Self-Concept: The Secret to Changing WHO You Are

Hello and welcome to Being Well. I'm Forrest Hansen. If you're new to the show, thanks for joining us today. And if you've listened before, welcome back. Most of the content that we do on this show, and most self-helpy content in general, focuses on what to do. Different strategies, habits, and routines. And that is really important. We've talked a lot about the value of small, consistent changes, and how applying something like the 90/10 principle can make a big difference over time. But sometimes, even when we know exactly what to do, we still don't do it. Or we try, but we keep running into the same problems and patterns over and over again. And when that happens, it's often because of something deeper. A story we're telling ourselves about who we are. This is where self-concept comes in. It's the invisible framework we use to answer the question, "Who am I?" It shapes how we see ourselves and what we believe we're capable of. And when that framework is too rigid or outdated, it can become a kind of invisible cage that keeps us stuck. We talk about self-concept a lot on the show, but I don't think we've done a focused episode on it, at least not for a long time. And I've been thinking about this topic for a while. How changing your self-concept isn't just a lever for change. In some ways, it's the lever for change. So today, I'm really excited to talk about it with my guest as usual, clinical psychologist Rick Hanson. So Dad, how are you doing? I'm really good. And I'm very psyched about this topic. I am too. And in part because I'm into it, there's a chance that I'm just going to monologue a little bit here. And I'm going to try to avoid that. But I would love to actually start by talking a bit about what is self-concept? Because skipping to the end, spoiler alert here, what we're eventually going to discover is that in order to change the stuff that's in your self-concept, it's really helpful to change some of the beliefs that you have about self-concept. And most of these beliefs are kind of invisible, right? So we got to pull them out of the darkness and into the light here. And that's what I'd like to do for the first couple of minutes here. So how does that sound to you, Dad? Are you okay with me just kind of doing a spiel? I love going meta. That's great. Awesome. So what's self-concept? Simply, it's your answer to the question, who am I? And there are a lot of people in the history of psychology who have defined it much more operationally and much more in detail. For example, Roy Baumeister, he was a big self-efficacy researcher, defined it as the individual's belief about themselves, including their attributes and who and what the self is. So the way I think about it is that it's a kind of internal map. It's this overarching view of who you are based mostly on the beliefs that you have about yourself. It includes a lot of other stuff too. But it includes our perception of things like core personality traits. These could be your big five traits like how extroverted you are, how agreeable you are with other people. It could include some of the primary roles and relationships that you have in your life. How do you think of yourself? Do you think of yourself as being a parent, a child, a member of a certain social group, various subjective judgments you have about yourself? I'm a hard worker. I'm a good person. I'm nice. I mean, I'm friendly. I'm not so friendly. All of that stuff. And then finally, the thoughts and feelings that we have about ourselves. Now these beliefs really importantly are learned. We absorb them from the world. There might be some kind of inherent belief in a person when they pop out. I don't know. That's more of a metaphysical question. But as near as we can tell, we learn this stuff and we primarily learn it through social interaction. We interact with the world. We see how the world responds to us and we develop beliefs about ourselves and other people based on those interactions. At the most simple level, we learn I got rewarded for doing this thing and I got punished for doing that thing. And these beliefs develop primarily when we're quite young. And we tend to internalize what we think other people believe about us. If you get told that you are smart and capable and highly functional over and over again, you tend to start believing it. If you get told that you are dumb and not very capable and not very functional, you tend to start believing it. Now this self concept can change as we age. And just as any belief could be true or not true, right? You might have the belief that the earth is flat and I hate to break it to you, but that one is not true. It's just a belief. It's not objective. It's not rational. And the same is true for our self concept. Just because we absorbed these things from the world doesn't inherently make them true. But a hugely important part of this process, this journey we're going to be on here today, is realizing that our self concept does not feel fallible inside of our self. Its rightness is presumed by the system. So this means that we have to really go out of our way to see any of the issues with the self concept that we've developed over time. We need to pull that machinery out of the unconscious and into the conscious mind. So Dad, what do you think about my whole kind of monologue here and what would you like to add to it? I thought it was great. And I thought with this material in particular, as I've nudged you before we turned on the recorder here, you have a lot of great material here for us. It's a great summary. You just absorb a plethora of material and you put it into a list. I've done a lot of these episodes at this point totally. So I want to really encourage you in that way. I'll do a little bit of complicating just at the front end. There are cognitions about ourselves. They are usually associated with sensations, somatic markers, and emotions, but to some extent related motivations. Yeah. In my summary, I really focused on the cognitive aspects are totally right. And I'm just sort of extending that building on that. I think we're going to focus a lot on cognitive aspects. I just want to get in here that the thought, no one really will want to marry me. That belief is a belief. You could test it as a proposition, but it's very associated with feelings, emotions, and also sensations moving into the shame response. And so those all go together. One, two, a major source certainly of the sense of self and ideas about the self is certainly interactions with others and repeated patterns of interaction. And even infants are little scientists and they're testing and forming conclusions about the world and about themselves even before other people have much effect. And I think people who tend to be very extroverted and/or people who are very interpersonally attuned, empathic and sensitive and open. Oh, sure. Yeah. Temperament factors are clearly on a big nature basis. Yeah, absolutely. Like more introverted, more sort of internally focused. That's a major source as well for who are you, that one. And then the last complication here, we're talking really about identity. Yeah. Broadly. And identity itself is often compounded and people have different identities. My