Transforming your self

Reviewing this book a year and a half after reading it is rough, because I … barely remember reading it, tbh. But after going through my notes, a lot of it seeped into my thoughts, especially the attitude of “don’t try to do the thing, instead try to become a person who does the thing”, which I think is a really useful frame.

I’d like to put more of this into action, but the trouble is that it requires some big introspection answering the questions “Who am I” and “Who would I like to be” in some level of detail. Having turned my entire life upside down in response to some introspection in my early 20s, I’m well aware of the consequences this kind of thing can have, so I’m cautious to engage with it. This is also why I didn’t finish the book – I got a lot of useful stuff out of it, and then put it aside because these things take time. As you can tell from the sheer length of my notes, I got something out of it regardless.

The book btw also gives plenty of examples of different internal experiences and modalities, which I really enjoyed. And generally introducing the concept of not just paying attention of how your inner representation of things looks, but also being able to change it, was super valuable to me.

Self-concept and self-esteem

Self-concept is like a map of who you are – as any map, it’s got inaccuracies and your weird own map projection going on, but also like a map, it’s still helpful when you need to navigate a situation without deriving your stance from first principles every time. Self-esteem is generated when your actions are in line with your self-concept, e.g. if you think of yourself as a kind person, and then you do something kind, you feel good about yourself. So if your self-concept (the flawed map) is aligned with your actual values, you’re building confidence and self-esteem.

Low self-esteem then is often the result of missing this alignment – most often because you accept externally-presented values (ie. you compare yourself to others and integrate what you see into your self-concept, even though it doesn’t fit in with your values). The goal of the book is to develop a self-concept that results in self-esteem.

Values

Your values are, in the end, abstracted versions of what’s important to you. As there are many things that are important to you, it’s helpful to prioritise your values – though a strict hierarchy isn’t possible, of course, as your values are context-dependent. Plus, values change with time and experience. And that’s good! When your values turn into a strict hierarchy, that’s often expressed in disorders, e.g. Bulimia or Anorexia.

You can’t and shouldn’t derive your values from first principles – that’s spherical cow thinking. If you don’t already have a decent idea of your values (what’s important to you and what you like/dislike), put yourself in as many different experiences as possible (both for real and imaginary) and pay attention to your reactions.

Think about the last time you did something you were not satisfied with – what values were expressed, what values were ignored? How would these feelings or values change if the situation had been different? Strength of bad feelings is a pretty good predictor of how important the quality is to you that was violated. And they can also point at more important values that you perceive(d) as conflicting and chose over the other value (of course, that’s not always the case. Sometimes you just make mistakes.)

Self-concept and actions

You act in accordance with your self-concept as much as possible (by definition, kinda), so changing your self-concept will change how you act, even if that’s not intentional. If in your self-concept being poor and reckless driving is coupled – no matter the reason – and you start earning a good salary, chances are, that your driving style will change along the way. You may not even remember the earlier behaviour after it has changed if it was just a result of your self-concept, and not in itself important to you.

Changing your self-concept in order to change your actions is also really powerful, because you can use one successful change to power the next ones, because you’ll also incorporate “I’m a person who can change” into your self-concept.

One technique is all about visualisation (cf Wachter!) – imagine the person who you would be if you were to act like you want to act, and connecting this image with the relevant situations. The important part is that when you work on this visualisation, you don’t see yourself performing the target actions, and instead, you focus on the kind of person who would behave like that, and integrate that with your self-concept.

Healthy vs unhealthy self-concept

You want to end up with a self-concept that is all you. You want to be able to enter a room and radiate your you-ness so that you don’t need to say or do anything for people to read who you are in your ~presence (he gets more specific than that, but I think he ignores how different people may want to be). In any case, you want your self-concept to be

• durable and resilient (so you can rely on it)
• but also self-correcting and responding to feedback (continuously, to avoid a jarring shock when you realise your self-concept is 20 years out of date), because it should also be
• accurate (matching your actions and values)
• unconscious and automatic, because you can’t sustain constant thought about who you are – think flow state
• connecting you with others rather than separating
• free from self-importance and arrogance, because if you land in that cycle, good luck breaking out

QUESTION: Your self-concept being inaccurate and out of date is bad. But how is this different from changing your self-concept to somebody you are not (yet, at least)?

How do you integrate your self-concept with what is instead of what ought to be? This is an NLP book, so it gets a bit woo / goes on to rewrite memories. What’s the harm (it says, and I’d agree, if your memories only impacted yourself). Painful memories are, according to the book, parts of yourself that are split off. It’s not really about the past situation/person anymore, it’s just a part of you that is alienated and that you would do better to integrate (cf Feeding Your Demons).

