Self-Concept

Take a quiet moment, and reflect inwards - How are you feeling right now?  Are you excited by something? Are you bored? Are you upset, are you challenged?

It's good to get in touch with your feelings and to be able to identify and articulate them to yourself (even if you don’t tell others).

Recently during one of my coaching sessions, my client realised that his own self-concept compared to others concept of him, was extremely harsh.  He'd been very, very hard on himself, and he'd scored himself quite low. He'd said that he was not a very good leader, had issues with aggression, as well as a lot of passive behavior. This led us to a really interesting conversation about your own self-concept, versus others concept of you.

Often I notice that people judge themselves far more harshly than other people do. So very often when someone receives the results of my 360 degree feedback process, you can clearly see how your own self-concept aligns (or doesn’t align) with other people’s perceptions of you.

This process involves asking five or more people in your immediate circle, to provide structured feedback about you.  During our coaching, we compare these reports to each other, with the whole experience designed to help you see yourself, through other people’s eyes. And in this case, there was a dramatic difference.

In this particular scenario, the individual themselves had been so hard on himself, given himself a low score in nearly every area that we were measuring. So when he received his profile and began processing the information – he was quite pleasantly surprised. The people around him thought he was quite a good leader. They respected him, and thought that what he was doing was right, and that he was very motivating. Other people were giving him all of these positive messages about his leadership. 

So his homework was to go away, and try to not only reconcile it, but just to try to understand why he's scoring himself so differently to what six other people have scored him. And it doesn't mean that one set of scoring is right and the other is wrong, just that there is room for human growth. 

So I’m asking you to check in with yourself today. Do you think you are unnecessarily harsh on yourself? Do you think you would give yourself an accurate response around your self-concept? Or do you think that you'd be tough on yourself and other people would be more generous? Of course, there's always the opposite way as well, where people can be a little bit tougher on you, and you're more generous to yourself (I’ve seen that happen too!).

It's just an interesting idea for you to consider in terms of developing your self-concept and moving forward and evolving as a human being. If you want to evolve as a more successful human being, then you are somewhere on this journey, aligning your self-concept with the other people's concept of you. And the more aligned you are then a really good indicator of personal success and also professional success from a leadership point of view.

So if you're interested in this kind of topic, and you like having conversations about yourself, then check the content on my website, as well as my Facebook group.  I often host courses, sessions and online training on these types of topics.