An important aspect of self-image is whether people consider themselves "successful" or "losers", based on their previous successes and failures. But we have a bias here: the feeling from a successful or failed task is not proportionate to its difficulty. So people can manipulate their outcomes by only doing easy tasks, which have high success ratio. When used strategically, this can be helpful; but doing it automatically all the time is harmful. Learning new things requires trying new things, but that has a risk of failure, which can harm self-image with possible bad consequences such as learned helplessness. On the other hand, protecting self-image all the times means never learning anything. Updating means admitting you were (more) wrong. How to deal with this?
I could treat my positive self-image as a depletable resource: after repeated failures I would stop experimenting with new things and return to practicing the stuff I am successful at, until I feel good about myself again. Maybe this is a secret ingredient of practice: not only does practicing a skill make one better at the given skill, but it also makes it part of their self-image. Doing difficult exercises would be better for actually improving the skills, but doing easier (though not too easy) exercises would be better for the self-image as a skilled person.
I could try to make a self-image of "a person who tries difficult things many people would rather avoid" which could make failures less significant (actually contributing to the self-image) and successes more sweet. On the other hand, if I overdo this, I get a convenient excuse for never completing anything. Perhaps it could be balanced by measuring whether people really avoid those things I am failing at. Alternatively I could use a self-image of a person learning something, because the only way to fail at learning is to stop learning; getting an exercise wrong is a part of learning. Again, overdoing this, I get a convenient excuse for failing.
Somehow related: the line between "solving the problem" and "running away from the problem" is sometimes blurred, but the respective self-images feel very differently. What kind of a solution can I accept so that it will not feel like running away? (Changing my job, which greatly improved my life: was it running away from the problem, solving the problem, or both?) It is easy to blame the environment, but also to blame the person, even if we are the person (we model others blaming ourselves). I prefer the self-image of a problem solver (because it would prime me to solve problems, duh), but my ultimate goal is winning, not working hard.
Also I have stopped reading internet discussions where people are impolite (unfortunately, too large sections of the internet), because I realized that it harms my self-image: I started to think about myself as a person who cannot have an intelligent and polite discussion with most people. Somehow I blamed myself for evoking the responses I got online, and integrated that into a stereotypical self-image of a computer guy with low social skills. However, most offline experiences proved me wrong: with real people I am a nice person, and I can have a pleasant talk with most of them.
...An important aspect of self-image is whether people consider themselves "successful" or "losers", based on their previous successes and failures. But we have a bias here: the feeling from a successful or failed task is not proportionate to its difficulty. So people can manipulate their outcomes by only doing easy tasks, which have high success ratio. When used strategically, this can be helpful; but doing it automatically all the time is harmful. Learning new things requires trying new things, but that has a risk of failure, which can
Related to: Cached selves, Why you're stuck in a narrative, The curse of identity
Outline: Some back-story, Pondering the mechanics of self-image, The role of narrative, Narrative as a medium for self-communication.
tl;dr: One can have a self-image that causes one to neglect the effects of self-image. And, since we tend to process our self-images somewhat in the context of a narrative identity, if you currently make zero use of narrative in understanding and affecting how you think about yourself, it may be worth adjusting upward. All this seems to have been the case for me, and is probably part of what makes HPMOR valuable.
Some back-story
Starting when I was around 16 and becoming acutely annoyed with essentialism, I prided myself on not being dependent on a story-like image of myself. In fact, to make sure I wasn't, I put a break command in my narrative loop: I drafted a story in my mind about a hero who was able to outwit his foes by being less constrained by narrative than they were, and I identified with him whenever I felt a need-for-narrative coming on. Batman's narrator goes for something like this in the Dark Knight when he <select for spoiler-> abandons his heroic image to take the blame for Harvey Dent's death.
I think this break command was mostly a good thing. It helped me to resolve cognitive dissonance and overcome the limitations of various cached selves, and I ended up mostly focussed on whether my beliefs were accurate and my desires were being fulfilled. So I still figure it's a decent first-order correction to being over-constrained by narrative.
But, I no longer think it's the only decent solution. In fact, understanding the more subtle mechanics of self-image — what affects our self schemas, what they affect, and how — was something I neglected for a long time because I saw self-image as a solved problem. Yes, I developed a cached view of myself as unaffected by self-image constraints. I would have been embarassed to notice such dependencies, so I didn't. The irony, eh?
I'm writing this because I wouldn't be surprised to find others here developing, or having developed, this blind spot...
Pondering the mechanics of self-image
At some point in your life, you may have taken on a job or a project without knowing that after doing it for a month, it would negatively affect your self-image in some way. There may have been things that you always found very easy to do which, after some aspect of your self-image changed, you suddenly found yourself avoiding or struggling with.
It would be nice to be able to predict and maybe even control that sort of thing in advance. In general, I'd like a deeper understanding of the following questions:
If you've never sat to ask yourself these questions genuinely, I might suggest stopping here and thinking about them for a while. Simply taking the time to ponder these issues has lead me to many helpful realizations. For example:
I don't have anything like an inclusive, general theory of self-image, and I have lots of hanging questions. Can I come up with a reasonably finite exhaustive list of features to track in my own self-image, for practical gains? Does such a list exist for people in general? But even without these, asking myself the old 1-4 once in a while gives me something to think about.
The role of narrative
In my experience, personally and with others, the answers to questions 1-4 are not automatically transparent, even if we can find partial answers by asking them directly. So what other questions can we ask ourselves to understand our self-images?
It seems to be common lore that our self-images have something to do with narrative identity. I take this to mean that we process our self-images somewhat in terms of features and schemas that we also use to process common stories.
So, I've tried working through the following series of questions to get in touch with what aspects of my personal narrative cause me to experience shame, pride, indignation, and nurturance. I like to lay them all out like this to signal to myself what they're for and that I want to do them all:
Consequences. By asking myself these questions, I've come to some realizations that didn't result from asking myself the more direct questions 1-4. For example:
Does anyone have similar experiences they'd like to share? Or very dissimilar experiences? Or questions I could add to this list? Or well-reproduced psych references? HPMOR references are also highly encouraged, especially since I still haven't read it, and in light of this post, I probably should!
Narrative as a medium for self-communication
Like any method of affecting oneself, narrative is something one can over-use. But I think I personally have been over-cautious about this, to the point of neglecting it as an option and ignoring it as an unconscious constraint. To the extent that I now use it, I think of it as a way of communicating with myself, not to be used for trickery or over-selling a point.
To draw an analogy, if you tell your 2-year-old child "You trigger in me feelings of paternal nurturance", while this may be true, it's not communication. Hugging the child is communication. It's a language she'll understand. In fact, it's probably how you should teach her what "nurturance" means. In particular, it's not a trick, and it's not over-selling.
Likewise, when I'm convinced enough that something is true — like for once I should really try not feeling annoyed with a postmodernist to see if we can communicate — and it's time to tell that to my limbic system with some conviction, maybe it's worth speaking a language my emotional brain understands a little better, and maybe sometimes that language is narrative. Maybe I'll write myself a poem about patience. Maybe I already have ;)