Most of us go through life without realizing how deeply we see ourselves through someone else's eyes. Long before we develop our own identity, someone else begins defining it for us... Unfortunately...  A child is told they're too sensitive... A little girl hears she's too loud... A little boy learns that real men don't cry or real men always keep their promises... Someone grows up believing they're lazy... Someone else is convinced they're not intelligent enough... Or very smart therefore they can't make mistakes... Another child quietly absorbs the message that love isn't freely given... it has to be earned. None of these sentences disappear. They slowly become the lens through which we begin seeing ourselves.

Something far more profound happens than simply developing low self-esteem. The child reaches a silent conclusion: "As I am, I'm not enough." If that's true, then love, acceptance, and approval must be earned by becoming someone else. From that moment on, life becomes a lifelong attempt to earn what should never have required earning in the first place: love, acceptance, and approval. The child learns that simply being themselves isn't enough, so they begin becoming who they believe everyone else wants them to be: easier, quieter, smarter, more successful, more helpful, stronger, less emotional, less complicated, more convenient. Little by little, they drift further away from themselves while believing they are moving closer to becoming worthy of love.

The tragedy is that most parents never intend to teach this lesson. They genuinely want their children to thrive. They encourage them to do well in school, to work hard, to become kind, successful, responsible adults. Their words sound positive. "You can do better." "I know you're capable of more." "I only want what's best for you." Yet beneath those words, a child often feels something entirely different: "Who I am today isn't enough." Every mistake becomes evidence that love, approval, or belonging might be taken away. Instead of learning that failure is part of growth and genuine support, the child learns to fear failure itself. Instead of developing confidence, they become preoccupied with meeting expectations. They no longer ask, "Who am I?" They begin asking, "Who do I need to become so I won't disappoint the people I love?"

That is how positive intentions can quietly create negative expectations. A child grows up believing that love depends on performance, that mistakes are dangerous, and that their value rises and falls with every success or failure... More accurate - with other people's judgement of our success or failure. Years later, the child becomes an adult who is still trying to earn a love that was never meant to be earned at all.

Eventually, this way of living becomes normal. People spend years trying to become just a little better, a little more accomplished, a little more productive. They collect degrees, promotions, achievements, perfect performances, believing that the next milestone will finally bring the feeling they've been chasing their entire lives: "Now I'm enough. Now I deserve to be loved." But that moment rarely arrives. Not because they haven't achieved enough, but because the problem was never a lack of achievements. The problem was the belief that love had to be earned at all. As long as someone lives from that belief, no amount of success can fill the emptiness inside. Every accomplishment brings relief for a moment before another standard appears, another expectation to meet, another version of themselves they believe they must become. Without realizing it, they spend their lives taking an examination that exists only inside their own mind.

Psychology offers a remarkable explanation for why this happens. It is known as the Rosenthal Effect, or the Pygmalion Effect, the extraordinary influence that expectations have on human behavior. In one of the most famous studies, teachers were told that certain students possessed exceptional intellectual potential. In reality, those children had been selected entirely at random. Yet months later, those same students began outperforming their classmates. They became more confident, participated more actively, and learned more quickly. Their intelligence hadn't suddenly increased. What changed was something far more powerful: the expectations surrounding them. And eventually, those expectations became their own.

Since then, similar patterns have been observed in education, sports, leadership, healthcare, and relationships. We rarely act according to our objective abilities. More often, we act according to what we believe is possible for us. When someone genuinely believes in our potential, we become more willing to try, more resilient after failure, and more capable of seeing opportunities that had always been there but had remained invisible to us.

The opposite is equally true. If we spend years surrounded by people who expect weakness, failure, disappointment, or inadequacy from us, our minds slowly accept those expectations as reality. Without noticing it, we begin living inside someone else's prediction of who we are. Their voice gradually becomes our own.

Maybe this is why certain kinds of love feel almost otherworldly. Not because the other person is perfect... and not because you've finally found your soulmate! But because, for the first time in your life, someone looks at you without seeing your limitations first. They recognize your courage before you do. They speak to you as though your dreams are entirely possible. They relate to you as though your future self already exists, even if you cannot yet imagine becoming that person.

For the first time, nothing has to be earned. You don't have to become better before you're worthy of love. You don't have to prove your value or perform for acceptance. Someone already sees you as enough. MORE THAN ENOUGH. And something inside you quietly relaxes. The endless audition finally comes to an end.

That is when real transformation begins. You don't grow because you're afraid of losing love or desperate for approval. You grow because someone has reflected back a version of yourself that feels more true than the one fear taught you to believe. Fear always whispers the same story: If I don't perform, I may lose the people I love, or their approval of me. So you keep trying to be better, more successful, more agreeable, more useful, believing that your worth depends on never disappointing anyone. I call this the Deficit Program, a way of living that assumes there is something fundamentally missing in you, something that must constantly be compensated for. When love is experienced as scarce, every achievement becomes an attempt to secure it, every mistake feels like a threat to losing it, and every relationship becomes another performance, which slowly suffocates you... Genuine love interrupts that program. It doesn't ask you to become worthy. It reminds you that you always were.

You become calmer, more honest, more courageous. You begin making decisions you always avoided. You take risks! You create! You leave relationships that have long stopped being alive. You finally start caring for yourself. You write the book. You create music. You start the business. You start INVESTING into your life and not waiting for "some day"... Not because someone else changed you, but because their belief IN YOU allowed you to stop living inside someone else's expectations of who you were supposed to be.

Perhaps that is why some relationships remain unforgettable, even if they never become marriages or end with "happily ever after." Maybe their purpose was never to last forever. Sometimes a person enters your life not to stay, but to become the first person who sees you more clearly than you have ever seen yourself and others never saw that in you either. And once that happens, something irreversible begins. You cannot return to being the person you used to be, because you have already glimpsed your own potential through the eyes of someone who genuinely believed in it.

Maybe that is one of the deepest forms of love. Not the kind that promises forever, but the kind that gives you back to yourself.