How do we see ourselves?

Exploring the topic of self-development further, it seems to me, that it all starts with the self-view one has. Might be really obvious, or what? If we are used to imagining that we are failing at everything, then any self-help books/tapes/seminars/programs etc are just really not going to make a difference. I use the word imagining on purpose. After all what we think of ourselves is nowhere near what the reality is or what others think about us. In fact our self-view is so skewed that even we would find it difficult to believe it if we really examined it properly.

The problem is that we never really exam it. We always just see snippets of our self-view. These snippets revolve around: I was bad at that presentation, talk, project etc. Even when the positive results of something we did, stares us in the face, we will still belittle the achievement, knock it, think it’s an isolated case, fluke, luck, etc. In fact we contribute the success to a bunch of external factors. For example, if we just messed up baking a cake e.g. it’s sunk in rather than presented itself proudly, we forget that we have baked beautiful cakes before, or that the dinner we cooked just the night before was to die for, or that we submitted a paper at college and we got an A+. And by the way, I have seen a sunk cake get more consumer votes of consumption than the fabulous raised ones.

As humans we do fail at a few things. But we absolutely shine and achieve wonderful stuff at others. But we only reflect and remember the bad, or actually what we consider to be bad. For somebody else, that flopped cake could have been an achievement! Their last cake could have burnt to cinders. A cake that shrunk a bit could have been wonderful! So where do we get these unrealistic standards from that we measure ourselves against? Good question that, don’t you think?

It gets me back to the folk in my Weight Watchers class that just didn’t make it – see my previous post where I questioned whether self-help projects actually work. The bulk, maybe wrong expression here, of them just not getting anywhere in their goal to lose some weight. In their self-view, they anticipate failure. When it is confirmed, they haven’t lost 10kg in one week – who would…- they give up. Not obviously at the beginning, they still attempt the weight loss. But they really have given up before it actually even starts. After a few weeks, max six weeks, they disappear off the radar. This is not an isolated case. Weight Watchers actually insists on new members paying for eight weeks of attendance. They have worked out that the one off, or two off visits would be the average attendance otherwise.

The question I have is as follows. Are human beings conditioned to achieve little? This could be because of parental disapproval, school or peer group criticism, or whatever else you want to identify here. Or, do we buy into the instant gratification to such an extend, that even the weight loss has to be immediate, and if not, we are not prepared to try further. Or are we really just as useless as our self-view presents it to us? Good questions. And I am sure that Psychologists will have a whole bunch of further theories to add to that bundle. The debate will continue.