concept of me when I'm interacting with my young children could be one way. My concept of me when I'm interacting with my authority figure, kind of scary boss, could be a little different. So you can have complexities in terms of self-concept. And related to that, intuitively and implicitly often, there's a sense of what do you identify with? Like, your self-concept also includes things like group identity, class, group belonging. It's made up of many different parts that can orient toward any of those parts. Absolutely. Yeah. My parents both grew up basically in poverty, working class poverty. And as I grew up, their vision of the possible was somewhat limited by their own backgrounds while being very supportive and wonderful. So my vision of the possible had to do with my identity as a lower-middle-class, very middle-middle-class kind of person. So I just kind of want to acknowledge the complexity. Clear the decks so we can go down the royal highway of your preparation here. I want to take a look at an aspect of what you just said there, Dad, because I think it's actually a really good example for why this stuff matters. So let's say that you're somebody where from a temperament standpoint, you're not really a super extrovert, but you're not really a super introvert either. You're a middle-vert. I don't know if there's a word for that. There probably is that I'm not aware of. Do you know of any words for this, Dad? No. No. A Misi-overt. Yeah, sure. You're a middle-vert. Okay. And let's say that as a middle-vert, you grow up and you have a lot of experiences of kind of liking other people in some circumstances and really preferring to be by your own and others. But you've got a little bit of social anxiety for whatever reason. So you go to school and you tend to kind of turtle because it's sort of helpful for other people to bring you into the conversation first. And then from there, you're good to go. Once you get brought in, you're good. But until you get brought in, man, there's a lot of friction. What happens? People tell a story that Sarah is an introvert. And then Sarah starts to hear that Sarah is an introvert. And then Sarah starts to take on the identity of being an introvert. And then when Sarah starts moving through the world, she starts operating from the stance of, "Oh, I'm introverted." And that means fill in the blank because I have all of these assumptions and conclusions about what an introvert is. And that just kind of illustrates the dance between a person's true nature, whatever that might be, and then the self-concept that they start to develop based on their experiences with other people. And I think it also highlights why this stuff matters because this starts to dictate what we can do and what we care about. And just like you said, dad, the sense of possibility that we have through the course of our life, right? Yeah. We'll get into a lot of stuff here, but just think about two different ways of regarding yourself. Let's say people listening here. So one way of regarding yourself is that you are basically fundamentally somewhat inadequate, not particularly impressive, not particularly likable or lovable. And you really have to work hard every day to prove yourself, that you deserve love, that you deserve the job, that you deserve friends. That would be one frame. That's a pretty common frame. A different frame would be something like, "I'm far from perfect. I'm not better than other people, but I'm plenty good enough. I have a natural inherent goodness. I'm basically a lovable, likable person. My intentions are mainly good." Two really quite different ways of viewing yourself and having a frame in which information occurs. Self-concept is like a frame in which information is assimilated or even accommodated to budge and change your frame. Those frames and those two different ways of guarding yourself would really make a big difference. Totally. Most people carry around a frame about self-concept that positions it as being pretty static. I forget exactly what they call this man. I think it's called the end of history effect, where if you ask somebody, "How different are you from the person you were 10 years ago?" They often say some version of, "I'm very different." But if you ask somebody a prospective question, "How different will you be in five or 10 years?" They often say not that different. Wow, that's interesting. I never heard of that. Yeah, we're always very different when we look behind, but we don't think that that change will necessarily continue into the future. Sometimes at different moments in your life, people tend to change more between the ages of 12 and 25 that they probably do between the ages of 25 and 40, just if you think about normal developmental curves. But we change a lot as people, right? But we tend to have this view of our self-concept as quite static. The problem with this is that we're a process, right? We're dynamic. We are changing the world around us changes. We're going to go through a lot of different roles in life. And if we are going to keep up with all of that, we need to be able to change inside of ourselves. If you derive the core of your identity from one particular role, that's going to exist for a while, but maybe not for the rest of your life. Whether that's thinking of yourself as being a parent versus thinking of yourself as being a child or thinking in terms of different relationship dynamics, like I'm a fun, desirable, single person and I'm a flirt and I like having that kind of dynamic. If some aspect of that personality or your life experience changes and your identity is really wrapped up in that role, you're going to experience a certain amount of friction. It's going to be very uncomfortable for you. Your identity is no longer going to fit with the kind of stuff that you need to accomplish in your life. And that's something that people really bump into quite frequently. As usual for us, when you come up with the topic for the show, I'm just amazed that you keep coming up with new topics. How many episodes are we in now? I don't know what. Over 400 episodes, yes, we somehow come up with new material. Yeah, we can and we can. And I really want to underline what an important topic this is. For example, as people think about things, certainly as they engage the default mode network, and they're just kind of daydreaming or ruminating, or they're focused on a problem, typically what's embedded in that is a sense of an I and a me. So there's a sense of an I that is a kind of subject that is reflecting about or imagining, including in terms of affective forecasting, like what it will be like for me, that me in the future in that particular situation. And so there's a sense of multiple me's. There's the me, I am at work. There's the me, I am hanging out with my friends. There's the me, I am reading a book before I go to bed at night, different me's, and then there is a certain amount of change in the I who is viewing those me's and regarding them and making fundamental choices. Well, that ongoing process of I making and me making is driven by our sense of self and our self concept, who we consider ourselves to be, and it's continually reinforcing it and constructing it. And so that extremely intimate