“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”– Henry David Thoreau
Your self-concept is probably the most important aspect of your life.
Why? Because it includes everything you believe is true about you. Everything you believe about what you’re capable of and what is possible for you. Your self-concept is visible everywhere in your life; it generates your current results.
Your self-concept consists of the ”ingredients” you use to create you. It includes your beliefs about your:
· Talents and abilities (“I’m bad at sales and marketing”)
· Athleticism (“I’m clumsy”)
· Creativity (“I’m not very imaginative”)
· Health (“I’m prone to getting sick”)
· Willpower (“I have an addictive personality”) and
· Genetics (“It’s in my DNA”)
You also spice up your self-concept with various personality traits and stories (“I’m an anxious person;” “I don’t have enough energy;” “People never change;” “I’m an unlucky person”).
Right now, I invite you to open up to the possibility of creating a radical new self-concept of yourself. If you believe this to be possible, it will be possible. If you believe this to be impossible, it will be impossible. Whichever you choose to believe, become aware that you are making this choice.
To free yourself from any aspect of your self-concept, I encourage you to examine where it originated.
Look at how you came to adopt it – like a form of osmosis (or perhaps at times more like brainwashing) from your family growing up, your peer groups, your culture (“I’m Swedish!”). From society as a whole.
By seeing how you actually choose to accept your self-concept (often with the mind of a five-year-old), you may more easily open yourself to the possibility of consciously choosing a new self-concept right now.
This is possible no matter what happened to you in the past or what was true for you then.
Your self-concept flows from what you imagine to be true about yourself so it’s important to become more mindful of what you imagine.
The insight you gather from this provides clarity on how and what you create. For example, you may find that a lot of your imagination is used for worrying or thinking about what you don’t want to happen. Or you come up with justifications for not doing something that you could be doing.
Whatever you discover, it can be changed.
One way you can look at your imagination is like fertile soil to be used for planting the seeds that you want.
Your imagination is the most powerful tool you have been given in life.
With this in mind, imagine what’s possible for you.
“Imagination should be used not to escape from reality, but to create it.” – Colin Wilson, author and philosopher
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