Creating Ourselves

I've recently been reading Cordelia Fine's excellent book, 'Delusions of Gender'. She mentions some research carried out by Adam Galinsky and colleagues, where participants are shown pictures of people including a cheerleader, professor, elderly man and an African American man. Participants were then asked to actually BE that person and write their diary for an entire day.

After they had done this, participants were asked to rate some of their own qualities. Perhaps not too surprisingly, those who had imagined they were the cheerleader rated themselves as more gorgeous, sexy and attractive than the control group; those who imagined themselves to be professors felt smarter; the elderly man felt  weaker and more dependent; and the African American man imaginers felt more agressive and athletic.

By imagining themselves to be someone else, the participants had altered their concept of themselves. The study goes on to demonstrate that this change in self-concept is translated into changes in behaviour.

This seems to me to be a powerful demonstration of the way we can create, not only gender, but also many other aspects of ourselves. And for those of us who have worked with NLP strategies ourselves, and with others, we know from first-hand expeerience that it is literally possible to create the sort of person you want to be.

So the questions for us all are: 'Do we want to keep being unconsciously created by forces that appear to sweep us along? Or do we want to consciously create the sort of person we want to become?' The first is much easier; the second far more challenging......yet what price being able to become the sort of people we have always wanted to be?

Now....who shall I imagine being today?!