In each of our DMC newsletters, we use the R&E Spotlight section to cover a measurement-related subject that is both novel and of potential practical value to our community. For this quarter’s newsletter, I want to share with you all a project that I am working on right now with colleagues from Rice University and several other institutions around the US. Together, we have conducted a series of studies validating a new measure that we call aspirational self-clarity.
More than 100 years ago, psychologist William James wrote about different facets to a person’s self-concept, which he referred to as the “actual self,” the “ideal self,” and the “ought self.” Most recent on the self-concept since then has focused on the actual self, which is a person’s sense of who they are right now (not that this version of the self is objectively true—it is subjectively perceived, but nonetheless perceived as being true today). Relatively little research has been conducted on the ideal self, or who a person wishes to become in the future. That’s what the aspirational self-clarity scale was designed to measure: the extent to which people hold a clear, coherent, and consistent vision of who they would like to be.
We believe that having a strong sense of the aspirational self is important for personal growth. Indeed, how can anyone chart a path in life if they don’t have a clear sense of where they want to go? We have found, for instance, that one of the two most important variables predicting how much progress people make toward their personal goals when working with a leadership coach is the extent to which they gained aspirational clarity by talking with their coach. We have also seen that scores on the aspirational self-clarity scale are relatively stable over time and are correlated in predictable ways with scores on other, related measures (such as the clarity of the actual or current self, self-esteem, and sense of purpose).
Perhaps most interestingly, we have also found that aspirational self-clarity scores can change! We devised a set of exercises to help people identify their most important values and their core characteristics, and then translate these into a life purpose statement. Our assumption was that purpose involves the active pursuit of your highest values within the parameters of who you uniquely are. For people who completed these self-reflection exercises and wrote a purpose statement, their aspirational self-clarity increased significantly. People who only engaged in self-reflection at either a shallow or a deep level (without writing a purpose statement) did not significantly increase in aspirational self-clarity. Thus, knowing why you’re here on planet Earth is the starting point for establishing who you want to become.
We are continuing to explore the meaning and potential value of growing in aspirational self-clarity. Our latest project involves resilience, and I look forward to sharing more about what we learn from that project in future newsletters.