You Are Not Who You Think You Are: How to Change Your Self-Concept

As the year comes to a close, many of us are taking stock — not just of what we did, but of who we believe we are.

In this episode, we’re talking about self-concept: the thoughts and beliefs you hold about yourself, how they were formed, and how they quietly shape your emotions, relationships, and choices — often without you realizing it.

So many of the things we believe about ourselves feel like facts… but they’re not. They’re thoughts — many of them inherited from childhood, authority figures, culture, or past experiences — and they can be changed.

Inside this episode, I share:

• What self-concept actually is (and what it’s not)
• How early experiences shape the way we see ourselves
• Why “positive thinking” often backfires
• A powerful question that opens a new path forward: Who would I be without this thought?
• How to shift self-judgment without forcing yourself to believe something that doesn’t feel true
• Why changing your self-concept isn’t about becoming someone else — it’s about freeing yourself

If you’ve ever felt like you are the problem, this conversation offers a gentler, more empowering way to look at yourself — one that creates possibility instead of pressure.

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If this episode resonated, I’d love to hear from you.
You can find me on Instagram at @theamandahess — send me a DM and tell me what stood out.

Whether you celebrate or not, I’m sending you so much love as this year comes to a close.
You are not stuck. You are not broken.
And you are allowed to change.

If you’re ready for deeper support, let’s talk. Book a free discovery call with me here.

What You’ll Discover:

• What self-concept actually is (and what it’s not)
• How early experiences shape the way we see ourselves
• Why “positive thinking” often backfires
• A powerful question that opens a new path forward: Who would I be without this thought?
• How to shift self-judgment without forcing yourself to believe something that doesn’t feel true
• Why changing your self-concept isn’t about becoming someone else — it’s about freeing yourself

Featured on the Show:

• Book a free consultation call with me!
• Join us in Love Yourself No Matter What for weekly coaching and community support.
• Send me a DM over on Instagram!

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Full Episode Transcript:

Hey, my friend, I am super excited to share this episode with you. Today we’re gonna be talking about your self concept. This episode is going to be released on Christmas Day, and I think that this is a gift that I can give to anyone listening. So it’s beautiful day to talk about this particular topic, your self concept.

Uh, what it really means is, is your identity. You know how you see yourself, but a lot of times what people will say to me is that it’s how other people see you. But the reality is it’s, it’s how you choose, and I use that word intentionally, how to ch how you choose to see yourself, and more specifically, your concept.

Your identity is the thoughts that you think about yourself. It is the beliefs that you have about yourself. Now, a lot of the thoughts and beliefs you have about yourself are planted by others. They are planted by where we grow up, the society that we are raised in, our parents, our teachers, our peers, our coaches.

Our self-concept is built from these other adults when we’re young. Because we don’t really have a self-concept yet. We don’t know who we are, we don’t know what we’re capable of. We don’t know how to see ourselves. I think about, you know, what was going on for me and my self-concept, and I wanna give you a couple to offer just a little bit of color here, right?

So one that comes up for me is that I had a ballet teacher, a ballet teacher. Tell my mom when I was doing preliminary ba ballet, so I was like five, right? Um, told her that I should pick a different activity after she failed me in preliminary ballet. That I was never gonna be a dancer. And guess what? I’m 49 and it’s a thought that still comes up for me.

That I can’t do that kind of dance, that I’m not flexible, that I’m not graceful. This still lives inside my brain as something that’s an option, right? Another example is when I was in high school. When I was in high school, I was severely bullied because in all honesty, how my verbal processing shows up for others.

Um, also for how my inability to express, also for how my inability to experience emotions like frustration in a safe way caused me to act. This is where the bullying would come from. It was socially unacceptable. And so when I think that about myself that I’m socially unacceptable, that I can’t experience emotions in a safe way when I believe those things.

I find myself being hypervigilant of how other people see me. But I’m going to tell you something about all of this, that these are all just thoughts. These are all just thoughts and not facts, and a lot of my clients. And a lot of my people around me share thoughts about themselves that they believe are facts when indeed they are not facts, they are thoughts.

When we think thoughts like this, when I think the thoughts that I’ve offered here that are offered to me in my own brain, I feel sad. I feel rejected. I feel embarrassed, and I feel ashamed. Which makes me wanna be small and shrink and causes me to scroll my phone and not even really know why I’m there.

At the end of the day, we have hundreds of thoughts about ourselves that define us. I can’t believe it. But they are thoughts, not facts. And we have to start here because the core of creating a life that you wanna be living is learning how to release thoughts and learning how to create new ones.

