Self-Concept

What is Self-Concept?

In this post I am going to give my definition of what I think Self-Concept is and theories relating to this particular topic.

According to me, Self-Concept is something which you create or think from your own experiences in life, as self means yourself and concept is something you think or create. you put the two together and and its something you do or think yourself. Below is a picture of different things circling around Self-Concept.

Coming to the theory side of Self-Concept, basically according to the theorist Solomon (1999) stated that Self-Concept is "the beliefs a person holds about his or her attributes and how they assess those qualities". An example for this could be that a teenage boy in his mid teens sees himself being a perfect person. This shows his own Self-Concept is positive. Each individual has separate beliefs on different aspects like emotional, and even physical about themselves. If you think about it, Self-Concept can be thought of as something of a future tense. Why I say that is because each person has ideas of what their aim is going to be in life and you only aim about life when you want to talk about future.

Self-Concept has three factors and they are:

1.) Self Image - Self Image is basically what we see ourselves like or percieve as. The picture below may look funny, but this shows that even an animal like a cat has ideas of seeing herself in the mirror even if it is pretentious and thinking of itself as a lion and thinking of being strong and powerful, even though they are part of the same cat family, but the size of the two makes the lion stronger.

2.) Self Esteem - Self Esteem is basically of how we accept ourselves or value ourselves to what extent. It has an involvement of us people having a positive or a negative thought of ourselves. A person can have a high esteem which means he or she may think positive all the time whereas if have a low esteem will mean he or she may think negative all the time. Below is a picture of a young boy and it suggests his thoughts based on his expression that he is very negative on what he does and this means he has a very low esteem (a very negative approach to whatever he does)

3.) Ideal Self - Ideal Self is what each individual wants to be. It is the type of person who has all the power, strengths and the integrity in total a very strong and positive person. To become ideal a person must have a positive and clear vision for future in which all the good things should be contained and no negative thoughts. An example can be that a child can look up to its parents and say that I want to be like them so that shows that their parents may have positve attributes about them thats why a child wants to be like them. Below is a picture of a family in which a little girl looks up to her parents so this can be thought of as a child looking up to her parents that when she grows up she will have all the positives from them.

I hope this post helped you lot in understanding the concept of Self Concept. Any comments on this post please feel free to comment.