Sense of self » 52 Ways to Improve Your Life

Embracing change (2)

Facilitating change, Sense of self Comments Off

Sep 172013

Last week I was talking about the need to embrace external change. Today I want to address the need to foster change on the inside too.

As AL Kennedy indicates in the episode of Radio 4’s A Point of View I quoted last time, one reason people are resistant to changes taking place around them is that they result in changes to their own identity. If I am accustomed to having status, money and a spouse, the removal of one or more of those will cause me huge emotional upheaval, not just in coming to terms with the new situation but also in recalibrating my sense of who I am.

As Ms Kennedy also points out, during times of uncertainty people often become more superstitious, turning to fortune tellers and tarot readers for guidance. Gambling is another area where people seek solace from life’s turmoil. In both cases, magical thinking becomes a refuge from reality and provides a spurious impression of being able to engineer the future we want. The problem with putting one’s faith in ‘psychics’ and tipsters is that it involves giving away the power (and responsibility) we have to shape our own destiny.

Instead of trying to control the world by resisting change or trying to steal a march on Fate in some mystical manner, we need to focus our energy on shoring up our own psyche and building our resilience and confidence. If I have a strong sense of who I am, rooted in me and not in my external circumstances, I will be less shaken by a change in those circumstances. This is not to say I won’t still be terribly sad or angry, but I won’t have my Self thrown into question.

If we get too hung up on labels and pigeon holes, we can end up stifling growth, in ourselves and others. It’s easy to go along with the stereotypes written by parents and friends – A is the clever one, B is the sporty one, C is the attractive one, and so on – but this is just another example of people wanting to understand the world around them and know what to expect from it. ‘Positive’ labels such as the ones I’ve mentioned are better than negative ones, of course, but they come with a lot of pressure to perform and, less obviously, they can be restrictive in not allowing the people to experiment in other fields. Within groups and families, those without the reputation for achievement in a given area can feel there’s no point in even trying. Good at something or bad at it, our destiny is already charted if we accept these labels.

Once we realise the power we have to change ourselves and be who we want to be, it becomes much easier to accept external change. The key to peace and happiness is knowing that we will be all right whatever comes our way. We can’t control what life throws at us but we can control how we handle it.

What’s in a status?

Sense of self Comments Off

Jul 232013

Some years ago, a friend of mine broke up with his girlfriend. They had been together a matter of months and, to him anyway, it clearly wasn’t working out. When he told her it was over, what seemed to upset her most was that she had only that week changed her Facebook status to In a Relationship and now she would have to change it back to Single. While at the time I was quick to ridicule her superficiality and emphasise how firmly her reaction underlined how right he was to finish with her, thinking about it now I can definitely sympathise with how she felt.

Obviously, being in a relationship is about rather more than a Facebook status and if one’s boyfriend is more a trophy, a symbol, a way to define oneself, than a soulmate, then the relationship will never be a deep and fulfilling one – but in many ways that is beside the point. What was at stake for this girl was not so much love and companionship as the integrity of her self-image. She had invested in having a boyfriend, rather than in the reality of the man, and when he took that away from her it shook her because suddenly she was no longer what she thought she was, a girl with a boyfriend.

I’ve talked about self-image on this blog before but I thought it was worth mentioning again because sometimes it can be hard to distinguish between what we genuinely believe others think of us and what, in fact, is what we think of ourselves. Unless we’ve done a lot of work on ourselves, our self-image is no doubt heavily influenced by our early parent figures but it is nonetheless how we see ourselves rather than how someone else might see us. The reason it’s important to draw this fine distinction is that we have the power to assess and change our own view of ourselves.

It’s useful to remember that different people see the world in remarkably different ways from how we may see it ourselves and that, to a huge extent, other people take us at our own valuation. The newly single girl may have imagined her friends would sneer at her failure to hold on to a relationship (is this what true friends do?); she felt shamed and expected those around her to be as hard on her as she was on herself. I may be projecting here but it’s a common enough phenomenon. I also suspect her need to be seen to have a boyfriend may have been more about meeting social expectation than genuinely wanting a man in her life, or anyway that man.

