I was in my early twenties working in retail at the Sprint store, which is where I say my defined self begun. I went from working in the store as a customer service representative to being promoted to a position of Assistant Manager. This beginning to my career was fast moving and where I began to find myself needing to make some changes to my self-concept since the outer self that I portrayed was being criticized by those I was hired to serve. My job was to review accounts that other employees had set up to check for accuracy and add-ons. I apparently had a rather direct style and when dealing with an employee that did not do their job correctly or did not even bother to add anything on for a commission. I was believed to be cold hearted and stubborn by my co-workers. My supervisor would often take calls from others complaining about my behavior and as always, I had to be shielded by my boss who would politely tell them I was only doing my job. It was throughout this stage that I tried to modify my phone etiquette to reveal what I believed the associate on the other side desired, but this was a greater task than I visualized it to be and the result was that I felt I had nothing to modify about myself. Now that I have grown up a little, I have been able to make the modifications I put so little determination into back then.
It is interesting to see, according to the book, the first perspectives that affect us are those of particular others (Wood, 2010). Also the book goes on to say on page 43, family members are the first major influence on how we see ourselves (Wood, 2010). I found that I would call myself a more refined version of my mother since I had many similar characteristics as she does. In addition, I find that the individual I was throughout that part of my life and career was filled with arrogance, for lack of better term, that was resulting by those I was surrounded by as well. It is currently in my current life that I have replicated on the judgment of my friends and family, as well as employers evaluation, that I see where the modifications need to be and what others are observing as an opportunity for improvement. The initial purpose on improving self-concept is being capable to step past yourself and pay attention to what others have said about you, grasping that information, possessing it as yours, and put together a real obligation to working on altering how you see yourself. You also have to understand nothing good ever comes from immediate results, so when things seem to be taking more time than you want to master, you just keep pushing on and even if one day you fail, then commit to the next being better. The next part of improving self-concept is to know where your self-concept was formed, or rather how you became who you are. This is where you examine yourself thoroughly and start to understand the origin of features that others may not know about you. By utilizing self-disclosure on page 57 in the textbook, you may realize yourself learning things you had not thought about for many years, if ever before. This is similar to stepping past yourself and getting and understanding of how you identify others and then how you actually interact with others. This is where it is important to see the blind areas of one's self. Another step in improving self-concept is setting goals that are not outrageous; keep them realistic, and fair. The very last thing somebody wants to do is flunk at something, but how baffling would it be if you placed your goals so high and idealistic that you were condemned even before you started? As we learned on page 58, we as individuals and a civilization expect more and more of ourselves and sometimes anticipate too much. If you propose to have certain types of noticeable progress or as it is called social comparison, you need to realize that you must use rational people for association. It would be crazy to think that your development remain coordinated with someone who had been in the similar field of employment since college and you only working in the same field for one year. This might not have been the greatest comparison, but I believe you comprehend what I am attempting to point out. The final part of this strategy for changing your self-concept is having a good support system around you. Having the contexts and people who are going to help you achieve your goals and that enhance what your wanting to do is vital to staying on track. Furthermore, you need to keep in mind that how you think to yourself during self-talk, you should always avoid self-sabotage.
The most significant issue I have learned is that we are capable of altering who we are or how we act and is not always a quick solution. We are trained to be who we are by the individuals who bounded us most in the beginning of our lives and in spite of our best efforts at times, we are continually working on who we are and how we see ourselves.

References
Wood, J. T. (2010). Interpersonal Communication: Everyday Encounters, 6th Ed. Cengage Learning