Can the Level of Our Achievement So Often Depend on Our Self-Image?

Start by doing something far better than you expect, then watch how your sub-conscious goes to work to sabotage your early efforts! The result? You finish up with the overall level of achievement you would have anticipated! And how do we anticipate that level - by referring to our self- image! Ask a golfer!

Take a mediocre golfer who plays rarely and yet has all the attributes to play well. Fix a friendly round for him with a good golfing friend who agrees to keep score in this non-competitive encounter. The mediocre player can play the first few holes like a dream, while nothing is said! But watch what happens when the golfing friend checks the score to-date and then announces, " I don't know whether you realise it, but if you go on like this you will have a round of only 10 over par!" (Which for those who don't play is pretty good for an occasional player!)

Stunned by the implication, our mediocre player does not so much feel an inner elation and pride, as a discomfort that actually he could be that good. The discomfort quickly spreads to his sub-conscious, which is ever-ready to maintain the status quo, and his quality of play immediately begins to nose-dive! By the end of the round his overall score is as he would have expected!

Perhaps stranger, the reverse can apply. The initial holes can be an absolute disaster, to a point where even his sub-conscious self-image is so offended that it calls for a different approach. And Hey! Standard of play improves and the overall score at the end rights itself!

Self-image, self-esteem, self-worth are very powerful cognitive drivers in terms of achievement and performance. Cognitive research has demonstrated that where we have unjustifiably low opinions of ourselves - unjustified because we are not as bad at something as we think - the low self-image triumphs over our greater ability almost every time.

However what should interest us and inspire us is the news that the converse is also true. If we have a higher self image than our actual ability would justify, most often it is that higher self-image we perform to.

So working on our self-image, feeding it with positive and upbeat messages does pay! We then perform better. We readjust our self-image and again perform better still.

But remember we do not have an overall self-image of ourselves. We have hundreds. Our self-image for singing could be low, golf - high, public-speaking - very low, cooking - very high, etc etc. We can work on each in turn to achieve more, by employing psychology simplified to its basics..

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