Explore your self-concept

Start with something that you know to be true of yourself and that you like, something of reasonable medium scope. This is something that comes up when you say “I am –”, and not something that is tiny and irrelevant, or of cosmic size. If you tend to think more about things you do – like care for people – you can use that to arrive at a self-stantement like “I am caring”. Choose something that is reliable about yourself, and that you like.

(I’m omitting the group exercises here, as I don’t foresee having a group available to do this, though I really believe that talking these things through with others would be tremendously helpful, because it opens your eyes to possible differences and makes it easier to see what is you.)

Next, notice how you represent this quality internally to yourself – your inner summary (a word, feeling, picture, combination …) – what springs to mind when you lean into this. Then go from there and explore your “database” of experiences and memories that underlie this quality.

Pay attention to how this database is structured for you: do you actually visualise picking out memories (from files, a list, floating images)? Try different ways of imagining your internal database, of finding experiences in your huge archive of memories. This is important! For example, determine where you are on the following criteria, and, crucially, if you can modulate them.

• Do you have a ton of examples or just two or three? Do you feel more confident about it if you increase the number, or are two or three strong examples better for you?
• Where are your examples/memories located within you / your inner space / …. Experiment with moving it higher/lower/closer/farther away/louder/quieter/warmer/colder, whatever makes sense in context.
• Can you see all or several at once, or only one? Can you peek at others while focusing on one / know how many others there are? You definitely want to end up with some way to flexibly switch between experiences, no matter how you structure and represent it internally – both sequential and simultaneous works, though simultaneous has a lot of advantages.
• Are the experiences visual? Auditory? Kinetic? …? Can you change this?
• Can you easily recall them? If so, do you recall an abstract or do/can you reexperience them? Now look at what happens when you recall an experience in context, and try removing the context, so that just the-person-who-does/is remains: which feels stronger and more solid?
• What is present in the most convincing memories: size, brightness, colour, etc, that make them more robust and substantial to you?
• When do your examples take place? Past, present, future? How far in the past? Can you focus on achieving a good, even spread here, if appropriate. How do things change if you put future examples in? Try this both with things that are likely to happen/similar as the past, and also with new contexts that were not connected to this self-concept before. More about future examples in the next section.
• Where do they take place? You don’t want all your examples be from one place (home, school, etc)
• What is the POV? What happens when you switch to an observer POV, or even the other person’s position? This can both provide valuable feedback if your example is skewed, and also allow you to fully take in how you are when you express the quality you’re focusing on.

Now consider what happens when you get feedback that is not in line with your self-concept. This is always a bit jarring and unpleasant, and the two natural reactions (if you get past the bristling denial) are to amend your self-concept or to amend your actions. How is this kind of conflict represented internally for you, and how can you make sure you’re sensitive to it and notice it as soon as possible (as noticing and reconciling your actions and your self-concept sooner rather than later is easier, before the gap is large, and also will make you happier.)

An interesting insight is that working with a large number of examples results in a self-concept that is both more stable AND more sensitive to feedback, because it’s easier to see discrepancies. This also means including many smaller less important seeming examples rather than just near-life-changing situations. If you are more secure in who you are due to the many examples you can rely on, you can feel more open curiosity when you notice or are presented with counter-examples or conflict, rather than feeling like your self-concept in under attack.

Self-concept and time

The distinction between self and behaviour is a bit artificial (you are what you do), but it’s still useful to look at identity as kind of the abstracted form of your behaviours, a form that exists and is recognisable in different contexts.

Creating future examples is very handy – it allows you to notice discrepancies in advance and adjust for them. The more detailled your future examples are, the better. It is also an open-minded approach towards the future: when you make promises or vows etc, you lock yourself in, and assume that you know better now than you will in the future. But presumably you’ll continue to learn and grow, and then get to feel bad when you have to go back on your previous vow because you improved your understanding, etc.

Make your future examples as detailled and vivid as possible, referring to last chapter’s checklist of what works for you in terms of solid experiences in your database. Then lean into the example and ask yourself: “Is there a problem with this? Is any part of me against this?”, and listen carefully (cf IFS!). This is where you notice when you make too ambitious plans, or plans divorced from who you actually are.

Even though the future examples should be vivid, they should also retain some vagueness, especially regarding circumstances. Don’t lock yourself into too specific situations: Remember, we’re still aiming at the type of person you are, not at specific actions. Treat it as a forecast, a potential event, and stop before it feels too compelling.