Never mind the labels, the pigeon holes, the cultural norms. Be the you you really want to be. If someone doesn’t like it, they might not like any other face you present either and, in the end, it’s your life, not theirs. But most people will respond favourably to the positive, authentic you. We can’t expect others to respect and love us unless and until we respect and love ourselves.

How do you see yourself?

Seeing the truth, Sense of self Comments Off

May 212013

We all have a mental image of ourselves, though we may not all be aware of it. When you picture yourself in your mind’s eye, what do you see?

How accurate would you say your vision of yourself is? How closely does it correspond with how you feel? If your image is positive and you’re happy, that’s a match and things are authentically good. However, if your image and feelings are out of synch, you will probably find it helpful to examine this picture of yourself and bring it up to date.

In my early twenties, I went a bit wild (delayed teenage rebellion) and my mental self-portrait was of someone energetic, reasonably athletic, attractive, slightly manic but the life and soul of the party. I suppose this was more or less who I was for a few years but it’s strange how long this view persisted after I had slumped into depression and ceased to be any of those things. Having a self-image that’s more positive than reality invites all sorts of trouble and I have no doubt that my depression was worsened by the fact that I was so slow on the uptake as far as my image was concerned. My fantasy was diverging further and further from actuality, without my even realising it was a fantasy. This led to a lot of disappointing and upsetting reactions and some bewildering cognitive dissonance.

Finally, my self-image caught up with reality and I developed a vision of a stout, frumpy wallflower. This is who I was for many years but it’s equally strange how long I retained this view of myself after I had made all sorts of progress on the road to autonomy, health and happiness. Again, the delay in updating my self-image was bad for me, this time impeding my recovery by endlessly reflecting back to me the incarnation of my depression. Below the level of conscious thought, I decided I couldn’t be making the progress I thought I was.

Now that I have finally succeeded in creating a mental picture that represents the happy, confident me I usually am these days, image and reality are aligned, each reinforcing the other.

If you’re not living up to your positive self-image, it’s time to have a long, hard look at the truth. You have to face up to reality before you can change it. On the other hand, if your self-image is negative, working on it can lead the way to improvements in your actual wellbeing. Continually visualising yourself as you want to be is a crucial factor in genuinely becoming the you you want to be.

To see ourselves as others see us

Seeing the truth, Sense of self 2 Responses »

Apr 232013

Robert Burns’s poem To A Louse is a cautionary tale, describing the sort of mortifying situation I dread. The poor girl thinks people are admiring her but actually they’re pointing and staring because she’s got a louse on her bonnet.

On the other hand, we have the new advertisement for Dove, a video that’s gone viral round the internet recently, whose message is: you are more beautiful than you think. I have a variety of misgivings about this experiment and its conclusion but, in the end, it’s designed to sell products, not win any award for psychological breakthrough. I don’t think anyone can argue with the overall point that the way we perceive ourselves (both what we look like, as illustrated, and what we are like) can differ – and sometimes differ wildly – from the way other people perceive us.

So, what can we learn from the Scottish poet and the American advertisers? How can we find that middle way, to be aware of our literal and metaphorical lice, while maintaining a healthy level of self-esteem and not being excessively introspective?

On the Louse side, I think the lesson is to stay grounded and not allow ourselves to get carried away in the heat of a moment’s attention by the idea the world must suddenly have discovered how fabulous we are. From the outside, modesty and self-deprecation are attractive traits; from the inside, they are protective. If we always err on the side of humility, we should be safe from Jenny’s fate.

But of course there is an extremely fine line between self-deprecation and self-doubt. The point of staying grounded is to be able to make a calm assessment and see reality as clearly as it’s possible to do, given the absence of objective truth. We’ll never see the absolute truth about ourselves because we’re always looking through the prism of our history – and nobody else can see the absolute truth about us either, because they’re looking at us through their own prisms. It’s important to know ourselves as well as we can, to hold ourselves to account and also to give ourselves credit when it’s due. And it’s important to remember we have control over what we’re like and the impression we make on the world.

On the Dove side, I think it’s useful to be reminded how widely perceptions can diverge and I think the lesson is to use this to encourage ourselves to play up to the top end of the tolerance window in the way we present ourselves. What I mean by this is that, to a great extent, people take us at our own valuation. To a great extent but not completely – although more on the negative side than the positive. Basically, if I demonstrate low self-esteem, the opinion you form of me is virtually guaranteed to be low. Even if you can see I have more to offer than I believe I have, low self-esteem tends to elicit negative responses, as I was saying a couple of weeks ago.

