Projection: How Your World Is a Mirror

At the last Sun Valley Founders Retreat, I went to dinner as someone completely unrecognizable to the people who know me.

“Hey man, you see the Niners? What’s your team? Yeah, Birdie’s been throwing some good ones.”

Just sports and surface level talk. I was just there to chill.

But this was intentional. Earlier in the retreat, the group had assigned each person a persona to embody at dinner, specifically the quality most opposite to how they normally showed up.

The most warm and bubbly person in the room went as cruel. The most humble guy went as arrogant and cocky.

And me? The group sent me to dinner as the guy with no interior life whatsoever.

It felt so freeing and light. At one point I even found myself thinking, I get why so many people just stay at this level. It’s just so chill.

But these weren’t people with time to waste. They were founders with companies to build, teams to lead, investors to answer to. And yet they chose to spend several days at a retreat where we spent an evening doing exactly this.

Here’s why, and what it unlocked for them.

Double-Sided Judgments

The mind filters everything (yourself, other people, the world) through a set of beliefs about what’s good and what’s bad. And those beliefs always exist on a continuum. On one end, the qualities you’ve decided are acceptable or admirable. On the other, the ones you’ve decided are not.

Because everything gets filtered through the same beliefs, it’s always double-sided. What you judge in others is what you judge in yourself. What you won’t allow in yourself, you won’t allow in others.

Here’s how that looks across both yourself and others:

• You + Good: Qualities you value in yourself
• You + Bad: Qualities you feel shame around
• Others + Good: Qualities you admire in others but don’t see in yourself
• Others + Bad: Qualities you judge in others but deny in yourself

As my old coach Diana Chapman used to say: “If you spot it, you got it.” Any quality you recognize in another person is a quality you have in yourself.

For example, a founder I coached couldn’t stand his co-founder’s indecisiveness. “He never makes a call. He overthinks everything!” When we dug deeper his frustration pointed back to himself. He felt he had to always know the answer. Beneath his strong opinions and quick decisions, he feared getting it wrong, and he couldn’t tolerate hesitation in himself, which is exactly why he couldn’t tolerate it in his co-founder.

This is what is meant when it is said that we don’t see people as they are, but we see them as we are. Because the reality you perceive is really just your own beliefs looking back at you.

Every person who triggers you and every person you admire is pointing you toward where you can expand. Toward the parts of yourself you haven’t yet accepted or claimed, and toward becoming more whole.

The Third Rail

Most people never take those invitations. Because accepting a disowned quality feels dangerous.

People fear that accepting it means they’ll act more that way. If I accept my selfish side, I’ll become more selfish. But the opposite is true.

What you resist persists. The denied part either leaks out in ways you didn’t choose, or you overcompensate so thoroughly that you lose access to the healthy version of that quality too. Deny your arrogance completely and you may find you can’t assert yourself or own what you’re genuinely great at.

And it goes even deeper than that. When a quality is truly disowned, when “I am not cruel” or “I am not arrogant” is core to your identity, it constrains what you allow yourself to do. It becomes what I think of as a third rail, a line your system won’t let you go near, even when going near it would actually serve you.

And when you can’t go near it outwardly, that energy doesn’t disappear. It turns inward. As self-attack. As self-harm.

At the retreat, one woman had identified “I am not cruel” as central to who she was. And she wasn’t being direct with people. Her system was rejecting directness because it felt too close to cruelty. She couldn’t access a behavior that had nothing inherently cruel about it, because the proximity to the forbidden quality was enough to trigger avoidance.

And because she’d forbidden cruelty from appearing outward, she’d turned it inward. Her inner voice was brutally self-critical, constantly policing her own behavior to make sure she never crossed the line. The quality she refused to express outward was being expressed inward as self-attack.

The disowned part doesn’t disappear. It relocates.

The Identity You Built to Survive

All of this filtering, judging, and self-attack is happening in service of maintaining an identity that was never the full truth of who you are.

Everything after the words “I am” is a mental construct, a role you built at some point in your life to gain approval, security, and a sense of control.

And the core beliefs that shape that construct tend to form during moments of perceived threat or rejection early in life. A child learns that a certain quality gets them accepted or rejected, loved or criticized, and the identity starts to form around that. What’s safe to be. What isn’t.

On top of that, the mind has a built-in negativity bias: it weighs negative information more heavily than positive as a survival mechanism. Missing a threat could cost you your life. Missing a reward just costs you an opportunity. So the brain evolved to err heavily toward the negative.

That bias gets applied to the beliefs you hold about yourself. The mind overweights negative feedback about who you are and underweights positive feedback. One piece of criticism confirms the negative label. A hundred compliments get filed away as exceptions. Overestimating your negative qualities means you can compensate, manage how you’re perceived, stay safe. Overestimating your positive ones means risking being caught out.

So erring toward the negative becomes the default strategy for maintaining approval and security.

For example, at the retreat one of the men said he wasn’t charismatic, wasn’t confident. People laughed because those were exactly the words they would have used to describe him. He just couldn’t see it.

The construct was built to protect you, not to tell you the truth about who you are. Which means every label the filter has been confirming (the qualities you claim, the ones you’ve disowned, the parts you judge and admire in others) none of it is the full picture.

So what is?

The truth is, all humans have all the parts: every quality exists within every person, just expressed to different degrees. The more you love and accept all of them, the more choice you have about which ones show up. The more freedom you gain, because none of those identities are actually you. You are the “I am” that comes before any of those labels.

Beyond the Limits of Your Identity

So back to that dinner in Sun Valley.

It was so fun, people really got into it, and it was almost like an out-of-body experience.

But besides it being just a freeing experience, it also showed that when you inhabit the parts you’ve denied, let others love you for them, and love yourself for them too, you expand beyond the limits your identity has placed on you.

Because the judgments you’ve been carrying about yourself and others dissolve, your perception clears. You start seeing reality as it actually is rather than what your beliefs need it to be. The people around you stop being reflections of your own beliefs and start being who they actually are.

You gain behavioral flexibility, no longer constrained by what your identity has decided you’re allowed to be. You can meet the moment the way it actually requires, and respond in a way that is most likely to create the results you want.

That’s why this group of founders chose to spend several days at this retreat.

Because the world has always been a mirror of your internal world. And when you become conscious of it being a mirror, it allows you to start addressing what it is showing you.

With love,

Dave Kashen