and why they still appear today.
As we understand ourselves more deeply, our familiar patterns and triggers begin to make more sense. And when we can recognise what is being activated within us, we create a little more space between an automatic reaction and what we choose to do next.
At the same time, we can become more intentional about the person we want to be now. We can listen more closely to our own experience, become clearer about what matters to us and notice where our choices are being shaped by old patterns rather than what feels right for us today.
We don’t have to reject the person we learned to be. Many of our patterns developed for good reasons. But understanding them gives us the opportunity to decide what we want to carry forward and what we may be ready to do differently.
The more we understand what has shaped us, the more freedom we have to shape what comes next.
A stronger sense of self creates more choice
A strong sense of self isn’t something we either have or don’t have. It is something we can continue to develop, often through our relationships with other people.
This can also play an important part in our mental wellbeing. When we understand ourselves better, we may spend less time caught in assumptions, replaying difficult interactions or feeling responsible for things that don’t belong to us. We can recognise when something has affected us, understand why, and respond with greater awareness. Over time, this can help reduce some of the emotional strain that relationships can create and give us a steadier place from which to navigate both work and everyday life.
The aim isn’t to become less affected by others. Relationships matter because we are affected by one another. Nor is it about becoming harder, more self-contained or less willing to compromise.
The more secure our connection with ourselves becomes, the more freedom we have in the space between us.
We can be open without becoming lost. We can care without carrying everything. We can adapt without continually abandoning ourselves. We can meet difference without it threatening who we are.
The better we understand what happens within us, the more choice we have about what happens between us.
Key Takeaways
- Self-awareness gives us choice. The more we understand our triggers and familiar responses, the more choice we have about what we do next.
- Our interpretation matters. What happens and the meaning we give to what happens are not always the same thing.
- Know what is yours and what isn’t. We can care about another person’s feelings without becoming responsible for them.
- Difference doesn’t have to mean disconnection. We can understand another person’s perspective while still holding our own.
- Healthy relationships include repair. Getting something wrong doesn’t mean there is something wrong with us.
- Stay connected to yourself while connecting with others. A stronger sense of self gives us a steadier place from which to meet one another.
Further reading
If you would like to explore the idea of sense of self in more depth, you may find my earlier article, The Confidence Myth: Why Self-Esteem Isn’t the Whole Story, helpful. It looks more closely at how our sense of self develops, how we can lose connection with ourselves and what can help us begin to reconnect.