As these students begin to change their self-concept to include the role of “serious student preparing to graduate and enter the professional world,” they likely have friends that want to maintain the “semiserious student who doesn’t exert much consistent effort and prefers partying to studying” role that used to be a shared characteristic of both students’ self-concepts. For example, many students begin to take their college education more seriously during their junior and senior years. Remember, people try to increase predictability and decrease uncertainty within personal relationships. Although you may have good reasons for changing certain aspects of your self-perception, others may become unsettled or confused by your changing behaviors and communication. When you change or improve your self-concept, your communication will also change, which may prompt other people to respond to you differently. As you actively try to change your self-perceptions, do not be surprised if you encounter some resistance from significant others. Photophile – Father & Son 2055 – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.Īside from experiencing life-changing events, we can make slower changes to our self-perceptions with concerted efforts aimed at becoming more competent communicators through self-monitoring and reflection. Similarly, other people’s self-perceptions likely change when they enter into a committed relationship, have a child, make a geographic move, or start a new job. Think of how your view of self changed when you moved from high school to college. A variety of life-changing events can relatively quickly alter our self-perceptions. Changing your overall self-concept or self-esteem is not an easy task given that these are overall reflections on who we are and how we judge ourselves that are constructed over many interactions. We can also identify common patterns that people experience that interfere with their ability to monitor, understand, and change their self-perceptions. Since self-concept and self-esteem are so subjective and personal, it would be inaccurate to say that someone’s self-concept is “right” or “wrong.” Instead, we can identify negative and positive aspects of self-perceptions as well as discuss common barriers to forming accurate and positive self-perceptions. Becoming aware of the process of self-perception and the various components of our self-concept (which you have already started to do by studying this chapter) will help you understand and improve your self-perceptions. Context-specific self-perceptions vary depending on the person with whom we are interacting, our emotional state, and the subject matter being discussed. Recall that we have an overall self-concept and self-esteem that are relatively stable, and we also have context-specific self-perceptions.
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