Following my morning exercise routine today, I was thinking about how differently I view myself compared to when I was a teenager. Being a psychologist (and a person with common sense), I know this is normal. In the teenage years, change is the norm – change in your brain, relationships, ability to cope, and your identity. At the same time, I think there were some things that I did that helped me change how I saw myself.
How did I see myself? Well, I’ve had asthma for many years. When I was younger, exercise (particularly running outside) induced my asthma. As a result, aside from some brief, proud moments during PE or our yearly fitness fest at my elementary school (when I beat everyone in how long I could keep myself in a chin-up position), I never saw myself as athletic or physically fit. As I proceeded into the strange teenage years, I continued to have that view of myself. I considered myself smart but lazy, not too into athletics, and largely uninterested in school, homework, or working hard at anything. I also never really saw myself as a team player, maybe because I had not had much experience on teams (unlike other kids who had done soccer, football, and so on). In fact, right as Grade 8 was starting, I briefly joined the football team and then promptly quit when I realized I had no idea what I was doing and didn’t really want to get up early to work out, be yelled at, or have to do stuff people were telling me to do. I enjoyed biking, playing badminton, ping-pong, and basketball with my friends, but these activities were sporadic. More regular and consistent were my binges at McDonald’s (I’m not going to go so far as to describe my typical order!). In fact, despite not having the propensity to gain weight, I had put on a few pounds (more than a few), and while extra weight doesn’t always equate to unhealthiness, in my case, it probably did.
Sometime after the end of high school, I started to realize that I could exercise without wheezing or getting winded, and that it felt good. I started biking the 45 minutes to and from university, rain or shine, eating more healthy foods, and developed an interest in cooking. I played tennis, started martial arts, and biked almost everywhere. I would bike from my home in Vancouver to where I volunteered at Riverview Psychiatric Hospital, to where I worked in North Vancouver (across the freaky Lion’s Gate Bridge), and even biked to do the famous Grouse Grind. I began to work a lot harder at my schoolwork and discovered the intrinsic rewards of learning new things and doing well. My view of myself as unfit, smart but lazy, and uninterested in hard work gradually changed.
Of course, then I went on to graduate school, completed a post-doc, and began a career as a professor and psychologist. All of that required a tremendous amount of commitment and work. My experiences further altered how I saw myself: I used to see myself as someone who was hesitant and anxious about speaking in front of others, and now I do that fairly successfully for hours every week and enjoy it. Seeing myself do all of this further affirmed my new “identity” as someone who works hard and takes his health and fitness seriously.
I found it interesting that my view of myself seemed to change because of what I was doing, rather than the other way around. It wasn’t as if I wrestled my brain into thinking of myself as fit and hard working. I gradually become fit and hard working before my perspective changed. One could argue, of course, that many of the changes I describe above are due to brain maturation in young adulthood. That’s probably part of it, but I do believe that, if you want to change how you see yourself, sometimes you have to change what you do.
Consider how you currently see yourself. Are you happy with your perspective on yourself? How would you like to see yourself? If someone were to ask about you, what characteristics would you like to be able to describe? Rather than trying to convince yourself to believe you have these characteristics, start doing different things. If you want to see yourself as fit and healthy, start making small changes to your eating and activity routines. If you want to see yourself as altruistic and caring, start finding ways to help others on a regular basis. If you want to see yourself as hard working, find something to sink your teeth into, and work on it. Act as if you have these characteristics, and you might start to find that you do. It might take some time, but I do believe that we can change how we see ourselves. I also think that one of the most effective ways to do this is from the outside-in. ~Alexander L. Chapman, Ph.D., R.Psych.