sense of I considering different impacts on me is right in the territory of what we're talking about. It says intimate and at the core of who we are is that. And the results of it can affect us in all kinds of ways. I'm just thinking of two right here. One is when we're anticipating or creating plans or developing expectations about how it would be to ask someone out on a date or how it would be to tell someone that we really didn't care for what they said to us in the meeting. We're imagining different futures and our expectations about how it will go has come very affected by self-concept. If we consider ourselves to be a me that other people don't particularly value and is not really very capable, well, then that is going to affect how we act because we'll expect disaster. So it really shapes our expectations. And then another way has to do with how do we respond when other people treat us a certain way, including when they say you are. Well, really, am I that? And the sense of the me you are gets very intimately involved. And the belief about the me who you are, when other people project a certain kind of a me onto you, you are a certain way or this way or that, including impacting how assertive you're willing to be or whether you roll over or whether you go to war or just how it lands on you. Like I grew up, I felt like my parents who are super loving kept dealing with a me with a Rick who was displaced from the real Rick by six to 12 inches to the side. And then you feel alienated. Feeling misunderstood is one of the biggest pain point experiences for people, I really think. That feeling of feeling misunderstood is just so painful for people. And I think that it does tie dad to self concept broadly. In some ways, we can almost misunderstand ourselves as maybe like a point that I'm sort of making as part of this, but also just the gap between what is really true about us. And then the experiences that we're having out in the world can also create that sense of incongruence, which is a big thing that Carl Rogers talked about when he talked about self concept. And as long time listeners of the show already know, Carl Rogers is probably my favorite psychologist. Personally, if I were going to be more like, oh yeah, for sure, humanistic psychology right there. Okay, that's very telling for us. He had a certain Mr. Rogers vibe about him that maybe I have an affinity to as a millennial who knows, but he talked about self concept as having these kind of three parts. First, your self image, how you see yourself. Second, your ideal self, who you wish you were. And then third, self worth broadly, how you evaluate your own value. And I think that kind of gets to some of the things that you were talking about, dad, these different aspects, how you think about yourself, how that causes you to show up in relationships in different kinds of ways. And then a big issue for people is when there is some kind of conflict between our self concept and our actual experience of the world. And he called this congruence or incongruence, right? Congruence is when your self concept aligns with your lived experience. And incongruence is when there's an experience that you have that contradicts how you think about yourself. A simple example of this, you have the self concept of yourself as being the good parent. But you have an interaction with your kid, goes a little sideways and you yell at them. Okay, so what happens after that? We need to have a kind of defensive mechanism that allows us to reconcile this difference. So that parent in that moment, they might minimize what happened, they might deny what they did, they might downplay it, they might say, hey, all parents do this, this is part of being a good parent too, you got to discipline your child, my parents did much worse to me, so on and so on and so on, because you want to maintain that consistency in how you view yourself. And I think that part of that at least is us kind of feeling like that self concept is supposed to be really stable over time, it's not supposed to change very much. And we can have a hard time including aspects of who we are that we think of as being more problematic. People really struggle with yes and yes, you are a good parent and yeah, you yelled at your kid. One version of that that I see really, really commonly is people have a concept of themselves as sort of inadequate or incapable or not particularly wonderful. But they don't update their priors. I mean, that's the direction that I generally see. I think there is certainly a fraction of people who are raging arrogant assholes and they think they're wonderful and yet they're doing all these harms to other people and they don't integrate that, they don't have the humility to integrate that. I think they're definitely people like that and unfortunately, I think they tend to predominate in positions of power, political and economic and spiritual. And so therefore it's particularly important if you're that person to have a certain humility and also it's important when you're around those people or you're interested in systems that you care about creating systems of feedback. I've been in sort of spiritual environments or psycho-spiritual environments in which the teacher, there was no feedback loop for the teacher, so they were unregulated. Okay, that's problematic. But in everyday life, most people I know, they're much more wonderful, just so good than they think they are. That's where the big issue is for a lot of people. We'll be right back to the show in just a moment. Now, back to the show. So what's being pushed away is maybe to use your point as an example to add somebody thinks of themselves as not being so competent, they might have a million experiences in their day-to-day life of being really quite competent, of handling a problem, dealing with a task, accomplishing something. And yet you hold that up in front of them and there are a million reasons why it wasn't that big of a deal. I didn't really do anything. I got a lot of help along the way, so on and so on and so on. Yeah, totally. And here's a weird wrinkle. I don't know where it fits in, but I'm free associating here because my self-concept includes creative bubbling. I've been thinking here about Jenny from the Block and Jennifer Lopez material about Jenny from the Block. And on the one hand, I think people can be sort of trapped in terms of their identity, having to do with their social class, ethnic identification, gender identification in their childhood especially. Let's say the first 20 years. On the one hand, on the other hand, I think there are many examples of people. This becomes really kind of salient when you think about children of immigrants for first generation, born in America people, who often will turn away from their immigrant parent background. And then they go on their own life journey. And somewhere around middle age, if not sooner, there's this process of reclaiming their own roots. And I think that that points to one of the big takeaways here, which is this flexible notion of it, right? Because that's what allows us to move from that incongruence experience, the experience of having stuff that happens out in reality that doesn't line up with our sense of who we are, to more of