Goals & The Self.......

Another point made by the notion of hierarchical organization concerns the fact that goals are not equivalent in their importance.The higher you go into the organization, the more fundamental to the overriding sense of self are the qualities encountered. Thus, goal qualities at higher levels would appear to be intrinsically more important than those at lower levels. Goals at a given level are not necessarily equivalent to one another in importance, however. In a hierarchical system there are at least two ways in which importance accrues to a goal. The more directly an action contributes to attainment of some highly valued goal at a more abstract level, the more important is that action. Second, an act that contributes to the attainment of several goals at once is thereby more important than an act that contributes to the attainment of only one goal. Relative importance of goals returns us again to the concept of self. In contemporary theory the self-concept has several aspects. One is the structure of knowledge about your personal history; another is knowledge about who you are now. Another is the self-guides or images of potential selves that are used to guide movement from the present into the future. As stated earlier, a broad implication of this view is that the self—indeed, personality—consists partly of a person’s goals.