The Self Concept of a Leader

The 17^TH century mathematician and philosopher René Descartes, in his Principia Philosophiae was the original skeptic. A logical and rational Frenchman responsible for the Cartesian coordinate system and analytic geometry, among several other things, posed the question in 1644 that doubt was the principle tool of a disciplined inquiry into anything. This led him to the line of reasoning that doubting was simply an extension of thinking; from this, he determined that he did, in fact, exist: Existence was a function of perception (a position that could later be posed via quantum physics some two centuries later). The mental process of perception would later develop, helped along by the great minds of psychology such as Sigmund Freud, Prescott Lecky, V.C. Raimy, Carl Rogers, William Purkey, and J. Schmidt into a fairly concrete theory of self concept depicting each and every person’s self-identity in a physical, psychological, and social sense and influenced by one’s habits, attitudes, beliefs, and ideas.

Self concept is a learned component of our self. In our earliest months we develop the foundations for self concept; over time and repeated experience and perceptions it is shaped and molded (often the most with significant others, as research suggests). Because self concept is shaped through continued social interaction, and not instinctive, it has boundless potential for development. However, the perception component of self concept presents an interesting corollary in that perception goes both ways such that you may see yourself differently than others see you. Also, since perception varies from person to person and within each person from moment to moment, our self concept evolves over time and with reinforcing experiences. Over time we may learn that there are inconsistencies between experience and our self concept: As we will typically perceive those things as threats, our self concept will organize itself more rigidly in order to maintain and protect ourselves. Furthermore, emotional problems may arise from these continued perceived inconsistencies. Aside from experiences, our self can help generate negative self concepts through faulty patterns of thought: Categorizing everything into extremes or over-generalizing, for instance.

Instead of having multiple perceptions about your personal existence, self concept maintains an orderly and organized manner so that all of these perceptions about one self are orchestrated and tied into one another. Because it is orchestrated, organized, and stable in such a manner, self consistency arises; the stability aspect, however, tends to be the reason many people resist change as they do: Change requires energy and effort to go into perception, and perception to change about the world and, therefore, about ourselves; the more closely-held the belief or fundamental the belief is about one self, the more resistant to change self concept will be. This can lead to inconsistency—one of the enemies of self concept and stable personality. Self concept, however, is not completely resistant to change: Since the organization is personality-based, this aspect of self will have its core in “I” phrases instead of “me” phrases—perceiving yourself as something to act, not simply as an object; allowing reflection to happen on information taken from the past and present and to adapt the self concept to handle and shape future experiences. If you fail in an area which you hold in high regard, your evaluation of all other areas will tend to be lowered; similarly, a success in a highly regarded area will raise your evaluations in other areas. In other words: Failures affect self concept negatively, thus affecting the rest of your world and your experiences whereas successes have the opposite, positive, affect on everything else in your world.

Self concept, as has been being built towards, is a dynamic thing: It is a guidance system that shapes the ways a person views—and therefore interacts—with themselves, their surroundings, others, and the entire world. In a sense, it is your compass always pointing to your “personal north” by allowing you to take a consistent stance in life. Instead of being the cause of behavior, however, it is the cause of personality—and thus the direction for behavior. In this sense all information that you sense about the world is viewed through the filter of your self concept and is a constant and continuous process always assimilating and expelling new ideas throughout your life. Because it is so closely tied to our fundamental belief structure, each person will have a tendency to behave in such a fashion that remains consistent with their self concept no matter how much that helps or hurts themselves or others; it will even usually take precedence over physical comfort in order to achieve emotional comfort, constantly guarding itself against losses in self-esteem and prohibiting feelings of anxiety. However, if self concept must continually defend itself against being assaulted, opportunities for growth will be limited.

While this entire field warrants much more discussion, suffice for a real world application immediately: Dr. John J. Sosik, in a paper written for The Leadership Quarterly, examined relationships among dispositional attitudes: Self-consciousness, self-monitoring, and purpose-in-life; and charismatic leadership. Dozens of managers rated themselves on the aforementioned self concept-based attributes while about three times as many subordinates rated their manager’s leadership style. Understandingly enough, there was a high correlation found between private self-consciousness, self-monitoring, and purpose-in-life.

And to think, all this from a man who was skeptic about the world around him.

A Model for Interpersonal Interactions, Part 2

Everyone (well, most everyone) interacts with other people on a daily basis. When we interact with people the new information allows us the opportunity to deal with the many differences that might exist between how we perceive the world and how the world really is. As individuals that belong to social groups, communities, and other such groups of individuals, we tend to develop shared worldviews based on individuals in the group placing and communicating value on similar objects. These shared views of the world create the environmental construct in which our individual constructs evolve. Things such as the laws we observe, virtues we share with others, and the morals of our communities are the manifestations of groups of worldviews. Because we share, respect, and value the worldviews of the social groups which we reference, we live our lives, in a manner of speaking, in accordance to the social reference group whose collective worldview is most aligned with our own.

