Building Your Own Identity
SUMMARY
Your identity is a package of all the experiences and things that have been said to you and about you and the meanings that you've placed on that over the years. It's there under the water — the part of the iceberg that you can't see — and it can bring you undone, just like how it did with the Titanic.
Let me give you 3 places to consider working on so that you can build your identity:
1. Understand and escape from the performance trap.
2. Rewrite your limiting and false beliefs.
3. Reprogram your inner dialogue.
This week, let's have a look at how you can shift from feeling like a fraud (an imposter and being in conflict with your values) to being more congruent (to be real, authentic, and okay with presenting to the world who you really are).
TRANSCRIPT
More and more, as I work with people across the world, I find that so many of you are telling me that you feel like you're losing yourself. You feel like a part of who you are is being eroded away by what you do.
Well, stick with me because this week I want to start a conversation around being able to reclaim your true identity to get free of the performance trap and operate from a position of self-approval.
Hi, this is Grant Herbert, VUCA Leadership and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today I want to talk to you about building your own identity.
Your identity is not what you do.
One of the challenges I see all the time is when people have "I am" statements that tell them or tell the people around them 'what' they do.
You're a human being, not a human doing. Who you are is not tied up in your profession or in the different roles that you play in your life. Your identity is the foundation for everything else in your life. It's who you believe you are and who you think you're not.
Your identity is a package of all the experiences and things that have been said to you and about you and the meanings that you've placed on that over the years. It's there under the water — the part of the iceberg that you can't see — and it can bring you undone, just like how it did with the Titanic.
This week, let's have a look at how you can shift from feeling like a fraud (an imposter and being in conflict with your values) to being more congruent (to be real, authentic, and okay with presenting to the world who you really are).
As a recovering people pleaser myself, I know that being who you truly are is the easiest and most effortless gig on the planet. It doesn't suck the energy that pretending and putting on a mask does.
Let me give you 3 places to consider working on so that you can build your identity.
Your identity is not something that needs to be outsourced to anybody else. It's your responsibility to decide who it is that you think you are.
To rebuild your identity, you need to unlearn some things that you've learned over the years about yourself that you've taken on as a meaning. You need to reverse the unhealthy conditioning that you've developed over the years.
These things can happen through neuroplasticity. You can rebuild your neural pathways — those thought patterns, your belief structure, and the values that hold true to you — and realign them with what you think, what you say and what you do.
To do this, you need to work on these three areas:
The first area is to understand and escape from the performance trap.
The performance trap is where you get up every day and perform for the approval of others.
Sometimes you get that approval; sometimes, you don't.
When you perform to get the approval of others, and you get it, you feel good. However, when you don't get it, you feel less than others, and you feel bad about yourself. And it's further evidence of what you were already thinking about yourself anyway.
So, it erodes away your true identity.
What you do is instead of performing to get approval, you work on your identity to get to a position of self-approval where you can look in the mirror, and you can go metaphorically: "I'm okay with who I am."
The second thing to do is to rewrite your limiting and false beliefs that you've formed about yourself.
Have a look at what you truly think of yourself. What you need to do is refute that evidence and go: "Objection. Facts not in evidence. Here's the real story." And now, bring out the evidence of why you can and why you are rather than why you're not and why you can't.
To do that, you need to go to the third area, and that is to reprogram your inner dialogue.
Your inner dialogue is what I like to call the "mini-me". It's that small voice that you have created inside you so that when you go to do things outside your comfort zone (outside the belief of who you believe you are), it can scream at you.
By reprogramming that dialogue, you can now be empowered to be who you need to be.
When you do that, and then repeat those new thoughts and behaviours, you create a new neural pathway. Your goal here is to get to a point where this new one is stronger than the old one so that it doesn't pop up anymore.
So, those are the 3 things that you can do to rebuild your identity — the idea of who you believe you are and who you believe you're not.
Well, that's it from me for this week. Join me again next week as I pull each of those apart over the coming weeks and go deeper into the science behind it and how to do it.
I'll see you then.
