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Your self-concept is your bundle of beliefs about yourself and every part of your life and your world. It’s the “master program” of your subconscious computer. The Law of Belief says that your beliefs determine your reality because you always see the world through a screen of prejudices formed by your belief structure. Your self-concept, which is your belief structure, precedes and predicts your performance and behavior in all areas of your life. You always act consistently with your self-concept and the bundle of beliefs that you’ve acquired from childhood.
Stated another way, you’re where you are and what you are because of what you believe yourself to be. Whether you’re rich or poor, happy or unhappy, fat or thin, successful or unsuccessful, your beliefs make you that way.
If you change your beliefs in any area of your life, you begin immediately to change in that area—your expectations, your attitudes, your behavior, and your results all change.
Your outer world is an expression of your inner world; it can’t be different. You’re not what you think you are, but what you’re thinking about.
Everyone is programmed to be who they are today. For lasting change, to act or behave differently, you have to change and reprogram your self-concept. The reprogramming occurs when you replace the self-limiting ideas and beliefs with self-affirming thoughts that update your master system with new beliefs and ideas.
Begin to think of yourself as you want to be, not as you currently are. When you change your thoughts, they begin to materialize as you have envisioned them.
ASPECTS OF YOUR SELF-CONCEPT
There is a direct relationship between how well you do anything and your self-concept in that area. You perform as well as you believe you are capable of achieving. Your outside can never be better or different than you think yourself to be on the inside.
Whenever you’re doing well and feel good about yourself in any area of your life, you demonstrate a positive self-concept in that area. Whatever area you’re dissatisfied with or performing sub-par in, your negative beliefs dominate that area.
What makes positive change possible for you is that your self-concept is primarily subjective – based on experience, not necessarily fact or truth. Your beliefs about yourself, especially your self-limiting beliefs and doubts, aren’t based on the truth or facts. Negative ideas about yourself and your abilities usually are based on false information and the impressions you have taken in and accepted as truth.
When you start to reject self-limiting ideas, they begin to lose their power over you. When you deliberately change your self-concept, your true potential becomes unlimited.
THE TURNING POINT
The turning point for you will happen when you learn how your self-concept controls your life and then decide to change it.
Your self-concept is a general summary of your beliefs about yourself. Within your self-concept, you have groups of smaller self-concepts, which control your behavior and performance in every area of your life.
You have a self-concept for your personal appearance, how much money you will make, where you’ll live, who you’ll be in a relationship with, even how popular you are with friends and others in the world.
Each self-concept also has a subset of self-concepts. For example, a person may have a positive self-concept about their knowledge about weight loss but a limiting self-concept about their ability to maintain a healthy weight. And that’s why the person can tell everyone else about weight loss and management but doesn’t maintain a healthy weight for themselves.
As with all beliefs, your self-concepts gradually move into comfort zones. Your subconscious does everything it can to keep you there, resisting all change, positive and negative.
The comfort zone is where discipline and achievement go to die. When you feel like you can’t break a habit, you’re in a comfort zone. Those stubborn behaviors become ruts and strongholds. You stop using your knowledge and effort to get out of the rut. Instead, you use that same knowledge and effort and get comfortable, rationalizing your situation as unchangeable. You feel, say, and believe there’s nothing you can do.
The comfort zone is also where you can develop lazy behavior accompanied by mild to severe cases of hopelessness.
The truth is there’s a lot you can do to change your life.
In the coming weeks, I’ll give more insight into your self-concept.
And I’ll talk more about The System, a proven way to create a new belief system in any area of your life you want to change.
You can re-design your self-concept and get whatever you want out of your life.