How to Change Your Self-Concept
Why self-concept is the key to unlocking more health, growth, and naturally high self-esteem
Photo by Anna Ismagilova on Shutterstock | Used under license
Who do you think you are?
Imagine we meet in a cafe and I ask you to describe yourself. You might mention qualities like kindness, creativity, or a free-spirited nature. But if I were to delve deeper and ask how you know this about yourself, what would your response be? I found myself confronted with this very question in a chat with a psychologist at my local cafe a few months ago.
Reflecting on my own answer of being open-minded and curious, memories flooded my mind — instances where I felt drawn to interact with others, moments when questions raced through my thoughts, or times when I was totally absorbed in books. Yet alongside these experiences were equally vivid memories of being so bored my eyes glazed over.
Through his unusual question, the psychologist introduced me to a topic I had never considered: the creation of self-concept.
While your life experiences shape self-concept, the crucial aspect lies in the selection and representation of these experiences in your mind. For instance, despite having numerous memories of being curious, I have an equal number of being fully disengaged. Which memories I choose to focus on and how I interpret them determine whether I label myself as a curious person.
The realization that we have the freedom to change our self-concept was a revelation for me. At the end of our conversation, the psychologist recommended a book to teach me how: “Transforming Your Self: Becoming who you want to be” by psychologist and Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) expert Steve Andreas.
Before I explain how it works, let me explain why self-concept is such a powerful lever of personal change.
Understanding Self-Concept
Your self-concept forms the bedrock of your identity, providing stability even as your body, emotions, and life change.
Moreover, it serves as the foundation for self-esteem, as shared by psychologist Steve Andreas:
“Self-esteem is the result of your evaluation of your self-concept…When your self-concept is not aligned with your values, you will experience low self-esteem. When your self-concept is aligned with your values, you can enjoy high self-esteem.”
Crucially, your self-concept influences your behavior and the manner in which you navigate life. If you perceive yourself as determined and capable, you’ll likely persist until you achieve your goals. Conversely, a belief of being unlikable might inhibit confident social interactions and limit success in relationships.
The image you hold of yourself becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, shaping your experiences. Therefore, altering your self-concept naturally triggers shifts in behavior and decisions.
How to Shift Your Self-Concept
The approach to self-concept I used was developed by Steve Andreas and based on NLP principles. NLP is an approach to personal development and one of its key presuppositions is that the map is not the territory. This means that people respond to their map of reality, not to reality itself.
Therefore, if you can change your internal map — how you represent experiences to yourself — you change your view of perception of reality and how you respond to it.
To test it for myself, I decided to change an aspect of my self-concept I felt uncertain about: likability. Despite having a wonderful group of friends and social life, early life experiences shook my confidence that I was likable in many situations.
Examining my mental representation of likability, I found a mix of positive and negative memories and physical sensations.
I reviewed the memories and used the suggestions from Steve Andreas to edit them in the same way a movie director would edit film footage. Here are some of the most effective ways I found to shift representations of memories around likability:
Size and display: Changing the size of positive memories to make them more prominent and displaying them in a visual collage for an easy overview.
Color: Brightening the colors of positive memories.
Perspective: Experiences can be represented from the perspective of the self (experiencer), other, or objective (film perspective). Changing the perspective of the viewer on memories alters and sometimes strengthens their impact.
Sound: Turning up or down the volume or quality of sounds in a memory to intensify or change its feeling.
Selection: Choosing memories from different stages of life, environments, and with different people can change the certainty of a quality by showing it’s consistent across time and space. Creating future ‘memories’ of a quality is a powerful way to program your brain for how you want to express a quality in the future.
Kinesthetic feeling: Changing or intensifying the kinesthetic or ‘body feeling’ associated with a quality can alter or strengthen it.
In a nutshell, I edited my past experiences to tell a different story. I turned up and strengthened the impact of positive experiences and turned down or re-represented negative experiences. For a much deeper dive into how to carry out the process, I highly recommend the book “Transforming Your Self” by Steve Andreas.
Over the two hours that I explored and altered my self-concept, the affirmation “I am likable” gradually resonated deeper within me. Subtly yet powerfully, it showed up in my behavior.
Though no friends used the word “likable,” they noticed the change: I was much less concerned about the opinions of others and more at ease in social situations, especially with other women. Because I was confident I was likable, I shed a lot of insecurity and stress and was able to express more of the traits of someone likable.
This positive experience has led me to keep making shifts to my self-concept and to share the process with friends and clients. After all, as a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner (NTP), I’ve seen that personal transformations are often blocked by a limited self-concept. Phrases like “I lack discipline” or “I’m not athletic” directly reflect limitations in self-concept. Until they shift, changes in diet and lifestyle may feel challenging and unsustainable.
The ability to consciously mold our self-concept offers the potential for transformative personal growth as well as better quality of life. When who you think we are is in harmony with who you want to be, internal conflicts start to dissolve and your life naturally takes on more ease and joy.