a sense of congruence. Because we have a complex view of the self, right? It includes more stuff. We've done some acceptance, we've done some reclaiming, we've kind of pushed open the box that we're placing ourselves in, in a way that becomes more inclusive. And people defend their self-concept in a whole bunch of different ways. There are all these different mechanisms for trying to preserve that sense of continuity. Because in general, we do like that. But I think that the big one that breaks it all down is exactly what you're saying here, Dad. It is that acceptance and inclusion and just kind of widening the field on this. Now, how much of this forest do you think of as defending self-concept or presuming self-concept, kind of an automatic pilot? A simple version of this might be some version of, okay, you're a kid growing up, and maybe due to a cultural background or gender roles, whatever, you get told the story that people like you are fill in the blank. You are a man, the classic gender socialization. So therefore, you do not show certain aspects of vulnerability. So what do you do? Well, you need to kind of hide your need for support, you need to suppress your sadness, you need to hold on to these different vulnerable emotional experiences we talk about on the show all the time, right? And maybe you grow up, you do a little therapy, you have a good cry in front of a therapist, and things kind of open up for you, right? And this is a good example of how trying to maintain or protect that self-concept can stymie growth in a lot of different ways, including just by ignoring reality. Like, the reality is that people are complicated. We have a lot of different emotional experiences, and we want to be able to include all of them. That's really kind of the theme so far I think of what we've been talking about, this notion of acceptance and inclusion, which is the big first lever, I think, for how people start to work with and change this stuff. It's literally getting more grounded in your direct lived experience. And that helps you start to blow apart all of these assumptions that you're making about yourself. So you're moving from an assumption framework, I am a man therefore, to a, well, what if framework? Well, what if something else were possible? Well, what if something else were true? All of that. So as you know, I brought up this distinction between active defense and sort of tacit implicit presumption of who one is. And so I've been reflecting here with you about ways in which people do defend their sense of identity. And I can think of two examples that come really right forward. First, people defend being X because they're afraid that they're Y. So their sense of self actually has two aspects to it, almost like two lobes. One lobe is who they fear they are, deep down. They don't want to admit it. They don't want to acknowledge it. They don't want to risk that dreaded experience of facing those aspects of themselves. So then they get very defended about, I'm always right because I can't afford ever to be wrong, right? They get defended about their identity as a saint, as someone who's spiritually good, even though deep down, they're doing all kinds of horrible things. They just have some impulses that they're uncomfortable with, even if they're not acting on it. Yeah, even if they're not horrible, horrible. So that would be one thing. As a kind of reaction formation in Freud's language, that there's kind of a below the waterline sense of self as damaged, dirty, needs to be kept out of sight. And then there's this compensatory reaction formation of a presentation of self or an advocacy for a view of themselves that's kind of the opposite of, and it's compensation for who they fear they really are. So I think that's definitely one way in which the sense of self gets defended. And I wondered, what are the other ones? What are other ones that you see in people? The classic one is the fundamental attribution error, or attribution bias is also what it's called, where essentially we tend to, most people, most of the time, there's a lot of variation here, tend to explain, they tend to make excuses for their own errors and attribute to morality the errors of other people, essentially. So if you arrive to work late, you know that you bumped into traffic, you know that your infant was crying and they needed to be soothed, you know whatever happened. Somebody else arrives to work late, they're a late person, they're a lazy person, whatever it is. This is the classic example of the fundamental attribution error, where we always have an explanation for ourselves, but we don't have those same obvious explanations for other people. There are other examples of this, confirmation bias, we tend to pay attention to the things that line up with what we believe and we tend to just kind of ignore or notice in the moment, but not take in and change things based on disconfirming information. I think that's a really huge one, where if you hold up the example to the person who has the kind of self-worth issue that you were describing earlier then, if you hold up an example to them of like, hey, you really did achieve this thing, hey, you really did do this good work. And I'm sure you've seen this a million times in the therapy office with people, hey, do you see how like you really were very effective with that other person? They'll say, oh yeah, cool, but then it won't stick, you know, it won't go anywhere. We've talked about this ad nauseam on the show in the past. And I think that that's one of the really big ones too, that even when we see reality, we don't really internalize it in that kind of lasting stick to your ribs sort of way. And I think you could argue that the focus of your work over the last 20 years has been, okay, how do we get better at the stick to your ribs part? Really true. And I'm kind of pausing to reflect on the updateability of particular psychological systems on average is the sense of self or self-concepts, beliefs about the self. Are they particularly impervious to updating? They would say, I would describe them as having a low evolutionability index. I just made up that term. I think it's interesting to think about the degree to which the notion of oneself is pretty stubborn. No, I think that's the big takeaway here is that for most people, it is very stable and very muddy. Yeah. Yeah. And then the question becomes how to update it really effectively. And I know we're going to get into that totally. Maybe prematurely, I just want to drop in here this sort of intellectual cool stuff I stumbled into. I was reading a paper about processed-based psychotherapy involved the work of numerous people including friends of ours, Diana Hill and Steve Hayes. And they made the point that what enables biological evolution to occur can be applied to individual development. And so there are these three major principles that enable biological evolution to occur. There must be variation as well as selection for what is most adaptive and retention of that which is selected. It must become stabilized. Now, bear with me here. If we apply this to developing a more adaptive and flexible and congruent with reality, which is mainly good news about who you are, right? We want to, first of