Transforming Your Self
Author
Damon Cart
Date
Oct 12, 2015
Tags
General tips
Content
Author
Your identity gives you a sense of stability, which is one of its important characteristics, but it is also fluid and changeable. For example, no matter where you go, there you are. You walk into another room or you fly to another country and you're still you. When you were born you were, were in a sense, the same you you are today and yet you're not the same person you were then or when you were a child and not just in physicality. You've learned and changed your opinion and meanings about many things which changed your personality and even your perception of reality. Throughout your life you have separated out incidents and gave them a beginning and end and called it an experience even though your life has been one continuous stream of living. As you get older you collect more and more of these experiences and give them meaning. You categorize these experiences until they create qualities that you use to refer to yourself such as "I'm intelligent. I'm not good at math. Sometimes I'm playful and sometimes I'm not. I don't know what it's like to be witty. I'm afraid that I'm greedy." Some of these are ambiguous qualities. Some are seemingly non-existent qualities you would like to have and some are shadow qualities; the negative qualities that you fear are true about you and that you suppress.To summarize, your self-concept is based on qualities and those qualities are based on how you've sorted your experiences. 
Who we perceive that we are (self-concept) governs our reality. When you change at the identity level we call it a transformation because you're not just changing an opinion or a behavior. You are changing the way you filter reality. If this filter is the only thing that separates us from the happiest and most successful people in the world, then we can alter that filter to create the experience of living that we most desire. The self-concept contains many generalizations about the qualities (generalizations on a lower logical level) we possess, what we believe about ourselves and the world around us, what we value, what we believe we're capable of. All this informs our behaviors and shapes our relationships and can even determine the environment we find ourselves in. In other words, when you alter your self-concept you're altering the entire system and the effects are usually quite powerful. The change may initially seem simple, but like a tectonic plate shifting on the ocean floor creating a tsunami, the change creates a ripple effect through all the lower level generalizations you have about your self. Why all this fuss about the ego? Isn't the ego a bad thing? We're really just spiritual beings having a human experience, right? I think a healthy attitude to have about your self-concept or ego is a neutral attitude. It's very popular in many types of spirituality to want to get rid of the ego or tame it or bypass it. Think of it this way; you must have a body. It requires food multiple times a day. Most of them have a strong urge to have sex. Bodies fart and create waste daily. They need to be exercised as well in order to stay healthy. Having a body can seem rather inconvenient but like the ego, you must have one. You really can't operate without a sense of self, (or map) which provides stability and orientation, according to Andreas. So if you have to have an ego you may as well make it a rich, resourceful, useful, accurate one that is resilient and open to feedback, which is the focus of Steve Andreas' Self-Concept model. In Steve's book 'Transforming Your Self' he maps how we create the qualities that make up our self-concept. He also realized that by engineering and transforming the self-concept we run the risk of creating arrogance. He discovered how we create qualities that endure and are open to feedback by mapping how we come to know that we possess a certain quality and by including counter examples in that map. For instance, I know that I'm intelligent even though I have done stupid things and I will do stupid things in the future. I have a solid database of experiences of being intelligent that let me know this. Sprinkled in that database are experiences of doing unintelligent things. This actually increases my sense of being intelligent because I have contrasting experiences. It makes the quality of intelligence more resilient because I know that even when I do something unintelligent I'm still an intelligent person. By acknowledging counter experiences I'm also open to feedback about this quality. By far this is the most powerful model, tool, and group of processes I've ever come across in NLP. It is now an integral part of my NLP practice and my coaching practice. Understanding this model has pulled the lid off of all of the NLP processes I've learned and revealed how they work, which is why I consider it, though not intended this way, to be the closest model to a unified model of NLP. A bonus that I've also discovered working with this model is that I've come to know myself so much better. Not only do I feel more connected to my experiences that have shaped my self-concept, I have more flexibility in changing and shaping my self-concept as I need to adapt from one situation to the next. Also, when you step back and work on your self-concept you're operating from a witness perspective, which is very meditative and is also what many meditation disciplines strive for; to witness the ego as not who you really are but something conceptual, changeable, flexible and ultimately under your control..
Damon Cart
Author
Damon Cart is considered to be a natural talent by some of the best NLP trainers in the world. His approach to guiding and teaching students brings to their awareness that they've been doing NLP all of their lives without realizing it and he empowers them with skills and resources to thrive and reach their full potential. With the understanding of how Neuro Linguistic Programs create oneβs experience a person can then take charge of those programs and create the experience and the life they want. By taking this approach into his own rigorous, daily NLP practice Damon has been able to rapidly accelerate his progress in learning, coaching clients and teaching workshops.
