How to Alter Your Self-Perception and Change Your Life For the Better
Don’t let your self-perception hold you back.
Early on in our childhood, somewhere around when most of us are entering school, an amazing thing happens. We start to become aware of ourselves and our role in the surrounding environment. This is a tremendous achievement, something humans specialize in.
This awareness of ourselves allows us to become whoever we want to be. It allows us to fluidly change from moment-to-moment and act in different ways in different scenarios.
Unfortunately, we often accidentally take this power and turn it against ourselves. We eliminate the possibility of becoming something better and tie ourselves up in an inescapable knot, all while believing we are working toward our comfort and happiness.
This knot is the result of the beliefs we’ve created that define us, determining how we will act before we have time to consider what we consciously want.
Our awareness of ourselves allows us to create a self-perception to categorize and label ourselves. This self-perception can help us reach our dreams or lead us down a road of misery.
Our Self-Perception Will Define Us for Better or for Worse
Every day we interact with both new and familiar people. Each of them is guided by their self-perception.
Most people base their decisions on their prior beliefs about themselves. What’s worse is they often don’t realize when they’re doing it. They let predetermined labels make the decisions for them moment after moment while they consciously wonder why they aren’t moving toward the person they hope to be.
Once you realize this fact, you have the opportunity to change your life little by little.
How to Use Self Awareness to Improve Your Life
First off, you will likely never know the full scope of your self-perception. The ideas we create about ourselves are so extensive and complex that we can only do our best to get a rough understanding of some of the ways we think about ourselves.
Through small realizations, we can hope to make great gains in the long run.
Step 1: Pay Attention to Your Routines
The first step to making your self-perception work for you is paying attention to the routines and thought patterns you find yourself coming back to regularly. These are the ideas and actions you are most connected to. These are the ideas that will build you to new heights or tear you down brick by brick.
An easy way to catch your routines is to start asking yourself what you’re doing at that moment and why you’re doing it. Take a moment in the morning or at night and quickly go over some of the more important parts of your day.
- What things are you doing?
- Do you enjoy doing them, or is there something else you’d like to try for the day.
You might decide to completely change the structure of your day, but it’s more likely you’ll discover 1 or 2 areas where you can improve. This can be as simple as changing the way you get to and from the places you have to go to, or it could be complex as spending more time with people you wouldn’t usually talk to.
What are the one or two things you’d like to change during your day?
Routines are usually created with good intentions, but over time they can become suboptimal, leading to missed opportunities throughout the day. Thus, they must be analyzed if you want to change your self-perception for the better.
Step 2: What Does Your Best Self Look Like?
The end goal of creating a better self-perception is to become the person that lives their ideal life. To make this happen, you must know the goal you’re shooting for.
What personality traits do you hope to exemplify more of? What opportunities do you want to take? How do you want to feel each day? These are all things you must be aware of.
Understanding your ideal self requires consistent reflection along with a little inspiration. You must look back on the things that made you feel happy and fulfilled. Be mindful of the emotions and physical conditions you enjoy experiencing. With these, you can start to create a vision for your future.
Here are a few practices that might help you get a clearer picture:
- Visualisation. Taking a few minutes to create a mental picture of your ideal life can be very helpful. How do feel in the visualization? What are doing with your life? How do you spend your quiet moments?
- Journaling. Journaling can be a great practice for reflecting on the main things you focus on during your day. What moments have brought you the most happiness in the past few weeks? What thoughts do you keep having?
- Moments of silence. Sometimes, all we need is a little quiet time to ourselves. It can be hard to be fully aware of what we want if we’re always engaging in things that require our attention. Just a few minutes every week can be enough to take inventory of your values and goals.
Step 3: Identify 1 to 3 Things You Can Do Today
Once you’ve determined where to aim your sights, you can start to move in that direction. Instead of focusing on accomplishing everything at once, allow yourself to focus on one to three things you can do today to make a difference.
This allows you to concentrate on the areas you determined to be most important without feeling overwhelmed by the changes. The key to change is it must be sustainable, adding too many changes into your day often becomes too much to manage.
You get to choose whatever you want to do for that day. Your goals could be the same thing(s) each day or you could go in a completely new direction.
Allow yourself to set these intentions one day at a time. Your wishes may be completely different a week from now, let yourself move in the direction you wish to at that moment.
Change is often slow at first, but when you look back in a few months, you will be awed by some of the amazing changes that have occurred.
Step 4: Recognise and Celebrate the Changes
If you consistently focus on changing your life and you’re able to consistently take action on your wishes, your life will change. It’s an amazing feeling, so make sure to celebrate your accomplishments.
We usually take on challenges for that feeling of success when we finish. Don’t brush over this feeling. Become aware of it. Embrace it.
Every day we have large and small battles, showing ourselves that change is possible. We might know we’re capable of improving in one area of our life, but deny being able to change another area. Through removing and changing our previously held self-perception, we become more confident in ourselves and our ability to overcome every obstacle.
Every time you find yourself on the other side of something you once thought was impossible, take a moment to let yourself bask in the glory of your amazing potential.
Change Your Self-Perception, Change Your Life
Self-perception forms the basis of how we think and act. Through changing this perception, we allow ourselves to tremendously improve every day. One day you might just look back at your life with disbelief, as you recognize how far you’ve come.
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