Being yourself presupposes of the complicated mechanisms of self-concepts that play essential role in human lives. In everyday life, a person expresses different self-concepts in communication with people, certain actions, etc. Self concepts have various dimensions: physical concept, personality concept, social self, the concept of character traits, and the concept that covers skills and abilities.
Physical concepts reveal the way a person describes himself to others with respect to how he perceives himself in physical dimension. Physically, each person has sex, body constitution, and physical characteristics. For example, a girl may describes herself as a healthy young woman with a well figure, good stamina, tall stature and slim body.
Personality concepts describe people’s personality from psychological point of view. Each person has a certain biological characteristics that reveal the nature of her/his individual temper, intellectual abilities, and other things that help her to distinguish from others. A middle-aged man can perceive himself as a sanguine-charismatic, smart person, with optimistic mood, who leads active life.
The same person may have numerous social selves as he/she interacts with during people and performs the corresponding social functions. Owing to this, a human life resembles a network, where all people continuously interact and bound with each other. For example, a young woman may describe herself as a teacher in school, a daughter for her parents, a mother in her own family, an assistant for her children, a friend for some other people, etc.
A person has certain character traits that make him a unique social creature. During people’s lives they can change or preserve more or less unchangeable. In this context, the self-concept of a schoolboy may be the following: he is talkative, self-confident, kind and outgoing person, with certain positive and negative personal sides.
The self-concept of skills and abilities of a person reveal the personal opportunities and talents in certain spheres of the life. For example, a child may be good in drawing, but bad in writing. An old man can be considered as Jack-of-all trades, because he can do practically everything in a good way. An artist may be extremely creative, but impractical man. Nevertheless, all people have their advantages and disadvantages.
Every day of their life people demonstrate their five major self-concepts. Owing to salience of self-concept, each person considers a certain self-concept as the most essential one; hence, he/she dedicates extra time and effort to it. For example, a woman may consider her social self as a mother to be the most important in her life.