Transforming Your Self
Becoming who you want to be
2001
Our identities both enable and limit what we can be and accomplish. Since our identities go with us everywhere, affecting everything we do, changes in self-concept result in profound and widespread changes in attitude and behavior. All of us have some conscious ideas about who we are, but like so much of our functioning, the root and foundation of identity is largely unconscious. A strong and durable identity provides a stable internal world that can sustain you through difficult situations, and be a solid foundation for a satisfying and enjoyable life during pleasant ones. Persistent life issues and repetitive patterns often result from self-beliefs that are limited, inappropriate, or poorly constructed.
Learn an entirely new, simple, and direct way to work with your beliefs about yourself, the core of your living and being. Now you can have an identity that will support you in having more fulfilling relationships, more clarity and success, and much more. Through guided self-discovery exercises, demonstrations, cartoons, changework exercises, and discussion, you will learn how to:
- Discover your own unique way of unconsciously thinking about yourself, a basis for learning how to adjust and improve it.
- Discover in your own experience the four important process elements that make the self-concept powerful, and the six important criteria for an effective and durable identity.
- Refine and redesign the solid aspects of your identity to make them even stronger, using a wide variety of changes in structure, process, and content.
- Build an entirely new desired quality of your identity that will guide your behavior unconsciously without effort. (See article: Building Self-concept.)
- How to use these process elements to make your self-concept carry through time, and across contexts.
- Transform a troublesome and unstable ambiguous quality into the strong positive quality that you want.
- Transform a quality in yourself that you dont like into its positive opposite.
- Discover the serious pitfalls in defining yourself by negation—describing yourself by what you are not—and how to change this into a positive identity. (See article: Not Self.)
- Adjust the unconscious boundaries between your self and the outer world to give you more choices in protecting your integrity from criticism or attack, yet remaining open to close and heartfelt connections with others.
- Apply these understandings and principles to spiritual concerns—how you relate to the larger world around you.
