Quiz night shocks my self concept
I am absolutely hopeless at quiz nights. I loathe them. Well, maybe it's not that I loathe them, it's more that I leave feeling stupid. What kind of negative self concept is that?
At every quiz night I have gone to, all around me I see people who are eager and enthusiastic. They actually know the answers to the questions, and share them confidently. I sit there hardly making a contribution.
Quiz nights are an Australian institution. We do quiz nights big time, don't we? It doesn't matter if we want to raise funds for our daughter's school, the local hospice, or the nearby netball club, we'll have a quiz night. (Or barbeque, but that's another subject!)
When I was first invited to a quiz night I went along delighted to show off my knowledge, and to share a fun evening with friends. After all, I was a smart, intelligent woman, wasn't I?
I may have thought so, but on the night I didn't seem to know anything. I managed to get two answers correct in the whole evening.
I felt so sorry for the people on my table. They felt let down. Why had they let such a dumb woman be on their table? They wanted to win.
The more quiz nights I went to, the more brainless I felt.
Once this started happening I questioned seriously what my level of intelligence was. I reflected on how hard I'd found many subjects at school and how I'd struggled to keep up with some educational requirements. I began thinking that deep down I wasn't very intelligent.
What a shock for my self concept. Such a shake-up meant my self esteem was also spiralling downwards fast.
All this of course, was made worse by the fact that my husband was an absolute wonder boy at quiz nights.
Ask him to name the capital city of any country in the world and he'd know. Ask him to name different countries and how they've changed during their political evolution and he'll state that Sri Lanka used to be Ceylon and Rhodesia changed to Zimbabwe. He even knows the weights, heights, distances, volumes and measurements of things I’ve not even heard of. Who needs Wikipedia?
No wonder I decided I wasn't very intelligent. I wish I'd never gone to a single quiz night. It was forcing me to consider a new definition of my self concept.
I complained to my husband about quiz nights and started refusing to go. I began exclaiming how dense I was, how I had no general knowledge, how I couldn't recall facts and figures.
"But I think you are intelligent", my husband said. "It's just you have a very different intelligence from me. I'm an analytical chemist and scientist but you can know things about people that I would never pick up. You can manoeuvre your way through a difficult interaction that I would run away from. And you did get a distinction in your psychology degree, you know."
"I suppose, but does that make me smart?", I asked.
"Absolutely. I'm only good for quiz nights, you can cope with people wherever your go. Who cares what the main city of an obscure country in Central America is. That's not being intelligent, it's being a fact collector. Intelligence is far more than being able to recall a sequence of facts. You have a high level of intelligence, it's just not the same type as mine."
Maybe he was right after all. Smart woman? Yes. Good at quiz nights? No! I do have a conceptual type of intelligence, an ability to analyse situations and people, and an emotional intelligence. Quiz nights don't test my emotional intelligence, do they?
Going to quiz nights opened up an unexpected new enquiry about my level and type of intelligence. This was important because my perception of my intelligence and my understanding of it is an important part of my self concept.
How smart are you? Does your self concept reflect an accurate definition of your intelligence?
Editor
Reader Comments (1)
One of the many things she said was:
Debunk the whole myth about super people ie that super people can do everything and they do it on their own. She says it "Should be debunked because I am not a superwoman and he is not a superman. And neither of us would be able to do the things we do without either our children's support, our broader family support, our broader friendship support, without each other and without our teams."
Read the full transcript here: http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2009/s2726856.htmI
I was inspired - what was your reaction?
Let's all shine.
Rachel.