Conflicts arise, however, when we add personal meanings to the collective worldview. Because 10 different people will interpret the world through their personality filters in 10 different ways people will be apt to create different construct meanings as part of the greater morality construct. In this sense, worldview meanings will not always translate—and often do not always perfectly translate—into the worldview meaning of the social reference group. In this environment where the fusion of individual and group beliefs is non-existent conflict becomes highly probable: We’ll start seeing conflicts not only between individuals in specific groups, but also between different groups. These groups of interactions are, in the more common vernacular, as relationships.

Relationships allow us to seek awareness in our patterns of thinking: The comparison of our closely held beliefs through emotions and concepts with the events that are transpiring in our interactions, our relationships. Which beliefs, concepts, and values are reflected in our behaviors? Each of these behaviors that reflect our beliefs, concepts, and values are partly caused by our interactions with our environment and partly the manifestation of our genetics.

Throughout our past we learn and evolve an understanding of how to be from the framework which we are working in at that time: This is why awareness is a key leadership trait at all levels—from self-awareness to awareness of one’s environment—if one’s perceptions are broad and understanding of circumstances deep, an individual can seize this epiphany of conditioning and make the most of one’s evolution. We go through this constant process, being most apt and searching for it in our youth, to fulfill the need to search for meaning in oneself and the world around them. If the past has had a dominant “punishment model,” the search for meaning created mechanisms for defense within the construct; in a nurturing atmosphere, self-expression becomes dominant. At any rate, the experiences of your past manifest themselves as the patterns of your today. The earlier that these experiences shape your construct, the stronger the tendencies and patterns become…the more inertia they have…and the more energy is require to overcome them.

The patterns that we use throughout our daily lives embody the truths in our world: We interpret, process, and mold the world to meet our specifications, our worldview. Conflicts in relationships are simply two worldviews that lack congruence with one another. In his book “Ways of Worldmaking” Nelson Goodman says: “Not only do truths differ for different worlds but the nature of agreement between a version and a world apart from it is notoriously nebulous.” In other words, the truths of each individual differ, but the reconciliation of our truth from someone else’s is infamously indistinct.

The logical conclusion for all of this is that we should strive for three things: Heightened self-awareness, a deeper understanding of our relationships, and a thoughtful understanding the individuals in our relationships.

A Model for Interpersonal Interactions, Part 1

Each person is but the sum of their experiences, or so we are told. Every experience which you have, every interaction which you make leaves you changed (unless we’ve been desensitized of it). Deep inside we have conscious awareness, unconscious unawareness, and everything in between that forms the construct of the person we are, the fabric of our being.

An individual construct, however complex, can be deduced to series of areas that combine in special ways:

Ontological component: The study of being and what constitutes objective and subjective existence, and what it means to exist.

Theological component: A particular system or school of religious or spiritual beliefs and teachings.

Cosmological component: The study of the structure, origin, and evolution of the universe.

Axiological component: The study of values and value judgments.

Epistemological component: The study of what is meant by "knowledge". What does it mean to "know" something as opposed to merely having an opinion?

Ethical component: The principles of right and wrong that are accepted by an individual or a social group.

Take 10 different people and ask them, for instance, “What constitutes your objective and subjective existence and what does it mean to exist,” or…if you didn’t want to be so long-winded, one could simply ask “what is the meaning of life for you?” You would likely get 10 different answers. Because things like the theological, cosmological, and ethical components have a tendency to be more discrete in nature (“What are your theological beliefs?” “I’m Lutheran” or “what is your belief about the structure, origin, and evolution of the universe?” “The standard model of cosmology, thank you very much!”). Ethics tend to vary between social groups, societies, and civilizations: What is an accepted belief in Western Philosophy, for example, isn’t necessarily something that one would find in Eastern Philosophy: The paradigms between cultures vary in context and, therefore, meaning.

How these various components interact comprise the objective versus subjective within the individual. Objective things are those that can be proven by fact, whereas subjective matters are often interpreted by the individual to fit into their individual world. The sum of accumulated learning goes through the “filters” of the individual—the ontology, theology, cosmology, axiology, epistemology, and ethics filters. Each person’s perception of the world is unique in that how they pass new information through these filters to change something.

Worldviews, supported by personal values, are a framework for interacting with others: More on that in the next post.