The other aspect of time in your examples is that an even spread in the past is really useful if possible. And spotting periods that are not present (e.g. school years) is very telling and should be investigated.

Changing stored experiences

Try to modulate your stored experience – a first good step is to find distortions and get rid of them. For example: Check if your appearance in your stored experiences is generally positive/complimentary or not.

A small example would be changing the posture you have in your stored experiences. If you make yourself appear more upright and confident in them, there are good chances for that to carry over. If you are unattractive/shy/other-negative-attribute-you-do-not-endorse in all your stored examples, then any tiem you refer to an example, you’ll strengthen the negative attribute.

This isn’t to say that you should actively distort the image – just to be vigilant for harmful distortions, both positive and negative.

Counterexamples: utilising mistakes

You are not a saint. No matter what quality you endorse or display, you won’t be 100% consistent in it. The most kind person can be unthinkingly hurtful. The most honest person lies. We all have a shadow, and we should rather ~~eat it~~ integrate it than fight or ignore it.

Including counterexamples in your database serves multiple purposes. First off, it supports a warning system: they illustrate how you have fallen short, and how you may fall short again in the future, so you can try to avoid that. Learning from mistakes, imagine! And of course, the earlier you get started, the better. Secondly, they help you avoid catastrophising: they make it clear that falling short is part of life, and that the next time it happens, it’s not changing who you are or an identity-shattering event.

Of course, we want to make sure that the stored counterexamples don’t encourage more of the same behaviour, like the stored real examples do. There are two things we should do, for this reason: Make the counter-examples less prominent in some way that makes sense in the internal storage context (b/w or sepia, muted, smaller, etc), and make sure to only include past counter-examples, no future theories.

When you look at your counterexamples, try to find a factor that is common to them. Once you’ve identified their commonalities, you can also use this to narrow the scope of your initial statement to be more realistic: “I am kind, as long as I am not ravenously hungry, in which case, run for your life”, or “I am a motivated person, as long as I am not exhausted and need to let my body recover”, etc. Or, you could use it to widen/change the scope: “I am a good planner on long timelines, even though I may look distracted in short-term planning instances.”

You may even find that you can integrate the examples and counter-examples into illustrating a larger and more important quality.

This is also helpful in letting go of guilt: Reframe the implied “I didn’t follow my values” into “I encountered conflicting values, and followed one of them, because I couldn’t see how I could reconcile them”. Not only is this more balanced, it also makes it obvious what to look at in order to deal better in the future.

You could also transform your counterexamples. You could link it to a positive transformation that occurred later (“I learned from this”), or even blend them so they transform directly into one another.

Building a new quality

Knowing that you can change your self-concept, what should you build? The first impulse will often be to radically change something you dislike about yourself. But. It’s really very hard to build the opposite of an existing self-concept. It’s better to pick something else that’s productive/helpful, but not in direct opposition to something established. When somebody sees themself as inherently lazy, then building up a self-image of “I am productive” will lead to a lot of inner conflict. It’s easier to build something up that softens or complements the other attribute – e.g. if you or others think you are too critical, you could add a component of acceptance, or of kindness, in order to let you still be critical, but be less hurtful/jarring.

Starting from other people’s criticisms is an alright idea for attributes to pick, though make sure you actually want to make those changes and are not blindly accepting other people’s guidance. You could also look at people you admire or like, and consider if there is any behaviour of theirs that you want to make yours.

This also goes in general: no matter what attribute you’re incorporating into your self-concept, make sure to make it fully your own. The best strategy is to pay attention to your collection of examples and your inner reactions to them – even when you start out with somebody else’s attribute, you’ll want to change it to be appropriate to your age/gender/who you are.

If you ignore the good advice and want to change an attribute you already have in your self-concept, you’ll start by building up and reconciling counter-examples. But man, hard work. You start by collecting counter-examples. Lots and lots and lots – start with 50. And once you have those, aggregate them into a big “I am x” collection. If you can’t find examples, that usually means you are being a perfectionst about it. Think smaller. But if you really can’t find any or enough, you could also start from other people’s experiences, putting yourself in their shoes, and past-/future-pacing them into your own life. (NLP hits hard here.)

This is the easiest if it’s something that you unabiguously want, with nothing getting in the way and subtly keeping you from it. That … won’t be the majority of the time. Be honest about this. Visualise the different you, and ask yourself if you could be like that right now, would you have any objections? And then listen closely.

(here ends chapter 9)