Dansalan Polytechnic College

149 Tampilong, Marawi City

“Breeding New Leaders for the Next Generation”
College Department

UTS – Understanding the Self

Introduction to self
The self is the first and foremost the collection of beliefs that we hold about
selves.
 What are our important characteristics?
 What are we good at?
 What do we do poorly?
 What kind of situation do we prefer or avoid?

Self Understanding – Is the awareness of and ability to understand one’s own

thoughts and action. To attain the insight into your attitudes, motives, defences,
reactions, weaknesses and strengths. It is a subjective sense of the self and a
complex mixture of unconscious and conscious thoughts, attitudes and perceptions.

IMPORTANCE OF UNDERSTADING SELF

 Self-understanding has been recognized as a key competency for individuals
to function efficiently in organization.
 It influences an individual’s ability to make key decisions about self, and
other way around.
 Understanding the self equips individuals with making more effective career
and life choice, the ability to lead, guide and inspire with authenticity.

SELF CONCEPT
 The set of beliefs that we hold about who we are is called the self concept.
 It can also be defined as the sum total of an individual’s beliefs about has or
her own personal attributes.
 It is basically the individuals image of the kind of person he or she is.
Especially included in this are the awareness of being (What I am) and
awareness of function (What I can do).

TWO WAYS WHICH WE PERCEIVE OURSELVES

POSITIVE SELF CONCEPT: People with positive concept believe in themselves are
confident about their ability to deal with problems and make decisions. Feel equal to
others, have respect for themselves and expect it from others.
NEGATIVE SELF CONCEPT: If people see themselves as failures and have a
negative pessimistic image of themselves, they will begin to act the part. Negative
feelings feed on themselves and become a downward spiral, gradually
encompassing all of the people’s thoughts, actions and relationships, they tend to
complain constantly and find it difficult to accept criticism.

Like the other belief systems, the self concept includes:

 Cognitive aspects
 Affective/Evaluative aspects
 Behavioural aspects

COGNITIVE ASPECTS: SELF SCHEMA

Self schema is cognitive generalizations about the self derived from past
experience that organize and guide the processing of self-related information.

AFFECTIVE/EVALUATIVE ASPECT: SELF ESTEEM

“self esteem reflects the perceived difference between an individual’s
actual self concept (who I think I really am) and some ideal self image (who I would
really like to be).

BEHAVIOURAL ASPECTS: SELF PERCEPTION

Influential self perception theory Darl Bem (1972) – Reflects we observe our
behaviour and the situation in which it took place, make attributions about why the
behaviour occurred, and drawn conclusions about our own characteristic and
disposition. In other words we come to understand ourselves the same way we
perceive and understand others.

COMPONENTS OF SELF-CONCEPT
1. Self-esteem
2. Body image
3. Role performance
4. Personal identity self concept

BUILDING UP SELF CONCEPT

Is primary factors of effective personality and behaviour. The four steps to
hold-up self concept are as follow.

1. Self awareness
2. Self acceptance
3. Self realization
4. Self disclosure

SELF AWARENESS
  Our attention is sometimes directed outward towards the environment and
sometimes it is focused inward on ourselves.
 Certain experiences in the world automatically focus attention inwards, such
as catching sight of ourselves in the mirror, having our picture taken, or more
subtly, being evaluated by others

SELF ACCEPTANCE
 Having being aware of who we really are rather than the person we would
wish to be, the next step on our journey to self-concept is to accept ourselves.
 According to Shepard 1979, self acceptance is an individual’s satisfaction or
happiness with oneself , and is thought to be necessary for good mental
health.

SELF REALIZATION
 Mean the fulfilment of one’s own potential
 It is realizing our inner potentials
 It is a willingness to pursue our ideal-self on our own to grow and to change
because we think it is important.

SELF DISCLOSURE
 Is the process of letting another person know what we think, feel and want,
that is telling others about ourselves.
 It includes all kinds of information: life experience, personal circumstances,
feelings, dreams, opinions and so on.

Research indicates that self-disclosure leads to self-contentment, helps a

person to be more perceptive, adaptive, competent, trusting, and positive towards
others.

SELF CONFIDENCE
 A feeling of trust in one’s abilities, qualities, and judgement is self
confidence.
 The belief that you can achieve success and competence, in other words
believing yourself to be capable.

SELF IMAGE
 It is how you perceive yourself.
 It is a number of self-impressions that have built up over time. What are your
hopes and dreams? what do you think and feel? What have you done
throughout your life and what did you want to do?
 Your self-image can be very different from how the world sees you.
 SELF FROMVARIOUS PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES

Philosophy of Self
The philosophy of self defines the essential qualities that makes one person
distinct from all others. There have been numerous approaches to defining these
qualities. The self is the idea of a unified being which is the source of consciousness.

What is Philosophy?
Quite literally the term “philosophy” means, “love of wisdom”. In a broad
sense, philosophy is an activity people undertake when they seek to understand
fundamental truths about themselves, the world in which they live, and their
relationships to the world and to each other.