all, increase the capacity for variation to let yourself be different selves, different who's, who's you are, right? Which who are you today and with this person? So variation. And then there needs to be the response to those different ways of being that respond well to some and maybe not so well to others. Some seem to work a lot better. So there needs to be selection of the ones that are for you at least better. And then there needs to be quote-unquote retention, which is to say internalization, implementation, establishing, stabilizing in this new, in a sense, habit, the habit of selfing. Right? Isn't that pretty cool to think about letting yourself breathe freely and try different things? I went off to Finland, as you know, when I was a kid, I was 14. And what was great about it was that people didn't know who I was. So the familiar scripts that kind of trapped me in certain roles and sense of self within relationship to others, they were gone. And therefore, there was much more opportunity for variation. And we see this all the time in our lives. To be a little embarrassingly revealed, I had a very formative relationship that went for about four years. It was when I was in college. And I felt like I learned so much inside of that relationship about how to be a good partner. There was so much learning that happened. And yet, it was very difficult to apply that information inside of the relationship I was currently in because there was a lot of momentum to it. There was a lot of calcification. I had self-view. They had self-view. We had our systems of interaction. We had sort of different ways that we did things together. And then that relationship ended. And all of a sudden, I felt like I could apply this information so much more freely in future relationships. Some people see that with graduating from high school. You graduate from high school, you enter college. All of a sudden, there's all of this opportunity to be a new and slightly different person because you don't feel the pressure of the social environment that you're in that has developed certain assumptions about you. And I think that that just highlights the importance of breaking down these assumptions internally. Working with the core beliefs that we have about who we are or how stable our self-concept even needs to be doesn't need to be this kind of continuous, congruent, consistent thing. If you're old enough to remember this, whether or not somebody was a flip-flopper became a major political topic for about a decade. And I always thought it was so funny that changing your mind became this vilified thing when obviously the whole pursuit of science is driven by the desire to change your mind and update your priors. And so that's what we're trying to do inside of ourselves to ourselves. So the question then is what supports us in doing that? And I think that this is where we get to how do we think about who we are? How do we think about what a self-concept is? Because we tend to think that in terms of there being continuously true facts about ourselves. If I was away yesterday, I'm going to be that way tomorrow. Forest is an extrovert. Another belief that people tend to have is that they need to be consistent in order to be authentic. If I'm not acting sort of consistently through time, I'm not really being authentic. I'm like putting on a performance in some way. Going all the way up, a lot of the time we have a belief even coming from some spiritual traditions that there's some kind of true soul self that exists inside of you. And our job is to drill down to that true soul self and have it flow from us more naturally. There's some authentic self that exists inside. And if we just align what's going on in our external world with it, good things will happen to us. Now, the problem with all of this is that it's just not true. It's just not true. Top to bottom. There are generally not consistently true facts about ourselves. We change all the time. Humans are generally not consistent. They're complicated. You can be both patient and irritable. You can be a good parent and occasionally yell at your kids. You can be a loving partner and say something really stupid to your spouse. I've done that about a million and a half times. People tend to resist change a lot of the time due to a feeling of sunk cost. If I change now, does that mean that I'm admitting fault for all the ways that I was in the past or all the times I was that way in the past? And I think that just all of these things, all of these views that we have really get in the way of being able to treat self-concept like what it is, which is a dynamic and constantly updating thing that is sort of loose and diffuse and has a lot of space in it for whatever we want to put into it. And the more that we can come into that view of self-concept itself, the easier this whole process gets, I think. What do you think about that? I love the fact that you're really emphasizing kind of the meta-level view. In other words, that you're talking about beliefs about beliefs and you're basically saying flexibility, openness, beginner's mind is really, really helpful. What are internal factors in a fact that steep in your learning curve about your view and your sense and your beliefs about who you are? And this is particularly urgent because I think for many, many people, their beliefs about who they are and their sense of themselves is terribly negative. It's negatively tilted compared to the reality. So it's important to be on the learning team in this territory. I would say for me, one of the places to start is to do just what you're doing to have people go up to the bird's eye view and start to reflect on who do you think you are? How would you describe yourself to others? Deep down inside, who are you afraid you are that you feel like you need to hide? Otherwise, people will see it. Is that true? On the whole, when you imagine yourself in different situations, do you generally expect that you'll be successful, that you'll be liked, that you'll be effective? Or on the other hand, you generally expect that you're just not going to do very well or very, very well considered. Be aware of your self-concept. That's an incredibly important place to start, just to end to observe its operation, including as you talk about for us, self-limiting beliefs, limiting presumptions about yourself. I think that's a great place to start. And then I want to throw in one thing that when you try new ways of being, it's a variation, the first. Make sure you're with people who will appreciate these cool new ways of being, because there's a lot of research in family systems theory and all the rest of that about how social systems like families or couples, like you were saying for us, couples or friend groups or communities or congregations and so on, they tend to maintain equilibrium. They tend to resist change. And so if you're someone who has seen yourself as very meek and mousy and inhibited and you think, gosh darn it, I'm going to be a little more assertive. Well, be a little more assertive, that's variation, with people who will select that new way of being in a positive way, they will like that you're being more assertive, rather than ignoring it or punishing you for it. So I think that's