Many people are afraid of change especially when it comes to personal change. More than often people want to improve themselves but don’t in fear of losing you they are as individuals. They believe that by transforming from an introvert to an extravert, they are in fact changing who they truly are and so they don’t take the first step to improvisation.
In order to help people change they need to understand that there are 2 selves: The primary self and the secondary self.
But before we take a further exploration into our selves, it is vital to first understand the influence people have on us.
. As people, we grow up in a world where we constantly learn from others. We adopt the habits of the people we surround ourselves with. This is not a sign of insecurity. Everybody dose this. It’s just the way we are by nature.
And friends and family play a detrimental role in the way we perceive ourselves. Very often you believe the judgements of others over the knowledge that you have of yourself. Very often this is the case with insecure people. People constantly tell them they aren’t good enough and they can’t do this and that. You go through life hearing what people think of you and eventually you start to believe it. You think, “Well if everybody says I suck with women, then it must be true.” And so from that moment forward you see yourself as a guy who can’t get women and because you believe that, it becomes true.
The people you have spent your life with have moulded you into the person you are today, so please feel free to fully blame your friends and family for the way you turned out.
The same way an insecure person is made, so is an alpha male. All his life people have told him that he is an awesome guy and a ladies man. So he believes them and therefor becomes exactly that. A ladies man. He feels good about himself because other people feel good about him. This is called a mind-set.
We are constantly adjusting they we act and behave and even the way we feel about things according to what other people do and say. For example; If you’re a high school student and you forget about a project and it’s the due date, if you are the only person in your class that has not done the project you feel like a bit of a fool, but as soon as you discover that 2 other people have also forgotten their projects you immediately feel liberated from any embarrassment. This for me is a very interesting phenomenon. We have the mind-set, “If everybody ells does it. Then its ok.” even if the action is not ok at all, we still feel better when we know there are other people sharing the same boat we are in. This shows us how psychologically dependant we are on each other and how much of and influence people really have on us.
Now that we understand how influential people really are on us, we can began to understand the dynamics of the primary and secondary self.
The primary self
The primary self is who you are as an individual person and who you have become without the influence of other people. These are the characteristics you develop from personal experience such as our natural talents, our intellect, how creative we are, whether we are visual or audible or kinaesthetic thinkers ect. These traits with make up our primary self are determined with in the first 2 years of our life and stick with us for the rest of our lives. They will always be who we really are for two reasons. One: When we are born the neurological connections in our brains are not fully developed, in other words, our brains are like empty canvases but as soon we come into the world that canvas starts to fill up. Up until the age of 3 our brains act like sponges absorbing everything we experience through the 5 senses. If the child spends his first 3 years in presence of music and sounds then he will most likely become an audible thinker. If the child’s first three years is mostly dominated by images and colour then the child will become a visual think. These are just some examples. These traits are embedded into the permanent neural pathways of our brain and thus becomes the core of who we really are. These are neutral traits, neither good or bad an completely objective.
The second reason is that we learn our greatest lessons for personal experience. And that almost becomes impossible after the age of 2/3. This is why: Research shows that children only become self-aware at about the age of 2 or 3. After that they begin to become more socially aware of people and how people interact with them and because we becoming socially aware of other people, we are now influenced by them. This is the point where the development of the primary self stops and the development of the secondary self begins.
The secondary self.
Our secondary self is made up of characteristics that we develop due to the influence of other people. Like the ladies man analogy, we become what we think other people think we are. At this point we start to become a little bit more complex as we mould into more psychologically extended individuals. Depending on how another people view us, we may adopt more extended characteristics such as confidence, shyness, insecure, positive or negative thinkers, humour etc and all this depend on the people we surround ourselves with. If you spend time violent people, you will become violent yourself. This is because we feel awkward when we stand out from the crowd. We want to belong because we want to be accepted. This goes back to analogy of the high school student who never did his project. Even though our secondary self is changing due to that influence us our primary self still stay the same. If a naturally creative man who is confident goes through social ridicule that turns him into an insecure person for some time of his life, it still does not change the fact that he is naturally creative.
Think of yourself as a car. You can change the colour and design a million times, but underneath all the paintwork, it’s still the same car. People can come along and starch your paint and dent you up until you look terrible, but at the end of the day, under the body kit, you are still the same car.
This bring us to our next topic, how you present yourself is how people perceive you and how people perceive you will have an influence on how you perceive yourself.
Whether we like it or not, much or our self-worth is created by the validation we get from other people. When we enter a social situation and realize that we are well liked by other people, we immediately feel good about ourselves because we know that other people enjoy us and therefore value us. Because of this, our level of self worth rises therefore our level of self-confidence rises making us feel good about ourselves. However if we enter a social situation and miss communicate ourselves to other people, they will dislike us. Once we realize that people don’t want to be around us we feel inadequate and bad about ourselves. Because other people do not give us value we ourselves do not give us value either and because of this our sense of self-worth is lowered therefore our sense of self-confidence is lowered making us feel horrible.
This is where the second affected aspect comes in. By not effectively communicating ourselves across positively, people may get the wrong impression of us and reject us. While some people are able to socialize with ease due to the fact that they were socially calibrated since a young age, others may have been unable to grow those communication skills and now struggle socialize with other people.
The simple mistake of miss communication can result in other people having a false impression of you, which in turn may negatively affect the person psychologically.
This miscommunication is mostly the result of bad secondary self characteristics such as insecurity and lack of confidence. If we ever wish to become socially affective and well liked individuals we must take a step back and evaluate our secondary self. We must then take out all those negative traits and replace them. This is very possible as secondary self traits are not mutual; they are either good or bad. The hardest part is changing those negative traits into positive ones and we can achieve this desired change by learning how to use our reticular activation system
Your reticular activation system or RAS is the part of your brain which is responsible for extracting important information and differentiating from information that is not important. For example, you are walking through a shopping mall and you listen to all the sounds of the mall, people talking, the sound of trollies being carted around and you hear all of it but you don’t really pay attention to any of it at all, then all of a sudden somebody says your name and immediately your attention diverts towards whoever called your name. Since infancy our brains are naturally programed to respond to curtain things like the calling out of your name. Our body become used to this and we naturally gain focus when we hear it being called out.
The RAS also acts as our belief and affirmation system. It helps us achieve our gaols and does this by bring important information concerning that specific goal to our attention with otherwise would’ve just been part of the background noise.
Because the subconscious cannot tell the difference between reality and what is visualised in the mind’s eye, it will draw our attention to the things we think about in our heads. If we visualise ourselves drinking coffee, our RAS will naturally draw our attention to anything that has something to do with coffee. This is how it works on our belief system, if we believe we will have cup of coffee today, our RAS will draw our attention to drink coffee even after we have forgotten about that thought. This is why negative thinker tend to experience negative things because their RAS is only drawing their attention to the negative things and ignoring all the positive ones.
Here’s an example. Let’s say Brad Pitt believed that he was terrible with women. 1 out of the 5 women he met in a day rejected him yet the other 4 were interested. Because his visualised himself as bad with women, his RAS was programed to only seek out the situations in which women did not want him thus confirming his belief and thus only making it stronger.
By simply changing our mind-set we can use our RAS to stop focusing on all the negative things it bring to our attention and start using it to help us focus on the more positive things.
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