Understanding One’s Self-Concept

            We could live our life without fully understanding why we live and behave as we do and therefore fail to act at times or most of the time in accordance with objective standards of right and wrong.

            It is only by understanding how we see ourselves that we will be able to see the reason for the incongruence of our personal behavior, attitudes and actuations with regards to the demands or requirements of an orderly and peaceful life, whether in our personal life, family life, work life, community life and social life.

            It is our self-concept that affects how we behave, how we regard ourselves and others and how we see others. What is significant about self-concept is that we have the potential to develop realistic but positive self-concept, which will improve our behavior, our self-regard and our regard for others.

            A more practical way of understanding self-concept is to view it as a ‘collection  of self-representations’. An exercise to help us discover or clarify our own self-concept is to represent ourselves or aspects of ourselves using animate or inanimate things.  We can represent the following aspects of ourselves using things, for example:

§        Physical representation

I see my physical self like a Narra tree because I have always been strong and with stamina to withstand the physical demands of living.

§        Relational representation

I am like a Bamboo tree in the way I relate with other people; I am always willing to bend at the pressure of other people, but always bounce back to my true standing at the proper time.

§        Performance representation

In my activities, I am like a climbing vine that proliferates and climbs fast; I am a fast worker and achieve much in relatively shorter time.

§        Spiritual-moral representation

In my spiritual life, I am like a tall straight tree alone on top of a hill, rising up to sky as high as I can.

Our self-concept is something we should not take merely as a matter of fact. Together with our past and our worldview, our self-concept needs to be evaluated in terms of more enduring and more life enhancing truths about ourselves.