Charles Horton Cooley, an American sociologist at the start of the 20th century, said:

“I am not who you think I am;

 I am not who I think I am;

I am who I think you think I am”

A child is born with no self-image, no concept of self & that’s why even if we take a child in front of mirror, seldom will she be focusing on her own  reflection, rather the entire surroundings form her area of interest. Then, this child start looking in eyes of those around her. She uses them as mirror to build her self-image & use their statements for constructing Self Concept. And slowly, her identity gets formed based on the views of the world around her.

That’s the story with all of us, that’s the reality of our lives. We have peeped in so many mirrors in search of ourselves that we have jumbled it all up. If someone says, you are intelligent, we start believing, yes, I am. Then someone classify us as dumbest fellow around & there goes our acquired confidence for a toss with doubts creeping in.  

Over a period, we accumulate so many varied images of ourselves from the eyes of other people (mirrors), that the real picture gets utterly blurred & we lose touch with our own self. And this all happens, without realizing that the mirrors around us are not showing us the true picture rather they all are biased with their own perception. In reality, the image these mirrors portray for us, tells more about them than for us. It’s like the magic mirrors in the fun world, where we see so many distorted images of ourselves. Can we say, any of those is true reflection of ours? The kind of image we see, only tells whether the mirror we are seeing is a concave one, convex or a mixed one in different planes. Still, we accumulate these contradictory versions of ours & construct a Self-Image based on that. That’s precisely the reason why we are so afraid of Opinion of others about us, so much so that our entire life gets guided by “What would they think of me”.

Unfortunately, from the very childhood, we get manipulated by those around us, sometimes for our good but most of times for theirs’s, in the guise of our benefit. Thus, over a period of time, we develop a depreciative concept of ourselves, which makes us vulnerable. This vulnerability exposes us to exploitation & ultimately to realization that we need to protect ourselves from getting manipulated by others. As a result, we develop a hard outer cover to deceive the world & protect ourselves. But, in the bargain, our true self gets buried under layers that prevent the expression of our true self & people who are conscious enough spent a life time to realize nature of their true self.

Based on theories from Psychologists like Sigmund Freud & Dan P. McAdams, a model is proposed that explains the three layers that make up our personalities. The concept delved beyond what we might think of as the good and bad parts of ourselves.  This model provided a way to look beneath the surface and explore our motives and the factors that influence our behaviors – especially the negative ones. The model suggests that there are three layers to our personalities.  They are the Mask Self, the Lower Self and the Higher Self.   If you picture a sphere, the mask is the outer layer, the Lower Self is the middle layer, and as odd as it might seem, the Higher Self is buried underneath the other two at the center – the core.

The Mask Self is the top, outer personality layer that has conformed to conditioning due to constant, unsolicited receipt of feedback from others. Our Mask is constructed by the beliefs and behaviors we’ve adopted to fit in, to be socially appropriate, and to avoid non-conformity. Our Mask is our public persona, the aspect most familiar to us and others.  It’s the dimension of our being that we identify with most closely and readily.  It’s about survival, which is so deeply ingrained, that we believe The Mask to be our true self.  We’ll fight for it, defend it, and even fake it to avoid embarrassment and discomfort.  But our Mask isn’t the real us.

The Lower Self – which is the middle layer – is forged by the threats we’ve perceived since we were in our mothers’ wombs.  Loud noises, painful life experiences, manipulations by others, torturous relationships all damage our emotions and can lead to self-sabotaging decisions or acting out in self-destructive ways.  The actual incidents have long been forgotten, but they still influence how we react to the world.  These are the roots of fear, skepticism, self doubts and behaviors we view as dishonorable or shameful.  The Lower Self contains shameful and painful experiences, thoughts and feelings – the kind we avoid acknowledging.  Often, they are the faults and flaws we see in others, but we deny that we’re affected by similar demons.

Finally, the Higher Self is who we are at our core.  This is the real US.  It is limitless, pure and loving when it’s not being smothered by the Mask and Lower Selves.  The Higher Self is kind, respectful, compassionate, peaceful, joyful and wise.  Our unique talents, gifts, passion, purpose and potential reside here – in our Core.  When we are at our best, we are expressing our Higher Self.

So, the question is, how do we tap in our higher self to operate in blissful manner rather than being intimated by the environment. Living from ‘core’, the higher self requires self-love. Most of us are fairly competent at self-protection, self-defense, self-sabotage, self-criticism, self-pity and self-denial. Fewer of us know how to love Self.  We prefer the masks we’re comfortable with – masks that project the right image and deny the existence of the toxic lower self. Unconsciously and unfortunately, our mask also denies our truest identity, the powerful person we are at our Core.

Thus, the equation boils down to that to operate from our cores, how do we increase our liking, our love for ourselves, how do we enhance our self-esteem to the extent that it no longer gets negatively affected by the toxicity of the environment, we might be operating in. More the self-esteem we have, higher will be the extent to which we can like or love our self.  Thinkers suggest two ways which are very much related to each other, to enhance the self-esteem –

1.      Fake till you make: Whenever our self-image, our personal performance is consistent with our self-ideal i.e. the person we most like to be, our self-esteem goes up. This means that we feel & behave in a manner that is most congruent with the image of the person that we idealize to be. This is like “Act your way in to Feeling”, i.e. act confident to feel confident or act being happy to ultimately start feeling genuinely happy. This might require us cutting thro’ Lower Self & Mask & initially might feel vulnerable as we are exposing our core to the world.

2.      Positive Affirmation: Some words work like magic, when we tell them to ourselves. They are very powerful & top among them would be “I LIKE MYSELF”.  Repeating this, our overall Self Concept goes up, our self-image goes up & it becomes closer to the self-ideal, which gets clearer. As our self-concept goes up, so does our performance, our behaviour & literally every part of our life goes up as we beam in re-found confidence.

Whenever we do something well, our self-esteem goes up & we like ourselves more, who doesn’t like a performer. More we like ourselves, the better we do, better we perform.  Better we perform, more we like ourselves, more we like ourselves, even better we perform & thus get into an upward spiral. Initially, we may have ‘cognitive dissonance’ as we are going against the Mask but more we repeat them, gradually they re-programme the sub-conscious mind.

Implications of this one act are cascading. Consider this, it is impossible to like ourselves & be negative. It is impossible to like ourselves & be angry, be worried. Our mind can hold any one thought at a time, Positive or Negative. When we consistently feed it with positivity of ‘I like Myself’ it has no space to accommodate anything Negative.

OR More we like ourselves, more we like others, we stop seeing negatives in them as well. More we like others, more they like us right back & that’s the foundation of Self-Confidence leading to another upwardly moving spiral. More we like ourselves, we gain higher confidence & thus more we like ourselves, less is the fear of failure & rejection, improving the performance & once again enhancing the self-esteem.

 So the take home message is day in day out, keep repeating– I am the best, I like myself & see how it transforms your life.