Self-perception
An article on self-image, self-esteem and self-perception
How you perceive yourself is perhaps one of the most important parts of your psyche. The problem we continually find with our clients is that is that many people have a negative self-perception – they constantly feel that they are inadequate or inferior to others around them. Self-perception and self-esteem are very important. A lot of the time people’s self-esteem is based on how they think others perceive them, and this of course directly affects how they perceive themselves.
During every social interaction with someone we pick up on their perceptions of us. For example, if you are the last person chosen a game of football, then those around you may be telling you that they perceive you as not being very good at that particular sport. If you are not often invited to social events, then others may be hinting that they find you boring. While they may not say it to us, you could view it as them implying it. Some people may call it “taking the hint”. The problem is that these hints can be very damaging to us.
If you think that people are constantly telling you that you are in some way lacking, then without the correct mind set, you will eventually think that they are correct. In other words, you will develop a negative self-perception. This will constantly make you feel in an unproductive state and hold you back from reaching your potential. This happens to the majority of children and by the time they reach adulthood they carry with them a negative self-perception.
Of course there is also the opposite – if at a young age you were always the first to be picked for the football team or to be invited to the social event, you may feel great. If the people around you are constantly telling you that you’re great, they will ‘give’ you great self-esteem and a very positive self-perception but, this is a very dangerous position to be in because if their perception of you changes so will your self-esteem.
These examples are quite stereotypical and clumsy, but they get the point across very well. They show us that until we come to our own conclusion of who we are we will just be a reflection on what our peer’s think of us. This is not wise as (a) we do not know as fact what people think of us and, (b) if you let others dictate how you feel, you lose all of the power to change. A more elegant way of putting it is that until we discover who we are, we aren’t really our own person.
Sadly, many of us have a tendency to have a negative outlook on the world. We have a habit of buying into all of the negative messages that people give us. It really is a vicious circle, the more negative messages we get, the lower our self-esteem, and therefore our self-perception becomes more negative. This will continue to go on and on, leading us down a path of unhappiness and not reaching our true potential. We are not sure why many of us default to this negative outlook, but it is a sad fact.
There are however some people (albeit much less) that are quite the opposite. They receive all of the good messages from those around them, and the block out the bad, but for some reason they are still not happy and often still have a negative self-image. People like this are a rare case in which their self-esteem isn’t connected to their self-perception in the more common way. Neither of the states described are ideal for reaching your true potential.
This negative self-image can appear in a multitude of ways ranging from anorexia to fanatic over achievement to manic depression. For example, someone who suffers from anorexia is unhappy with themselves (most of the time unconsciously) to the point that they want to disappear. A narcissist has an uncontrollable and burning need for validation (most of the time unconsciously) to the point of destroying all relationships around them. The masochist feels so badly about themselves (most of the time unconsciously) that they think they deserve pain.
These are really tragic circumstances for people to find themselves in, and often need a lot of NLP to help them break the negative patterns they run in their minds. The reality is that it all goes back to self-perception. These people have based their perception of themselves completely on what others have said or done to them. Often these extreme cases result from things like domestic abuse completely destroying someone’s positive self-perception.
These are rather extreme, and probably don’t apply to many of you readers but they certainly do tell us the importance of building up our own self-perception and self-image. A self-image that is unclouded and based completely on what we think of ourselves, not what we think others think of us.
Here’s a fantastic example of what happened to a client of mine who was studying law at a top university. He had a really bad run of test results and when I say bad I really do mean it, up to a point where he was going to quit university. The mistake that he made was that he let these bad results get to him. Within just a few weeks he had convinced himself that I was never going to be successful in his chosen field of endeavour, even to the extent where I found easy topics hard.
Eventually after some sessions, he did pass his final exams and left university with a LL.M but only because he decided to take positive action. Using different NLP techniques he changed his internal self-image to a successful law student who found challenges exciting and fun. From that point on he stopped being ‘bad at law’, and with a great deal of diligence and hard work he really did achieve a lot.
The point of this story is that it shows how you are the key to your own betterment. If you think you are bad at something then sit down and think of how you would like to be. Vividly imagine a you with the beliefs and the self-image needed to succeed, then ‘act’ as that person would and think how they would think – and practice this all of the time. I can guarantee that this alone will improve your outlook greatly.
Be your own person, and not one who is a slave to the opinions of others.
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