style="font-size:15px;"> How to Recognize Your Self-Schema
1.Start with the question—“Who am I?”
2.Answer honestly as you see yourself, not as you want the world to see you.
3.List the first twenty things that come to your mind, regardless of the connotation.
4.Group the list into key themes—these are most likely your core self-schema.
You Are Unique
Once you begin to understand how schemas are formed, it became apparent that each and every one of us is unique—just as our experiences, memories, emotions and bodies are unique. One of the biggest and most beneficial things you can learn in life is to embrace, rather than fear, this difference. We often over-focus on the benefits of sameness—no one gets bullied for not standing out. But by the same token, no one truly succeeds without standing out.
Let’s say you meet two people today. One of them is unlike any person you’ve ever met. That person is fascinatingly different. The other is just like someone you already know. Which do you think you will remember more? Which do you think you might tell your friends about meeting?
Since your brain likes so much to group things, it’s likely you will remember the unique person solely because they are, well, unique. Your brain had to make space in the attic for a whole new special crate just for them. You’ll probably vividly recall little details about them—silly things like the color of their shoelaces or the way they pronounce a certain word. Anything your human supercomputer has latched onto as different from the norm. And the other individual? The one with similar traits to someone you’ve already met? They’ll just get added to the same box as your existing friend. Other than that, you’ll probably forget most things about them.
I once was at a business conference where individuals were presenting on creativity and technology. There were amazing speakers from the most innovative companies in the world like Google, Facebook, and more. However, if you asked me about what any of them presented on, I couldn’t tell you. In my brain, they’ve all been lumped together into one box probably labeled something like “technology presenters who wear suits and talk about the future.”
However, toward the end of the day, I remember one of the final speakers, Dave Trott, who was starting his presentation. As he took the stage, he dragged behind him an old, worn overhead projector and a stack of clear transfers. Instead of the typical business PowerPoint, he presented to us using handwritten information on those clear plastic sheets. The point of his presentation was to convince of one thing and one thing only: that being different makes you memorable. He wanted us to create a schema unique to him. It’s been three years since that conference, and I can still remember that presentation clear as day. Mr. Trott was right: you never forget someone who dares to stand out.
Embracing and allowing your uniqueness to shine has some major benefits, beyond just being memorable. Once you know yourself, you can more easily communicate your needs, simply because they are more fully-formed. You are acknowledging them regularly. Decision-making becomes easier because the hesitation to choose based on your community’s reaction is removed. In line with this thinking, you feel less guilt or regret as a result of those choices. You have a clearer vision of who you are, your goals, and the daily progress you are making toward them.
If embracing uniqueness is so beneficial to us, why is it so hard to do? Research shows that humans derive some pleasure from fitting in. Conformity sometimes serves as an emotional proxy for one of our most basic human desires—belonging. When we think we belong somewhere, we feel connectedness to a group through a common goal and experience. We are happiest when we feel we truly belong, and find communities that embrace as we are.
However, at times, we convince ourselves that changing who we really are to fit into a community that may not be right for us will give us the same feeling as belonging. We make ourselves blend in, and we do it at any cost. Adapting our behaviors is a double-edged sword. We may feel like we belong, but we will also carry a constant fear that we are not deserving of this acceptance. It’s that nagging fear that if someone knew the real us—they wouldn’t like us. When we conform, we are doing so for short-term gains at the cost of our long-term happiness.
Embracing our individuality starts with self-awareness, or conscious knowledge of our own character, feelings, motives, and desires. To successfully be self-aware, we must not only better understand how we see ourselves, but also take in how others perceive us. Who we are becomes a delicate mix of these two perspectives.
Getting to Know Yourself
Over the course of my life, I’ve been through a lot. I’ve endured horrors that I hope no one else ever experiences. I’ve rebuilt myself. I’ve conquered fears. I’ve adapted my emotions of anger and frustration into ones of understanding and patience. I’ve done hundreds of things people have told me I will never be able to do. Every day, I look in the mirror and I see this. It kills me that so many other people don’t do the same. They see their faults and problems. They see their ugliness and pain. They see someone else’s definition of who they are, because they haven’t made time to define themselves.
Finding myself and my place in this world was a journey—and a hard one at that. I don’t want you to think any of this will be easy. You will have to fight yourself to find yourself. Every time you hesitate or doubt something you wanted to try based on what you think you are allowed to experience, you have to force yourself to try and do it anyways. Gradually, it becomes habit. The fear drops away and a fresh confidence can grow in its place. Soon those things that terrified you, that once felt out of your reach, become things that make you feel powerful. Eventually, you see yourself in actions rather than in words. You see beauty in who you are, and not in the words strangers might use to describe you.
Discovering who you are is a process. You have to make time and emotional space to dig under all the layers of “what you should be” to discover who you could be. Slowly, you begin to understand what you want in life, what causes you to do the things you do, and what your emotions are trying to tell you. Begin with a journal to track your feelings. Set goals you want to achieve, so that when you are faced with life decisions you can always check in and make the right choices for your future self. Lastly, make time every day to get away from the noise of the world to just think about who you are, where you are going, and what you have accomplished so far.
Tasha Eurich, author of Insight, studied a group of individuals who were proven to be successfully self-aware. Her research resulted in some interesting results. Often when a situation goes awry we ask ourselves, “Why?” Why didn’t I get this job? Why didn’t I get asked to prom? Why do I feel alone? The word “why” focuses our attention on assessing past decisions and events. Through this process, we expect to discover a reason for our current situation. However, our minds are fickle beasts, our memory isn’t perfect, and much of the information we use to make decisions lives in the messy basement of our brains (our subconscious).
When we ask ourselves “why,” we are forcing ourselves to rehash a situation that has already passed and that we likely have a skewed perspective on, looking to discover a detail we can’t change and hoping this knowledge will make us happier in the future. If this sounds unrealistic, it’s because it is. This type of introspection can make us stressed-out. It can depress us. Even worse, it delays our ability to solve problems. We literally become trapped in our own self-analysis of our history. We can’t move forward.
I remember having dinner with a friend where we discussed our pasts. We both had similar disadvantages and challenges as kids. My dinner partner, once recognizing we had a similar history, asked me how I had managed to become successful despite it all. As we continued to discuss each event and dissect how my choices had netted me in increasingly better