Now, when I am helping somebody with this, a lot of times they’ll ask me. How to think the thoughts and also what thought they should be asking or what shot, what thought they should be thinking. But those are the wrong questions. Instead, we wanna ask better questions of ourselves.

So when we notice that we have a thought that we believe to be true, we want to ask ourselves, who would I be? If I didn’t think this thought, who would I be? If I didn’t think the way that I processed emotion was a problem?

Who would I be if I didn’t think that the way that I processed emotion was a problem? Who would I be? How would I treat others? How would I treat myself? What would I do that I currently hold myself back from doing? What would I try.

How would I be with other people if I didn’t have the thought that ballet was not something I could do?

I would sign up for a class because I’ve always been drawn to it. I would go once a week and it would help my figure skating. I would be engaged. I would be excited if I didn’t have the thought, the verbal processing, my emotions was wrong.

I would have compassion for myself. I would give myself a break. I would just say it like a fact to others and they would have more context and I would be able to move freely through my life, not carrying, not carrying around the extra weight of guilt and shame.

When you ask yourself these questions, they offer a picture of a life where you are free from the jail of your current self concept. Imagine what your life could be like if you were free to think whatever you wanted about you.

Now when people ask me, but how do I change the way that I think I’m always going to answer? We start by getting honest about the things that you are thinking right now.

I was coaching a client today and she told me that she was no longer blaming herself for a situation that happened in her past. But then she told me that she needs to make sure she sees red. She needs to make sure she sees the red flags and doesn’t make the same extent and doesn’t make the same mistake next time.

And the thing is, that’s just a different version of self blame, so we need to see it. I see a lot of women getting into arguments with themselves about their thoughts.

They know logically they need to think something different, but it’s not embodied. They don’t feel it. There’s no truth to it. There’s no buy-in. And for me, when I am coaching you or coaching myself, I wanna find what also could be true.

I was coaching another client today and she was telling me. That she was the problem in her business, that she was the bottleneck. And what I offered is that this seems useful.

A lot of the thoughts that we think that increase pressure, that increase, um, stress, right, that create a different kind of emotion, but it’s still a negative one. We do that because it allows us to think that it’s a solvable problem.

So if the problem is me, it’s solvable. If the problem is them, it’s solvable. If the problem is that the system is unfair, it’s solvable. But instead, what this line of thinking creates is judgment, and judgment is not that useful.

When it comes to changing things in our lives, judgment is what our brain naturally does. Our brain is a natural judge. It’s perpetually moving through your life, deciding what’s good and what’s bad. That’s what’s happening in the background.

But instead, we want to engage in a different way consciously. So the question, who would you be without this thought? It simply offers a new path forward that is less pressured.

So for instance, my client who was telling me that she was the bottleneck in her business and that she was the problem, what I offered her is what if you are the solution? What is different about that?

So much is different about that. It’s the same. It’s a different side of the same coin. It’s a thought that’s also true that’s going to create a completely different emotional experience.

If you believe that you are the solution, rather the than the problem or the bottleneck, it allows you to get creative. It allows you to step in in a different way.

If I’m the solution, I can be excited about being the solution. If I’m the problem, I’m not excited about being the problem. I’m defeated, I’m frustrated, I’m confused, I’m overwhelmed, and instead we wanna be excited, then let’s make you the solution.

You can notice that I haven’t. Completely changed the thought in a way that it’s unbelievable because really it’s, it’s just the same thing said very differently. But her self-concept becomes instead of I’m the problem, it becomes, I’m the solution.

And that’s empowered. And when we were coaching, she was looking for that empowerment. She knew that that’s what she wanted to use to solve the problem. And so that’s why we did it in that way.

For my client that said she needs to see all the red flags, that she needs to be conscious and vigilant of fresh of red flags. We wanna look at what is the opposite side of that coin.

And it can be something as simple as, I date men that are emotionally available. I date men where I feel safe when I’m in their presence. I date men that I’m excited to see.

That’s very different than I’m looking for red flags. You could say, if you’re looking for red flags, I’ve gotta make sure that I don’t date somebody that’s emotionally unavailable.

I’ve gotta make sure that when I’m dating someone, that I’m not experiencing it in a way that feels bad for me, that I don’t, um, that I don’t second guess myself. That I don’t stand up for myself.

Notice the difference of, instead, let’s look at this from the standpoint of how do I show up? What am I here for? What am I excited about? What am I creating?

When we’re talking about self-concept and identity, what we’re really trying to do is shift from. This is all the shit that’s happened and this is what’s going on for me, and this is what I struggle with and this is what’s hard for me.

Having that identity, that self-concept, moving into a more solution-focused place.

