The document discusses the ongoing process of personal identity development, emphasizing the importance of positive reinforcement during childhood for self-esteem and self-judgment. It explores key concepts such as self-concept and self-schema, along with self-motivations like self-assessment and self-enhancement, highlighting the role of biases in maintaining self-esteem. Additionally, it illustrates how self-fulfilling prophecies can shape one's self-concept, stressing the need for conscious positive self-talk to influence one's subconscious mind.

1. The Psychology Of Personal Development
Developing a personal identity:
This is an ongoing process beginning at birth; learning that takes place in the early years lays the
foundation for how we see ourselves during later growth. Making positive statements (particularly
throughout childhood which is the most important stage for healthy maturation of the mind) and
affirming efforts, achievements and attributes is a vital part of nurturing and reinforcing this
development of self. This then leads on to the development of self-esteem and self-judgement.
Encouragement of your efforts is fundamental to building self-identity and self-esteem; a healthy self-
identity and self-esteem fosters a positive disposition and attitude.
The science of the self:
The Static Self – what is the “self”?
- Self-concept – Your knowledge, feelings and ideas about yourself.
- Self-schema – The mental framework that represents and creates information about who you
are.
Key sources of information that enters our self-concept are:
1. Introspection! This is how we examine our own conscious thoughts and feelings.
2. Other people’s expectations and evaluations about us.
Self- Motives: Shaping the self:
- Self-assessment (curiosity about ourselves)
- Self–verification (seeking consistency in ourselves)
- Self-enhancement (feeling better about ourselves) – this is the most important/prominent self-
motive!
How do we self-enhance?
- Self- serving bias- This is any cognitive or perceptual process that is distorted by the need to
maintain and enhance self-esteem, or the tendency to perceive yourself in an overly favourable
manner. In other words, individuals tend to ascribe success to their own abilities and efforts, but
ascribe failure to external factors (they reject the validity of negative feedback in order to
protect their ego from threat/injury). The use of self-serving biases becomes stronger when
failure is made public (visible to others).
- We are critical about information we gain.
- We spend time on processing positive and negative feedback from others in order to make
changes to ourselves.
- We forget failure feedback – forgetting our past failures to self – enhance
The self-fulfilling prophecy has a great impact on shaping our self-concept. The self-fulfilling prophecy is
a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true by the very terms of the prophecy
itself, due to positive feedback between belief and behaviour – an expectation about a subject (e.g. a
person or event) can affect our behaviour towards that subject, which causes the expectation to occur.

2. e.g. let’s say you’re starting a new job but you’ve never done that type of work before. You may have a
strong belief that you can’t handle the responsibilities of the job and therefore make negative
statements towards yourself about the work you are doing. As a result, this has a negative impact on
your work performance, and your negative expectations have affected your behaviour to the point
where your original prediction becomes true. Because of this, we believe that our prediction must have
been correct which only encourages our confidence of inadequacy in future predictions. To actually take
control of this you need to become conscious of the statements you are making about yourself and
eliminate any negative statements, you can even change these statements around and add positive
language to it, changing the way that your subconscious mind processes the information. The
subconscious mind is the most powerful tool we have to shape our own destiny, so don’t fill it with
things that are self-destructing and just completely untrue.
Joe Searle
JS PERFORMANCE MARKETING
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