Hey! I want to talk to you about your self-concept. Your self-concept is something you put together
over time, and, yes, you've got lots of things from people, comments about you and so on,
but you need to know something. You have a set of ideas about who you are, and for you
they're like hard reality. In fact, your self-concept is so central to the way you organize your
entire world, you hang onto it like mad. I mean, you feel like, okay, if there's one
thing I know, I know me. And yet, you may be leaving out all kinds of possible things
about you that you could've taken notice of, but you haven't. Did you ever have this experience
where you got into a class with somebody, a particular professor or teacher, and they
just looked at you a different way? It could be even a grade school teacher, but it was
like they saw something about you that the other teachers hadn't seen, and they kind
of expected more of you, and maybe they waited a little longer to hear what your answer was,
like they were really interested, and you went, oh. I mean, you didn't necessarily say
something out loud to yourself about what was going on, but pretty soon, you were kind
of like, speaking up in class and saying more things. That's what happens. There's an interchange
with you and other people, and you form a self-concept. And the good thing is that there
is room for it to expand, and you can take more in and allow yourself to shift. But if
anybody comes in and just says you're not this or you're not that, you hang onto your
self-concept. You feel like they're crazy. They don't know. I know me. You know, like,
one quadrillionth of you. You're an energy system. You are beyond stardust. You're amazing,
and there's so much to you that you don't understand and don't conceive of and can.
I urge you to look at your self-concept and see what it contains because your self-concept,
every time you say something that's a self-description, I'm this kind of person, I'm that kind of
person, when you say I'm this kind of person, a present tense statement of how you are,
you are prescribing future behavior. You're saying we're-I'm committed to this. This is
the position I take. This is me. You prescribe further behavior in that same direction. So
if you say it about a negative characteristic, you just put in place a limit, and you just
acted in a self-hypnotic way to strengthen that. You are doing self-hypnosis all the
time when you talk to yourself or when you describe yourself to others, and that self-hypnosis
strengthens and prescribes behavior. If somebody tells you, oh, you're always this way, or
you're always that way, the characteristic, no matter what it was, was a prescription
for future behavior. If it was a positive description of you, it was still a prescription
for future behavior. If it was a negative description of you, you were saying inside
yourself, yeah, that's me. That's what people expect. That's what I do. That's who I am.
And you make a mistake between saying that's what I do, and that's who I am. I will tell
you something you need to do about your self-descriptions. Listen carefully. Any self-description that's
positive, say it in the present tense. I am that way. Any goal that you have, say it in
the present tense, I am that way, because your goal is not to try to become the fastest
swimmer in the 2044 Olympics. Your goal is I am the fastest swimmer. That's my goal.
I'm the fastest swimmer. I'm the fastest swimmer. I'm the best artist. I'm the strongest man
in the world. Your goal is I'm the strongest man in the world. Say it in the present tense.
Any negative characteristic, do not prescribe it for the future by putting it in the present
tense. Say up till now, I was this way, or I have been this way. Don't own in your self-concept
negative characteristics because when you say them in the present tense, you keep re-prescribing
them. You're giving yourself instructions for how to be. I want you to be all you can
be, so I don't want you to keep prescribing limits. Stop the negative prescriptions. Prescribe
only positive things, new directions that you know you're building toward. Since you're
a high achiever you may know about this. High achievers often hit a wall. They're going
along, they're having one success after another and then suddenly, something happens and they
grind to a halt. And it's confusing because they're not sure what it is they've done wrong
if anything. They just know that they're not moving anymore the way they're used to moving.
The way they have moved in the past. If you've run into like what seems like a ceiling over
you and you're kind of in a fog and you're mystified by what's getting in your way, you
can even kind of slide into a swirl of doubts and wonder if you ever really achieved anything
significant at all and whether any of your amazing achievements you have done were anything
but kind of fronting or a little bit of a fraud. That is really negative and pernicious
and it doesn't have to be that way. I want you to go get a free report from me. Go to
DrKenChristian.com/Breakthrough and receive from me this free report with action steps
that are going to tell you exactly what to do now to get you going.