What if what you’re demanding from someone else were a signal about you?
Maybe there’s something there you’ve gone a long time without looking at.
Today I want to tell you about something that took me a while to see, and that settled something in me once I saw it.
It has to do with a word I used a lot.
Consistency.
It matters to me. It always has. That what someone says and what someone does are the same thing. I looked for it in the people I worked with, I named it in my conversations, I quietly held it against people when I couldn’t find it.
And for years I didn’t notice what I was doing every time I asked for it.
Let me tell you how I figured it out.
A while back I was sitting in a parking lot, waiting for my son to finish basketball practice. That dead time, phone in hand, watching people walk by.
And a message came in. A woman who follows me online wrote to say she’d liked something I posted. She ended with two words: so consistent.
I sat there with the phone in my hand for a long time.
Because right there, reading those two words someone was handing me, I saw all at once what I did with them when I was the one asking.
Every time I asked for it out there, I was pointing at something happening in here.
Not always the same thing. But always something of mine.
And here’s the uncomfortable part: asking for it was already a judgment.
In psychology, this is called projection,
a mechanism described through Anna Freud’s work on the defenses of the ego: what we don’t recognize in ourselves, we tend to see with total clarity in other people — and react to with an intensity the situation doesn’t quite warrant.
Which is why whatever irritates you most about someone is usually information about you.
In everyday life, it’s simpler than that.
Someone doesn’t follow through and it bothers you — and that same week you’d been putting off something of your own.
Someone talks too much and it gets under your skin — and you’ve spent days saying things you don’t mean.
Someone won’t take responsibility and it weighs on you — and there’s something of yours you’re waiting for someone else to solve.
It’s not always exact. But there’s almost always a thread.
And I want to say this carefully, because it isn’t about no longer seeing what you see.
It’s about looking at your own part first.}
Consistency starts with you. What’s out there isn’t the problem. It’s the mirror.
I’ve lived differently since then. When something bothers me about someone, I don’t go out to correct it anymore.
I ask myself what it’s showing me.
And there’s almost always an answer.
The strange part is that since I stopped asking for it out there, I find it more often.
Not because people changed. Because where I’m looking from did.
I’m Saskia Fulco.
And this space is for exactly that — so what you see in others stops being a complaint, and becomes information about you.
No pressure. At your own pace.
If you want to keep going from here, I wrote a book about this — about deciding from your own identity instead of from what’s expected of you. It’s called Learning to Be, and you can find it on Amazon if you’d like to have it close.
And if reading this brought up something of yours you’d like to look at more closely, with someone alongside you, the consulting application is open. I’ll leave it right here for you.
For today, just one question:
What are you asking of someone else, that you might be asking of yourself?