When analyzing the Self Concept, it is crucial to understand the characteristics that define the concept fundamentally. First and foremost, the “Self-Concept” involves three factors that determine personal identification in society, both externally and internally. The complexity, which is the underlying factor, is the system of personal life “roles” and their sophistication. In this case, the “role” means the relative identification of the individual. In other words, the same person could be “Father,” “Best friend,” “Business partner,” or “Husband,” depending on the other member of society.
The more life roles the person possesses, the more “complex” he or she is. However, even though self-determination is crucial, “consistency” is the more important factor in the long-term perspective. More specifically, consistency is the quality of interaction of the individual’s life roles. For instance, when the person is considered to have a calm type of character and works in a stressful atmosphere, the consistency factor overshadows positive influence even though they experience an increasing complexity.
In addition, when the individual is trying to pretend to have higher complexity, different life roles might be in conflict not only with each other but also with the person. As a result, the “pretender” experiences serious issues connected with the consistency factor. Last but not least, “clarity” is the synonym of “determination,” which is the final stage of creating an individualized Self-Concept. To be more specific, this is the level of understanding of self-complexity. When the person can understand their life roles and answer the question: “Who am I?” then the clarity level is sufficient to implement the Self-Concept in real-life effectively.
On the other hand, every individual should implement the Self-Concept by realizing four “self”: Social self, self-enhancement, self-evaluation, and self-verification. The four terms refer to the correct evaluation principles, including adequate evaluation in personal comparison or understanding other people’s right and wrong evaluations. However, to become a healthy and confident individual, it is critical to implement the Self-Concept to correctly understand weak and strong points of personality and use the four “self” to properly evaluate the personal capacity to achieve specific goals, such as increasing complexity or self-verification.