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Achieving Success: How Your Self-Concept Limits

Hey! I want to talk to you about your self-concept. Your self-concept is something you put together over time, and, yes, you’ve got lots of things from people, comments about you and so on, but you need to know something. You have a set of ideas about who you are, and for you they’re like hard reality.

In fact, your self-concept is so central to the way you organize your entire world, you hang onto it like mad. I mean, you feel like, okay, if there’s one thing I know, I know me. And yet, you may be leaving out all kinds of possible things about you that you could’ve taken notice of, but you haven’t.

Did you ever have this experience where you got into a class with somebody, a particular professor or teacher, and they just looked at you a different way? It could be even a grade school teacher, but it was like they saw something about you that the other teachers hadn’t seen, and they kind of expected more of you, and maybe they waited a little longer to hear what your answer was, like they were really interested, and you went, oh. I mean, you didn’t necessarily say something out loud to yourself about what was going on, but pretty soon, you were kind of like, speaking up in class and saying more things.

That’s what happens. There’s an interchange with you and other people, and you form a self-concept. And the good thing is that there is room for it to expand, and you can take more in and allow yourself to shift. But if anybody comes in and just says you’re not this or you’re not that, you hang onto your self-concept. You feel like they’re crazy. They don’t know. I know me.

You know, like, one quadrillionth of you. You’re an energy system. You are beyond stardust. You’re amazing, and there’s so much to you that you don’t understand and don’t conceive of and can.

I urge you to look at your self-concept and see what it contains because your self-concept, every time you say something that’s a self-description, I’m this kind of person, I’m that kind of person, when you say I’m this kind of person, a present tense statement of how you are, you are prescribing future behavior. You’re saying we’re-I’m committed to this. This is the position I take. This is me. You prescribe further behavior in that same direction. So if you say it about a negative characteristic, you just put in place a limit, and you just acted in a self-hypnotic way to strengthen that.

You are doing self-hypnosis all the time when you talk to yourself or when you describe yourself to others, and that self-hypnosis strengthens and prescribes behavior. If somebody tells you, oh, you’re always this way, or you’re always that way, the characteristic, no matter what it was, was a prescription for future behavior. If it was a positive description of you, it was still a prescription for future behavior.