What is Wisdom
Is the ability to know what is true or right, common sense or the collection of
one’s knowledge. Ability to discern inner qualities and relationships, insight, good
sense, judgment, accumulated philosophical or scientific learning and knowledge.

Socrates and his Contention of the Self

 Socrates was the first philosopher to ever engage in a systematic questioning
about the self, hence the method of inquiry called Socrates questioning.
 Socrates method was named after him. Socratic method, also known as
dialectic method is the foundation of critical thinking, a method of questioning
that challenges accuracy and completeness of thinking in a way that acts to
move people towards their ultimate goal.
 Furthermore, Socrates argued that self is dualistic, as it is composed of body
and soul, where body is characterized as imperfect and impermanent and
soul as perfect and permanent.

THE SELF ACCORDING TO THESE PHILOSOPHERS

1. Rene Descartes “You know the self through reason”. For Descartes, the
self is an innate idea that cannot be rationally doubted because there is
thinking going on, and it has to come from somewhere. Thinking is the
foundation on which one should buil all his or her knowledge.
2. David Hume “You know the self through experience.” The self exists as a
thinking thing but only insofar as it records sensory impressions; i.e., the self
doesn’t exist separate from sensory object and so there’s no substantial
knowledge you can have about it. In his theory has put forward the premise of
 understanding the “impression” and “identity” we have ourselves before
we dwell into the questions of “the self”. According to Hume, as human
beings we tend to think of ourselves as selves – who are stable entities the
exist over time but no matter how closely we examine our own experiences,
we never observe anything beyond a series of transient feelings, sensation,
and impressions.
3. Immanuel Kant “You know the self through a synthesis of rational institution
and experiential content.” It seems like the ability of reflecting and being self
-aware implies the self as the locus of experience. Further reflection reveals
that space and time and all the categories of pure ‘understanding’ are
also wrapped up in the notion of the self. Because of this we can say nothing
about the actual nature of reality itself, but only our subjective experience of it.
ie., our mind creates a picture of reality.

THE SELF, SOCIETY AND CULTURE

SELF
 The self is what makes someone an individual; It is the essential of being of a
person, one’s ego, and the awareness of one’s inner person.
 The union of elements (such as body, emotions, thoughts, and sensations)
that constitute the individuality and identity of a person.

The Self and Culture

 Remaining the same person and turning chameleon by adapting to one’s
context seems paradoxical.
 According to Anthropologist Mercel Mauss, every self has two faces:
PERSONNE and MOI. Moi refers to person’s sense of who he is, his body,
and his basic identity, his biological givenness. Personne, on the other hand,
composed of the social concept of what it means to be who he is. Personne
has much to do with what it means to live in a particular institution, a particular
family, a particular religion, a particular nationality, and how to behave give
expectations and influences from others.

The Self and the Development of the Social World

More than his givenness (personality, tendencies, and propensities, among

others), one is believed to be in active participation in the shaping of the self. Most
often, we think the human persons are just passive actors in the whole process of
the shaping of selves. That men and women are born with particularities that they
can no longer change. Recent studies, however, indicate that men and women in
their growth and development engage actively in the shaping of the self. The
unending terrain of metamorphosis of the self is mediated by language.

Mead and Vygotsky

 For Mead and Vygotsky, the way that human person develop is with the use
of language acquisition and interaction with others.
 Both Vygotsky and Mead treat the human mind as sometimes that is made,
constitude through language as experienced in the external world and as
encountered in dialogs with others.
 For Mead, this takes place as a child assumes the “other” through
language and rolr-play.
 For Vygotsky, a child internalizes real-life dialog that he has with others, with
his family, his primary caregivers, or his playmates.

SELF IN FAMILIES
 Every child is born with certain givenness, disposition coming from his
‘parents’ genes and general condition of life, the impact of one’s family is
still deemed as a given in understanding the self.
 The kind of family that we are born in, the resources available to us (human,
spiritual, economic), and the kind of development that we will have will
certainly affect us as we go through life.
 As a matter of revolutionary fact, human persons are one of those beings
whose importance of family cannot be denied.
 It is what a family initiates a person to become that serves as the basis for
this person’s progress.

GENDER AND THE SELF

 Another important aspect of the self is gender. Gender is one of those loci of
the self that is subject to alteration, change, and development.
 Nancy Chodorow, a feminist, argues that mothers take the role of taking care
of children, there is a tendency for girls to imitate the same and reproduce the
same kind of mentality of women as care providers in the family.
 Men on the other hand, in the periphery of their own family, are taught early
on how to behave like a man.
 The gendered self is then shaped within a particular context of time and
space. The sense of self that is being taught makes sure that an individual fits
in a particular environment. This dangerous and detrimental in the goal of truly
finding one’s self, self-determination, and growth of the self. Gender has to
be personally discovered and asserted and not dictated by culture and the
society.