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. It's what dictates your thought life and the decision-making processes that you go through when you decide whether or not you'll do things.
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.
It's not the things that you see above the water that are challenging; they’re there, and you can deal with those. But there’s this deep underlying foundation in your subconscious, in this identity that you have of yourself, that you (and every single one of us) need to work on.
I am talking to me as well every time I talk to you about this stuff, and I'm passionate about helping people to become who they need to be in every area of their life, and this is the foundation of all of being able to do that.
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.
Doing this is done in a way that is confident and not arrogant. It says: “I'm humble, I'm teachable. I know that I have areas that I'm still working on. I'm still becoming who I need to become, but I'm okay with the fact that I'm not all there — that I'm not complete and perfect because that's never the goal.”
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, whether it was something that was said or done to you by someone else or something that you've made up yourself. 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. Those dopamine and other pleasure circuits in your brain fire up, and it feels great. 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.
Every single day that you are not being who you truly are, you are chipping away at your identity just to get the approval from other people who, by the way, don't care about you as much as you might think they do.
We're all wired to be selfish. To survive, we need to be self-centred.
Therefore, looking for approval from elsewhere is the worst thing that you can delegate.
That's your responsibility.
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, not just physically: “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.
For many years I appeared so confident. People would look at me and go: “Wow, this guy can do anything. He's confident. He's just to the point (a lot of times arrogant). He’s able to take on anything: He can talk to anyone, whether it's in the boardroom or on the shop floor; this guy's got it all together…."
And I certainly didn't.
Deep down, there was an inner child that was screaming out, and I was coming across that way as a smoke screen so that people would like me and I wouldn't be rejected even more.
So, to look at the foundation of that behaviour, I had to look at what I believed. I had to look at what I'd formed over the years as being true about me based on experience and what I'd been told.
Just like me, you've got those beliefs, and there is plenty of evidence for those beliefs that pop up all the time.
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 and go:
“What are you doing? Stop that! We don't do that. We're not good enough. We're not like them!”
By reprogramming that dialogue, you can now be empowered to be who you need to be.
I like to look at that like a two-year-old child, where if you're not giving it attention, it's going to get your attention in the best way that it can.
So, the first thing we need to do is acknowledge the fact that you taught your internal dialogue to speak that way to remind you of those things.
You need to be able to say to it: “Hey, it's okay. I know I taught you that, but I'm going to teach you new things. Now let's unlearn that and watch what we now do instead.”
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. And together, we will be able to rebuild a strong identity, out of which we will be able to be who we need to be to step into our full potential and bring our personal best.
I'll see you then.
