Have you ever worked diligently to transform something about yourself, but found yourself unable to change? Chances are the reason was because your self-image wasn’t consistent with the new behavior. It’s easy to overlook the importance of your thoughts. In fact many rarely catch thoughts as they pass from awareness back into the oblivious abyss beyond consciousness. But the goals and heights you will attain in your life are all directed by these thoughts and the images they represent about you. Your self-image is the prime director that sets the parameters for your achievements, your relationships, your responses and your ability to create whatever it is you end up creating.
Colette Hirsh and colleagues of the Institute of Psychiatry in De Crespigny Park in London studied a group of patients that suffered from social phobia. The team wanted to study the impact of the self-image. The patients suffering from social phobia were to hold two conversations with strangers, one while holding the normal negative image of themselves and one held while holding a less negative image. Assessors, blind to which image was held during the conversations would rate the levels of anxiety visible to observation.
When the participants held the less negative image of themselves it correlated with the assessor rating them as less visibly anxious than when the normal negative image was held.
When the normal negative image was held the participants themselves overestimated the visibility of their anxiety and underestimated their performance during the conversation.
Author of Psycho Cybernetics (Wilshire Book Company 1960) Dr. Maxwell Matz says that “self image is the key to human personality and human behavior." Psychology has termed some personalities as success or failure prone and health or disease prone and so on. In short there seems to be a case for certain personality types to continually attract specific experiences over and over again. Each of these types of personalities however, is governed by the self-image. When you find that thinking positive just doesn’t seem to work for you, the cause could be that your self-image is negative. According to Dr. Matz, positive thinking “literally can not work when it is inconsistent with the self image.”
The reason why your thinking, if inconsistent with the self-image, falls by the wayside is due to your brain and nervous system. These two work in concert with each other and create a sort of “goal striving mechanism.” Like a missile aimed at a target, your brain and nervous system having received its orders from the self-image, set out to achieve its goal by any means possible. The brain interprets the world according to the orders given to it and then the nervous system kicks in and releases the hormones, adrenalin or endorphins for example, to create the feelings or sensations necessary to support the brain's perception of reality.
How to Change
The nervous system is unable to tell the difference between actual experience and something vividly imagined. And since your nervous system is unable to distinguish between the two, each time you use your imagination vividly, you are developing memories that are as impacting as actual experiences!
- Create a positive realistic image of yourself
- Relaxing as you visualize is paramount, but see and experience yourself in a different light
- Commit to visualizing for 30 minutes a day and it takes about 21 days for the mind to adjust to new data or experiences.
- Be detailed with your practice, see yourself in specific situations, hear, feel and sense yourself living life as the new improved you.
In his book Dr. Matz cites research on the effects of mental practice and skill improvement. He notes only a 1% advantage of skill improvement was shown to exist between subjects that practiced a task and subjects that had only vividly imagined practicing the same task. You can change your life by practicing being the person you really want to be, by seeing yourself in great detail acting and feeling in ways that you have consciously chosen. When you do this you are changing your self-image and opening doors to an extraordinary life!
Donya Ture - Donya Ture'-Washington has worked in the field of social services providing counseling to families, foster and biological, for the past 10 ...