Do I believe that you could have the self-concept and raise that even higher? Yes, I do. Yes, I a hundred percent do, and we do do that work.

But at the beginning, a lot of times when people come to me because feels things feel so broken down, we want to start with just taking the thoughts and beliefs and flipping them in a way that is also believable, that doesn’t require a lot of work.

And so we’re not getting in a tug of war with the thoughts.

When people talk to me about positive thinking, I’m like, positive thinking becomes toxic when we aren’t being aware of what is happening for us and where it’s coming from, where we’re not noticing that.

The reason why I’m thinking these thoughts. It isn’t just because I am a negative person, isn’t because I somehow don’t know how to handle this, but instead it’s just coming from fear, coming from doubt, coming from the messaging that we have been given all of our lives and now we wanna change it.

And in order to do that, we’ve gotta find safe thoughts, safe thoughts that are also true.

And that opposite side of the coin is a very, very effective way of doing it, and it allows you to move.

When we use thoughts like, I always do this, this is who I am. Nobody loves me, everybody hates me. Whatever your thoughts are, we all have, you know, a handful of them that we hear inside of our head all the time.

When you are having those thoughts. When we let them run unchecked, that is now our self-concept. That is our identity. That is how we show up in the world. That is how we show up to our relationships.

So we might show up resentful, we might show up defensive, we might show up frustrated. We show up unregulated, right? When we are thinking those thoughts, it makes us smaller and it makes us feel like we’re backed into a corner.

And if you think about an animal trapped in a corner. The last thing you wanna do is start hitting it with a stick. And that’s what we tend to do with ourselves. That’s how we tend to treat ourselves.

And it’s not your fault. This is how society is set up. This is how our world works to an extent. It’s because of the way that our brain just naturally works.

That survival brain is just showing up for you. Judging quickly, quickly, quickly, quickly, what’s the problem? What’s the problem? What’s the problem?

But it’s really learning the skill of slowing down and, and, and it’s learning how to determine what do I want myself concept to be? What do I want to think about myself? What do I want to believe about myself?

What do I wanna believe about what’s possible in my life? And starting to build a picture of what that looks like, not from the standpoint of I’m gonna be a better person. ’cause you’re already perfectly the best version of you right now.

But instead, what’s the next best step? What could be fun? What could be exciting? What could be simple? I’m the solution. I love that thought so much.

When you think about your thoughts, which are the ones that come to the forefront, if you want help shifting those, I do really invite you to come find me on Instagram. It’s the Amanda Hess. Send me a dm, I’ll help you.

I will give you a thought. That’s also true, that will help you if you really want help.

I have a couple things that I can offer as we’re sitting here on Christmas Day. I want you to know that you could come into my membership this week for free. You can come in for a full seven days.

You can come on a group coaching call where you can get coached and you can listen to other people being coached and see how this works.

You can listen to my private podcast that I do every single day. There’s over 500 episodes in there, and you can come into the community that we have online and engage with other humans that are just like you. And we will do this work.

The other offer I have for you is I do have availability right now in my one-to-one coaching, so you can come and do a discovery call with me.

If you go to amanda hess.ca/book a call, I should have some calls open and you can come and do a call with me one-on-one.

And we will simply walk through what’s going on in your life, the thoughts you are thinking, what your self-concept is, and then we can talk about what you want it to be and what the steps are to get there.

The thing about self-concept work is that too often we believe that it’s set in stone, that it’s unchangeable, that there’s nowhere to go from here, and it’s not the truth.

You are not preset. You are. A chameleon, you can change, not for other people, but for you. You can step into the next version of you anytime you want.

You don’t need proof. You don’t need to have all the things lined up. In fact, the things that you really want in your life will come from you developing and cultivating your self concept. This is where it comes from.

Your self-concept, your thoughts and your beliefs about yourself, come first. When you believe that you are the solution, you start creating solutions.

When you believe that you’re an emotionally healed individual that wants to date people that are like you, you will create that. This is the direction we go.

Now, don’t use this against yourself. Don’t sit there listening to this and go, oh no, I’ve created this for me. This is not what I’m saying.

What I am saying is we wanna look at the controllables here, and we wanna look at this from the standpoint of even if nothing or nobody else is different, I could change this.

I can alter the trajectory of this. I don’t have to stay here. And that’s where we wanna lead your brain.

So my friend. This is what I’ve got for you. If you celebrate and you’re listening to this in real time, Merry Christmas. If you don’t, I’m still sending you all the love in the world. You know where to find me.

I hope you have the most beautiful day today, and I will see you here next week. Bye for now.