another piece of the puzzle here, to put yourself in situations where your new ways of being are going to be wanted. Exercise, for example, that I think is really useful is to take a chapter in your life that was challenging and maybe out of which you developed a fair amount of self-concepts and tell that story from a point of view that is really affirming of yourself, that highlights how you coped, how you dealt with your burdens, how you endured, you persevered, yeah, you fell down, but you got yourself back up again amidst the failures, there were successes. Tell the story that way, tell the story in a heroic frame that's authentic to you and then see what happens when you do that. That's a very powerful exercise and it tends to surface a lot of things. Something we've kind of orbited, dad, and particularly that you've nudged us toward, is this feeling that most people have issues with self-concept tied essentially to negative forms of self-concept, right? With related emotions and body sensations. Yeah, with related emotions. Grounded in or history. Absolutely, yeah. And incongruence in the Rogerian sense focuses on situations where reality is not consistent with self-concept. And so what we do is we try to see reality more clearly and we internalize the reality and Roger's kind of lays out this whole process for doing that. But what about aspects of self-concept that are actually reinforced by reality? How can we change a belief that is true? Why would we want to change that? Not all aspects of self-concept are wrong, many are right and useful, some are right and not useful, and many of them are kind of right-ish, right? Yeah. And I think that a piece of this is about taking a step back from the whole thing and cultivating, as you said a moment ago, more of a sense of don't-know-mind about it. Yeah. And a feeling of having less expertise on who you are. Yes. And this is something I've been really thinking about a lot recently and I would love your take on it. As we develop in any kind of way, we get more information, right? And that information teaches us things about ourselves, about the world around us. And even as you start engaging with your psychology more, if you're the kind of person who listens to a podcast like this, you've probably done a lot of thinking about yourself, a lot of thinking, a lot of diving into it, a lot of uncovering the material, all of that good stuff. The problem with this is that we learn a lot about ourselves. And the more that we learn about ourselves, the more kind of entangled we can become with it. We talked about this a bit and the recent episode that we did on the problems with self-consciousness and kind of excessive self-awareness. In ACT, sometimes they talk about this as fusion. So you've become really fused with the beliefs that you have about yourself. And how can we kind of blow that open and take more of a beginner's mind stance toward who we are? There's something that makes me feel like that's really the way here. And then the question becomes, okay, how do we do that pragmatically? And do you have any thoughts about what tends to support somebody in that? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I have a list. What a surprise. Hit me with a list. Okay. Kind of working through it. One is to take a fearless and searching inventory. I love that phrase from the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, a fearless and searching inventory of your strengths, your good intentions, your values, your capabilities, your talents, your skills, which are acquired, talents are innate, and the capabilities that you have. So you can see that about yourself. Just the kind of an inventory. That's not everything, but that's a good start. So definitely do that. Second, face your moral failures. Paradoxically, unfazed moral failure, to use a phrase, really erodes self-worth. It might be encapsulated around which people create this defensive formation that I've described of compensatory wonderfulness, but it's quite burdensome. It's like a tree growing around a big rock of the moral failure. So come to terms with that. Face your failures, take responsibility for them, put them in a larger context so that you're not overstating them or understating them, feel appropriate remorse, shame or guilt, take a breath, make reparations as best you can, then forgive yourself and move on and recognize that whatever that moral failure was, it was almost certainly an extremely small part of the totality of your psyche and the totality of the fabric of your life as a whole. Really important, makes a big difference. And this for me is own that world of acceptance, that like seeing the whole field being real about yourself and then that acceptance rather than having it like blow up who you are, have it all be yes and, yes I am this and also I am that. It's not so black-white, it's not so splitting as we talk about in psychological language. You're more in the world of the gray, and the gray is much more inclusive. And then third, being aware of your tendencies, that kind of the negativity bias, the negativistic sort of downward pull, the gravitational pull of that negativistic, inaccurate, unfair view of yourself. Being aware of that, be clear about how you really want to regard yourself and experience yourself as who you really are. And so look for opportunities to really affirm and reinforce and remind yourself that that's who you are. That's the three aspects of what enables evolution, what enables change, retention, taking in the good, letting learning land, letting it be established. Really affirm yourself in that way. I, for example, used to think of myself as a very unathletic, unmanly kind of boy. And for me, there's been a real journey to experience myself as really quite athletic. That's been incredibly important for me to see myself in that way. I think it's also helpful to see yourself squarely in terms of your vulnerabilities, like a vulnerability to partying too much or toward exasperation. So you need to regulate these things. But you want to be someone who does regulate those things. So that would be, for me, a big third headline here. And then a fourth headline is really cultivating that sense of innate goodness, that there's a level of being deeper than self, a sense deep down inside. It doesn't feel like personality. It doesn't feel like gender. It just feels like depth of being, that your own depth of being is innately good, a wholesome, intact, unstained, untainted, indestructible, loving, peaceful, content and wise, getting in touch with that. And then the last headline taken from my kind of primary teacher these days, Stephen Snyder, is to allow yourself, just like you were saying for us, to move into spaces where you don't know who you are, including saying thanks to yourself, as long as it won't make you psychotic or dissociative. But I don't know who I am. That opens up all kinds of beautiful doors. Yeah. So you just cued me up there fantastically, Dad, because something that we have, or at least I have deliberately not talked about so far, is the obvious relationship that this topic has with some aspects of Buddhist practice, particularly the relationship to things like not self or disidentification. And there's