If I demonstrate high self-esteem, you are likely not entirely to take my word for it but to probe a bit, so you can form an opinion based on evidence of my characteristics and abilities as well as the vibes I’m giving you. If you judge my self-esteem to be inflated, I will go down in your estimation, probably past what one might think of as the objectively fair level. This is why it’s important to know ourselves and also to be humble. But to return to the tolerance window thing, it’s good to present ourselves as confidently as we can get away with.

To quote from another literary source, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players”. Everybody is an actor. Let’s make sure the character we’re portraying is the person we want to be.

You are free to choose what you think

Keeping an open mind, Seeing the truth, Sense of self 2 Responses »

Mar 262013

We are all shaped by the cultural environment in which we grow up. Our attitudes, inclinations and prejudices are instilled in us at an early age by our parent-figures, our schools, the media and all the other influences of modern society. There is no getting away from this and in any case I don’t believe it is inherently a bad thing; it’s just the way it is. One of the main interests for me in going abroad is to see how differently people in other countries view the world.

It sounds as if I’ve kicked off by contradicting the title and message of this week’s post and, at one level, I suppose I have. None of us is created and nurtured in a vacuum, and in terms of cultural values, ethics and politics, nothing much exists by way of objective truth. We can each only do our best to think and behave with honesty and integrity and remember that someone who has reached the opposite conclusion on any given issue may well have done so with equal honesty and integrity, but approaching from a different perspective.

I was well into my 30s before I realised how many of my opinions were imported holus bolus from my mother. Of course, I knew we agreed about almost everything, but I genuinely believed I had thought things through for myself and just happened to end up thinking what my mother thought because she was right. As I began to detach from her psychologically and emotionally, it became clear to me I’d been fooling myself, that I had trained myself to agree with her because it was the most self-protective course of action. My mother has a strong sense that those who don’t see the world exactly as she does are weird, inferior, possibly deficient, usually rather unpleasant, to be pitied or despised.

What I’m trying to do today is to encourage you to examine your beliefs and opinions and make sure they are really your own. A good way to do this is to get talking to people who hold beliefs and opinions that are different from yours and keep an open mind as you discuss things with them. If you’d like to do this in a safe environment, I recommend a debating society or some sort of discussion group that is chaired and where people don’t resort to personal insults. I’ve been going to a couple of these groups for about eighteen months now and I can tell you they have done me no end of good. I’m learning so much from listening to other people and it’s also immensely reassuring and empowering to know that, although many members of the group may fundamentally disagree with my stance on any given subject, I always feel welcome there. Holding ‘incorrect’ views has historically been an existentialist issue for me and it’s been an absolute liberation to discover there are people to whom I am acceptable even if I think differently from them.

Prejudice is something we take in with our mother’s milk and we cannot be blamed for that. It’s the same, to a greater or lesser extent, for every single person who has ever been born. However, what we can be blamed for is allowing those prejudices to persist, by avoiding or dismissing information that challenges them. We owe it to ourselves and to the world to learn as much as possible and always to keep an open mind. This doesn’t mean we should go through life never forming a solid opinion – far from it – but it does mean we need to keep listening and re-evaluating.

Challenging and changing your views can be quite a disorientating experience but it can also be an exhilarating ride, as you shed your baggage and find out what you really think. In certain areas, you may unearth a truth that blinds you as soon as you uncover it; in other areas, you may decide you were right all along; in yet others, you may go on fine-tuning your views over decades. To me, this is all part of the interest and the growing. You can never be your own person until the views you hold are your own.

And remember that all this cuts the other way too: if your views are based on your own knowledge, experience and open-minded debate, you are on firm ground. There will always be people who disagree with you but, as I was saying last week, this doesn’t necessarily mean you’re wrong. Actually, there is great strength in being able to admit when you’re wrong or you’ve changed your position and if you can get used to doing that with grace and without fear, you’ll get a reputation as someone measured, reasonable and probably even wise. Then, when you are unshakeable on a particular topic, you’ll have more authority and – who knows? – you may even change the minds of some of your listeners.

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