Your self-concept is wrapped up in a set of descriptions and images - of good success scenes or bad failure scenes that you’ve experienced. It is also carried in a set of personality trait labels you use to tell yourself and others what you are really like. Your self-evaluations are important because they influence most areas of your behavior, defining the limits of what you will attempt. You avoid an activity if your self-concept predicts you will perform so badly as to humiliate yourself. For instance, if your self-concept includes the belief that you would be a poor ice skater, you might never try it, and will indeed remain a poor ice skater. Often people excuse themselves with “That’s just the way I am.” By using this excuse, they deny themselves opportunities for personal growth.

If you could listen in, you would hear non-assertive people saying all kinds of negative sentences to themselves. They selectively remember some criticism of themselves, exaggerate it to monstrous proportions, and repeat it over and over like a chant. The man battling his bulging waistline might be saying, “I am ugly, fat, and disgusting. No one can stand to look at me. I am a fat worm. I’ve got no will power.” The shy, retiring boy at a dance might be saying, “Those girls are whispering about me. My pimples are horrible. If I talk to that girl, she’ll insult and ridicule me. I never know what to say to girls. I’ll die if she cuts me down.”

The fact is that people are often their own worst downers. They say to themselves, “I am irrational, emotional, stupid, dull, ugly, shy, cold, submissive, fat, ineffectual, overbearing, bitchy, childish, a bully, a miserable father (mother), a lousy speaker, a failure, and over-the-hill.” We all have our own lists. People can be terribly brutal with themselves. Out of the whole animal kingdom, only humans are endowed with this capacity to make themselves miserable. Can you imagine your pet cat or dog moping around, saying such brutal things to himself?

Worse yet, in many cases our negative view of ourselves may be communicated to new acquaintances before they have time to form an independent impression of us. If we tell people we are inadequate, they may do us the disservice of believing us. A woman in one of Sharon’s assertiveness classes repeatedly advertised herself poorly by prefacing each remark with, “I doubt if my idea is worth anything, but…” Without realizing it, the class did indeed pay less and less attention to her ideas - at least until they stopped to examine the subtle message her remark conveyed.

The toll of a negative self-concept is that it limits what we are willing to try, forestalling opportunities for growth and enjoyment. Doomsday prophesies about our social failures tend to be self-fulfilling. The shy woman who retreats from friendly overtures is indeed judged to be cold, aloof, disdainful, and the man who was turned down for approaching her is even less likely to make another overture to her (or vice versa!) The student with anxiety about taking a test “goes blank” to such an extent that he does indeed fail just as miserably as he had feared.