The Importance of Self Concept to Personal Communication

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The Importance of Self Concept to Personal Communication

The observation of yourself as an individual is called self-concept.

Self-concept also embraces how well you know yourself through the

medium of thoughts, feelings and emotions.

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Perception plays a key role in the making of self-concept. How you

perceive yourself and how you think others perceive you, shape your

self concept. This means that if you have difficulty with perception

your self concept is likely to be distorted. For example, someone that

thinks everyone loves them and agrees with every idea of theirs may

have trouble with their own perception of what people really think of

them. Because it is very likely that not everyone does agree with them

and love them.

The way you feel about yourself or view yourself reflects foremost in

how you behave and the characteristics you possess. Therefore

self-concept strongly influences personality. If you feel that you are

a quiet person you will end up being a quiet person, this is a classic

example of the "Self Fulfilling Prophecy". This is the concept that

how you think you behave will lead to the expectation that you should

behave like that and therefore you will fulfil that expectation. An

example of this prophecy is when a child is predicted to behave badly

in a certain social situation by his or her parents'. If somehow this

prediction is communicated to the child, he or she will 'play' up to

the prediction and the expectations of the parents will be fulfilled.

Consequently the self fulfilling prophecy occurs when a prediction is

fulfilled.

We ...

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... perceive, whether good or bad will condition how you view yourself

(self-concept). In turn this will help or hinder personal

communication depending on how your self-concept has been shaped.

On the whole, Self-concept is made up of 8 intertwined main factors

and many more than relate and link in. These are Perception,

Personality, Role, Communication Skills, Empathy, Thinking, Motivation

and Socialisation. When any of these factors change or disappear,

self-concept is affected.

When self-concept is affected it changes the way we describe and view

ourselves. If we view ourselves badly then personal communication will

suffer and if we feel good about ourselves then we will be more

outgoing and confident and more successful communication will take

place. So Self-concept is very important to personal communication.

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