no coincidence there, because various third wave behavioral approaches like ACT, with the talk about diffusion and fusion, were heavily influenced by mindfulness practice, which comes as a root tradition from many different places. But one of the ones that was very influential in the United States was Buddhist practice. And they do have a lot of alignment and spirit, right? Like suffering comes from identification, freedom arises when we're able to have more spacious awareness, the self is a process, it's not a thing. Thoughts and feelings have this kind of emptiness to them, all of that. Now, the big difference is that ACT is not making an ontological claim about the nature of reality, while Buddhism is. And I know that those forms of practice have been deeply meaningful to you personally. It's also kind of a super cheat code to blowing all of this up in what can be a very productive way for people, because as we've been talking about, the big hill that we're trying to climb with a lot of this is viewing the self and viewing self-concept as more flexible, more changeable, more inclusive, more variable. And a very powerful way to do that is start asking, like, wait a second, is there any self at all in there? Are you the sky and whether is appearing inside of you or is really the sky just kind of a construct also? And I'm wondering where you would like to take this stat. I recall the line, Darn, I'm forgetting the source, that you have to be somebody before you can become nobody. Yeah. And that's why I think that this is kind of an end of the episode conversation as opposed to the front end of it. Yeah. So let's say that it's really wholesome. It's really good to have an underlying sense of the person you are, which is the combination of a body and a mind that has a particular identity and a particular kind of continuity, to some extent, over time. With no doubt, there are persons, the person process, personing through our day. It is very good and very valuable for a person's sense of themself as a person to be strongly loaded, kind of like a stew, strongly flavored with a sense of worth, self-respect in the broad sense. So it's really good on that foundation. On that foundation, it's extremely useful. And I kind of short circuits a lot of suffering to recognize that the notions of identity, forms of contraction, possessiveness, pressure, "I must, I gotta," that is a fast track to suffering. And so, yeah, I would say that it's completely appropriate to recognize yourself like, okay, I'm relatively introverted or I'm relatively good at playing with words. It's okay to have ideas about yourself. But where we start getting into trouble, and people can be very experientially aware of the markers, is when there's a sense of pressure or contraction related to the eye-making or the "me-making" processes in the mind. Eye-making and "me-making" as fabrications in the field of awareness are not intrinsically problematic. They become problematic when there becomes an identification with the eye perspective or a particular eye perspective. That can become problematic where identification and defense and possessiveness around a particular "me" who you're trying to present to the world or impress people that this is who you are. That's when trouble begins. Eye-making and "me-making" per se is like hearing, seeing. It's sensing. It's just one more activity to be judged pragmatically, good, bad, and different. It's when we go all in around it. And you can really see this in other people when they kind of go in all in on identifying with a particular "me" or a particular eye perspective. How dare you look at me that way? Then trouble begins. We'll be back to the show in just a minute, but first a word from our sponsors. Now, back to the show. For me, a huge piece of this is about the directness that various forms of mindfulness practice gives you with your lived experience. In congruence becomes much more difficult to achieve when you are really living in what's going on between you and the world moment to moment to moment. You're getting much more direct information. When we're living in the cognizing function of our brains, we're having a lot of thoughts about thoughts, and particularly a lot of thoughts about a kind of preoccupation with eye, forest thinks that, forest feels that, whatever it is. That can really take us away from real, direct, and linear experience of reality. I find that most people are enormously benefited by a little bit more direct and linear experience of reality. It feels good most of the time on its own. It feels more immediate. It feels like there is less that gets in the way of really being able to feel the way that things are. That can become a really beautiful way in to evidence gathering. The way that we've been talking about throughout the episode, well, who am I really? What is going on around me? Huh? Does that person actually think that about me or am I just assuming that they think that about me? Wow, they said A to me, but in my brain, I heard B. There's a big gap between A and B. A is over here, B is all the way over there. I made a lot of jumps because I wasn't necessarily in that direct experience. That's one of the aspects of that kind of practice that I think is very pragmatic and people can get a lot of juice out of. Last night, your mom and I were listening to a lovely meditation from Henry Shuckman, who has this fantastic app, by the way. It's a highly recommended called The Way. He was sharing a meditation related to a Zen saying, "Go straight on. Go straight on." A lot of ways to understand that. Maybe as we wrap up here, there's a psychological dimension called basic trust. Its origins with Eric Erikson have to do with very early childhood. Can you trust the world in a basic way? That's important. And most deeply, is there a basic trust in yourself? Self? Who are you? Self? What kind of person are you? Do you have basic trust in the kind of person you are? Or do you feel like you need to continually second guess yourself, get feedback and reassurance from other people? Can you trust yourself? And there is a natural movement of the person you are that is wholesome, beneficial, direct. Go straight on. And you can live in, I don't know who I am, while going straight on. This is normally where I would move to and outro and recap what we talked about today, but I wanted to include this last piece as part of the body of the episode. Boiling it all down, how do we change self-concept based on everything that we've talked about today? I think the first step is we increase our general openness to change, and we loosen up some of the beliefs that we have about identity itself. We loosen the belief that identity is fixed, and coherent, and timeless. And relaxing that is the move that enables all of the other moves that we make. This is cultivating more don't-know-mind. This is lightening up about ourselves. This is being more okay with, "Hey, I was that way yesterday, but I could be a different way tomorrow," and having more of a skeptical view toward these entrenched aspects of self-concept in general. Is it really true that you are a certain way? What if you were this different way? What evidence can you see out in the world that doesn't line up with the