Positive Self-Image

Close the Gap Between Who You Are and Who You Want to Be — An Evidence-Based Guide to Your Self-Concept

De: George Clear

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

The two exercises in every book on this shelf are the two with the worst evidence behind them.

Repeat the affirmation. Picture the outcome. Talk to yourself in the mirror. All three have been studied, and the results are not what the genre claims. For the first, the benefit has never been demonstrated, and in two experiments people with low self-esteem who repeated I'm a lovable person felt worse afterwards. For the second, four experiments found that imagining an idealized future lowers your energy, measured by blood pressure and by how much people got done a week later. For the third, the real procedure is a supervised clinical treatment in which adverse events have been reported.

This is the second edition of Positive Self-Image, rewritten from the first line. It begins by taking those three things away. What is left is smaller, and it holds.

WHAT IS IN IT

• The three selves you actually carry: who you are, who you hope to be, and who you think you ought to be. The distance to the second produces sadness. The distance to the third produces anxiety. They call for opposite responses, and almost nobody separates them
• Why praise slides off you, from a meta-analytic review of what people really want to hear about themselves, and what a self-description will accept instead of a compliment
• Process, not outcome: students who spent a few minutes a day imagining the work averaged 80.60 on an exam, while those who imagined the grade averaged 72.57
• Wish, outcome, obstacle, plan. A four-step tool that binds you to reachable goals and releases you from unreachable ones, which makes it the only instrument here allowed to tell you to stop
• Values, not slogans: the writing exercise with documented effects on education, health and relationships that sometimes persisted for months and years
• Five checkpoints you answer in your own words, and a 14-day plan with dates on it

WHAT IS LEFT OUT, AND NAMED

Affirmations you do not believe. Visualizing the finished result. The mirror exercise. The idea that your thoughts act on the world without passing through your behavior, which the first edition of this book borrowed in three places without noticing. And any promise that a fortnight will change who you are.

WHAT "EVIDENCE-BASED" MEANS HERE

19 sources, every one marked in the text and listed at the back with volume and pages. Seven were read in full; where only a published abstract was available, the book uses only what the abstract says, and says so. Two of the sources contradict each other about whether self-esteem causes anything, and chapter two works through the disagreement instead of picking the convenient side.

There is also a page at the back called What the Research Does Not Settle. It names 13 places where this book's own evidence is thinner than the author would like, says exactly how thin each one is, and ends with what was cut from the manuscript because it could not be verified at all. It is the reason you can trust the rest.

Chapter 15 says when this is the wrong book and a doctor is the right one.

A rewritten second edition. Three readers of the first said there was not much to it. They were right, and this is the answer.