now that you better understand self-perception and also maybe the ideal self-concept um i also wanted to talk a little bit about the accuracy and distortions of self-perceptions so you know at the end of the last video i talked about how we have this ideal self and if you look at that does it make you feel bad at all these things um you know what are the things that people have spoken over you and told you about yourself but i kind of want to kind of talk about that aspect just a little bit this might feel a little bit like a therapy session um but you know sometimes there's a big incongruence in accuracy of our self-perceptions incongruence is just a fancy word for you're wrong right no not really but in congruence the book defines as a gap between self perception and reality this may be you or maybe you know somebody who you they talk about themselves and you're like what like it's so vastly different from what you perceive about them like someone might say like oh i'm just so i'm not smart i'm not this i'm not that and you're like what yes you are and it's just it's so easy to see it whenever it's not you know it's not you like you can say that um but sometimes personally we have some incongruences and i know that i've had that in my life there have been times that i perceived myself in a certain way that wasn't really true and it really negatively impacted me like made my self-esteem go down a lot i think we can do that but it's important to recognize when there's an incongruence and you may actually feel that about yourself but there's a point that we have to look at at ourselves and say okay is this truth or has this just been told to me or is this just something that i've held on to because someone said it to me sometime or because i messed up or anything is it actually true so say like for me i used to love cheerleading and tumbling maybe i mess up one time in a routine am i going to go my whole life thinking i'm a bad cheerleader now because i messed up that one time hopefully not because that would be an incongruence that would be a gap with reality i was a good cheerleader but everyone messes up just because i mess up once doesn't mean i'm not good so we want to think about it's kind of like a very simple um not very emotional one but that's very it's true there's things that we experience like that so how does that happen how do we get to that incongruence um sometimes i think it is someone says things to us maybe someone's told us those things maybe we've failed at something we've that we've really wanted to do that maybe it's part of our ideal self-concept and we continue to fail at it so we feel that way um it's also based on like like your evaluation of a talent or a skill like say that you feel like um you know you're not good at like if you're not good at singing like i said in the last video if you're not good at singing if you're not good at singing then like you know you're just not good at anything you're not worth anything right like you can kind of go get into this mentality that if i'm not this ideal self that i'm not good enough i mean that's not true either so how do we how do we kind of combat that one of the things that i think is really important is to understand self-fulfilling prophecies and self-talk so self-fulfilling prophecies is just believing that something is going to happen and so therefore it does uh meaning if i'm sitting here saying oh you know like the cheerleading example the next time that i go out if i think i'm just going to mess up again i'm just going to mess up again i'm i'm probably going to mess up again right or just like if you get up and you're like i'm tired this is gonna like it just it's raining outside it's probably gonna be a bad day then probably the whole day is gonna be bad because you have the mentality that it's gonna be bad and so we have to take a moment and sometimes check ourselves like what are the things that we're saying that we're making kind of speaking into existence i guess you could say um self but i was actually let me say this real quick the book says that self-fulfilling privacy is an inaccurate perception of a skill characteristic or situation that leads to behavior that perpetrates that false perception is true so like again i want to say that because to give you a better example i have students sometimes that say i'm not smart right and so they come into the classroom and they do things that cause them not to perform well like maybe they don't participate in group discussions maybe you don't take notes maybe you don't ask questions when you should um you know you you don't ask for help from your group members those things are going to lead to you not succeeding or to that student not succeeding so therefore it's a self-fulfilling prophecy they'll say i'm not smart they do certain things that cause them to not perform well so therefore they don't get as good of a great as they could have and so they that then it is fulfilled their their idea that they're not smart is then um affirmed because they didn't get the grade that they they could have or like as high of a great as they wanted so that's something important to remember about self-fulfilling prophecy another thing about this that is important is self-talk so self-talk is that intra-person that in like meaning to ourselves in trump personal communication where we're talking in our head a lot so you know if you don't have healthy self-talk habits that's going to lead to a lower like a lower like to lower self-esteem and also um like negatively viewing your self-concept right like the things that make you you you're going to feel negatively about that so that's your self-esteem it's going to be lower um self-con or self-talk is one of the most important things that we can do for ourselves so some people some people may talk about like you know like the mental game and athletics right or if you like to perform or you know be on stage and do drama how much you have to think to yourself all those things like do you encourage yourself or do you beat yourself down at some point we have to choose you know how like how are we going to think you know and if you're in therapy or if you've ever done that that's called cbt or cognitive behavioral therapy it's changing the way you think and therefore when we change the way we think our behaviors will change so i find that very very important self-talk is one of the most vital aspects of our self-perception or the most the biggest influences i guess i should say um so making sure that that's in the right place um will help us not have such a big incongruence right we won't have such a big gap between what is true about ourselves and reality and what we may may feel if we have low self-esteem