view that you have of yourself? How can you integrate that information a little bit more into the person that you are right now? As we do that, we step to create a lot more space around identity, thoughts, and feelings. This is cognitive diffusion. It's the ability to take a step back from a statement that we make about ourselves and using related language that creates some more space. So a classic example of this could be moving from saying something like, "I am anxious," to something like, "I'm experiencing some anxiety." This could sound a little pedantic or a little technical or the kind of thing that gets generated inside of a psychology textbook or in a classroom space, but that isn't very practical. But the truth is that that movement, that little shift of like, "Huh, I'm feeling a thing," as opposed to, "I am a thing," can create a lot of space for people. And I've seen it really help people in a lot of different kinds of situations, in part because you start viewing your thoughts and your feelings as possibilities rather than facts. And there's a lot more space in a, "Huh, what if?" Then there is, "Wow, this is definitely true." And this is what takes us to the third step. We figure out what's true. We increase congruence by accepting reality. Sometimes this can be a bit painful. But most of the time, as Rick emphasized over and over again throughout the episode, most of the time this is pretty great because you're learning all of this stuff about yourself that you had pushed away. You are challenging your limiting beliefs and you are going out of your way to really internalize disconfirming evidence. And this can include a kind of coming into the present. What's true in your life right now? Right now, today, what is that direct experience that we talked about at the end of the episode? Something might have been true back then, but what's true right now? Then we allow the acceptance process that we went through to really fuel a feeling of agency. It's not about being perfect. It's particularly not about being perfect in the past. It's about doing what you can today. You've got to meet yourself where you are and you have to believe that this kind of change is possible for you. You see all the stuff that's out there, you accept it on its face and you go, okay, now what am I going to do? And a big part of this that we didn't talk about in too much detail, but that I want to emphasize at the end here, is how do we expand the story of who we are and reclaim some emotional real estate, okay? What stories have become a part of your self-concept? I'm a this kind of person, I'm a that kind of person. This thing happened to me and therefore, fill in the blank is true. What are those stories? Where did they come from? Whose stories are they? Are they your stories? Or are they stories that you got from somebody else? And as you go through this kind of a process, what you will often find is that the story is not entirely yours. You were told things, you assumed things, other people had a stake in making you feel a certain kind of way about yourself. And by investigating what's really true and forming what's called a coherent narrative of what happened, you move away from a reliance on simple consistency and toward a focus on values. What's true from now on? As you do this, you start to add rooms to the house of who you are. You build a broader self-concept that includes more stuff. I'm a parent and I'm also an athlete. I'm kind and I'm also assertive. I get sad sometimes and I'm also a very manly man. You know, whatever's true for you. That might be true over there. What's also true over here? This is sometimes called self-complexity theory. If you're interested in this kind of stuff, the formative research on it comes from Linville. I think it was mid-80s or something. We don't want to put all of our eggs into one identity basket. When we expand our identity, we become more resilient. People who have more self-aspects, they are friend and athlete and caregiver and artist tend to be better at coping with change and loss and all of the difficult stuff that we have to deal with over the course of our lives. If you're really interested in this, Brad Stolberg does a lot of great writing on this. He's got some wonderful books about it. I would really recommend his work. Along the way, two major factors to consider. First, these are emotional considerations just as much as they are factual ones. We have focused a lot on beliefs and on whether or not a belief is true and how do you find the disconfirming evidence and all of that. But that's not the only important consideration here. There are huge emotional stakes on the table and people often fuse with identities. They become very, very tight with them in order to manage fear, fear of rejection, of vulnerability, of inadequacy. Hey, maybe a fear of impermanence altogether as we talked about a bit at the end of the episode. The more importance we invest into something, the higher the emotional stakes. Our self-concept is very, very important. How you manage your emotions and your feelings as part of this process is a huge variable. Finally, environment and social forces play a huge role in this process. We often define ourselves relationally. We talked a lot during the episode about the pressure that those social environments can put on us. As you move from one social environment to another, it can become a lot easier to change aspects of self-concept. Our social relationships reinforce different kinds of social scripts and particularly identity scripts. They typically resist our attempts to change. As you are changing the puzzle piece of who you are by reevaluating your self-concept and exploring your identity, you're going to put some pressure on the other puzzle pieces that are around you. You're going to put some pressure on your close relationships because all of a sudden you're showing up a little bit differently. That is normal. Those relationships are going to resist that change. That is also normal. All okay. It's all a normal part of this process, but being aware that this is going to be a piece of it that you're going to have to deal with, it can be very helpful to go in with a clear seeing of that. That's my summary. That's my boiling it down. How do we actually change our self-concept? I would just add on top of that everything that Rick mentioned toward the very end of the episode, opening up that sense of who we are, becoming more interested and more curious about the possibility that things aren't so bolted down in the house of the mind, that it is kind of open and diffuse and who knows what's in there. Getting more comfortable with that as a real underlying possibility and letting that airiness give you a bit more freedom in how you think about yourself. Letting this whole process give you more of a sense of curiosity about the person that you're becoming. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I had a great time talking with Rick about all of this. This is some of the most interesting stuff in the world to me. I think this is really the crux of change for a lot of people. I hope that you were interested in it as well. Please let us know. Leave a comment. 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