What’s Driving Your Behavior?
Posted on November 04, 2012 by Lynn Crocker, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.
The self-image is your conception of the sort of person you are. It is built from your own beliefs about yourself and drives all of your behavior.
When I begin working with a client, one of the first things we do is shine a light on her self-image. Having a clear view on how she perceives herself is essential to understanding and overcoming road blocks and breaking habitual thought/behavior cycles that are preventing her from creating the life she wants.
Dr. Maxwell Maltz was the first researcher and author to understand and explain how the self-image has complete control over an individual’s ability to achieve (or fail to achieve) any goal. The original text, Psycho-Cybernetics, was written in 1960 by Dr. Maltz and updated by Dan S. Kennedy and the Psycho-Cybernetics Foundation in 2001. The following is an excerpt taken from The New Psycho-Cybernetics, c 2001 Penguin Putnam, Inc.,Pages: 2-4:
Your Secret Blueprint
…By understanding your self-image and by learning to modify it and manage it to suit your purposes, you gain incredible confidence and power.
Whether we realize it or not, each of us carries within us a mental blueprint or picture of ourselves. It may be vague and ill defined to our conscious gaze. In fact, it may not be consciously recognizable at all. But it is there, complete down to the last detail. This self-image is our own conception of the “sort of person I am.” It has been built up from our own beliefs about ourselves. Most of these beliefs about ourselves have unconsciously been formed from our past experiences, our successes and failures, our humiliations, our triumphs, and the way other people have reacted to us, especially in early childhood. From all these we mentally construct a self (or picture of a self). Once an idea or a belief about ourselves goes into this picture it becomes “truth,” as far as we personally are concerned. We do not question its validity, but proceed to act upon it just as if it were true.
The self-image the controls what you can and cannot accomplish, what is difficult or easy for you, even how others respond to you.
Specifically, all your actions, feelings, behavior, even your abilities, are always consistent with this self-image. Note the word: always. In short, you will “act like” the sort of person you conceive yourself to be. More important, you literally cannot act otherwise, in spite of all your conscious efforts or willpower. (This is why trying to achieve something difficult with teeth gritted is a losing battle. Willpower is not the answer. Self-image management is.)
The Snap-Back Effect
The person who has a “fat” self-image, whose self-mage claims to have a “sweet tooth,” to be “unable to resist junk food,” who “cannot find the time to exercise”, will be unable to lose weight and keep it off no matter what he tries to do consciously in opposition to that self-image. You cannot long outperform or escape your self-image. If you do escape briefly, you’ll be “snapped back,” like a rubber band, extended between two fingers, coming loose from one.
The person who perceives himself to be a “failure type person” will find some way to fail, in spite of all of his good intentions or his willpower, even if opportunity is literally dumped in his lap. The person who conceives himself to be a victim of injustice, one “who was meant to suffer,” will invariably find circumstances to verify his opinions.
You can insert any specific into this: your golf game, sales career, public speaking, weight loss, relationships. The control of your self-image is absolute and pervasive. The snap back effect is universal.
The self-image is a “premise,” a base or a foundation upon which your entire personality, your behavior, and even your circumstances are built. As a result, our experiences seem to verify and thereby strengthen our self-images, and either a viscous or beneficent cycle, as the case may be, is set up.
For example, as student who sees himself as an “F”-type student, or one who is “dumb in mathematics,” will invariably find that his report card bears him out. He then has “proof.” In the same manner, a sales professional or an entrepreneur will also find that her actual experiences tend to “prove” that her self-image is correct. Whatever is difficult for you, whatever frustrations you have in your life, they are likely “proving” and reinforcing something ingrained in your self-image like a groove in a record.
Because of this objective “proof,” it very seldom occurs to us that our trouble lies in our self-image or our own evaluation of ourselves. Tell the student that he only “thinks” he cannot master algebra, and he will doubt your sanity. He has tried and tried, and still his report card tells the story. Tell the sales agent that it is only an idea that she cannot earn more than a certain figure, and she can prove you wrong by her order book. She knows only too well how hard she has tried and failed. Yet, as we shall see, almost miraculous changes have occurred both in grades of students and the earning capacity of sales people, once they were prevailed upon to change their self-images.
Obviously it’s not enough to say, “it’s all in your head.” In fact, that’s insulting. It is more productive to explain that “it” is based on certain ingrained and possibly hidden patterns of thought that, if altered, will free you to tap more of your potential and experience vastly difference results. This brings me to the most important truth about the self-image: it can be changed.
