Exercise 4-1 Discovering Your Self-concept ↑
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Exercise 4-1 Discovering Your Self-concept (trios, 15 minutes)
I want you to get together with two other people to form a trio, and enjoy a short discovery exercise. I assume that you have already identified some quality or characteristic in yourself that you are sure of, and that you like. As soon as you sit down together, I want you to close your eyes, and silently explore your own experience for about five minutes, asking the
question "How do I know I'm ?" It should be fairly easy to identify the summary representation; probably you have already done that. I want you to spend most of your time examining your database of examples to find out what that is like. What images, feelings, sounds or words do you have, and where and how do you experience them?
Then open your eyes and take another ten minutes to share your experiences. You can learn a lot just by doing this yourself; you can learn even more by sharing with others, and assisting each other by asking questions. I want you to do this without ever mentioning the content—the name of the quality that you are examining. Talking about the content would only distract you from the task of finding out how you represent the content. Talk to each other only in terms of the structure—the pictures, sounds, or feelings that constitute your database, and how and where you represent them. You can always talk about the content later if you want to.
"Well, I do this and that; what do you do?" Share your experience, and if anyone has any difficulty, assist each other, "Well, how do you do that?" and watch for nonverbal cues and gestures that often clearly indicate the size, distance and location of images or voices, to get the basics of how s/he does this.
I'll give you more specific directions later, but for now I want you to explore on your own. Then we'll get together and discuss what you found. Are there any questions about the exercise?
Tess: Please go over the distinction between the summary representation and the database again.
Perhaps an example will help. I often use kindness when I need to talk about content, because I like kindness, and I think it would be nice if there were more of it in the world. You could have an internal voice that says, "I'm a kind person," but that general statement doesn't specify what kindness actually is. However, your database contains a wealth of examples of how to talk kindly, act kindly, touch in a kind way, think of kind words to say, kind things to do, etc.
From now on we will be working almost entirely with your database, because this is where the real information about your self-concept is. That is where you can transform yourself by making profoundly useful changes in how your self-concept functions. Out of all the experiences that you have had, over however many years you have been on the planet, how do you know that you are a kind person—or that you are tenacious or sensitive to others, or whatever your chosen quality is? Which experiences do you represent, and more important, how do you represent them? When you make changes in the database, you can really make your self-concept work well— but before you change anything, it's important to know what is already there.