People dealing with a low self esteem don’t view themselves clearly. They see themselves through warped funhouse mirror.  The distorted reflection seems to magnify their weakness while diminishing their assets.

My psychologist suggested I do a self concept assessment to raise my self esteem and get rid of the false warped mirror images.

The first step toward doing an accurate self concept assessment begins with writing down detail on how you see yourself right now. The more details the better. This assessment is a condense excerpt from the book Self Esteem by McKay and Fanning

Creating Your Self Concept Assessment

I recommend keeping your assessment in a spiral notebook. Your assessment will consist of eight areas. In each area, write down as many words and/or phrases to describe yourself.

1. Physical appearance.
Include description of your height, weight, hair, skin, eye, style of dress along with descriptions of specific body area.

2. How you relate to others
Include details of your strengths and weakness in all your relationships, with people you interact with regularly.  Also include how you relate to strangers in social settings.

3. Personality
Describe your positive and negative traits

4. How other people see you
What strength and weakness do your friends and family see

5. Your performance at school or job
How do you handle major task

6. Your performance of daily life task
Describe how you maintain yourself, home, health and other personal care task include family needs too

7. Mental functioning
This area can include, reasoning, problem solving, learning, creativity, specialized knowledge, insight wisdom and so on

8. Sexuality
How you see and feel about yourself as a sexual person

Self-Esteem: A Proven Program
of Cognitive Techniques
for Assessing, Improving,
and Maintaining Your Self-Esteem

Next Step in finishing your self concept assessment:

• go back and put a plus sign by items representing your strengths or things you like about yourself.
• Put a minus sign by item you consider negative or would like to change.
• Look for a pattern with your plus and minus signs

Do the majority of your negative show up in only a couple of areas?

This generally means your self esteem is in good shape with a few specific weak spots.

If you have more minus signs  over positive signs throughout your assessment, it will take more effort for you to achieve a realistic positive self concept.

Part two of this series will go over how to begin revising the weak perceptions on your list.

Other posts of the series

1. Self Esteem | Accurate Self Concept Assessment - Step Five
2. Self Esteem | Accurate Self Concept Assessment - Step Four
3. Self Esteem | Accurate Self Concept Assessment - Step Three
4. Self Esteem | Accurate Self Concept Assessment - Step Two
5. Self Esteem | Accurate Self Concept Assessment - Part One (This post)