Who Are You? How to Navigate the Ins and Outs of Identity

Identity is just your self-concept. It is how you see yourself in the world. And it matters enormously, not because it determines your worth, but because it determines your behavior.

If you want to make changes in your life and keep getting in your own way, the place to look is not your habits or your discipline. It is your identity.

1. Notice Your Roles and Rewrite the Rules

Every role you play comes with a set of rules. Rules you probably never consciously chose. Rules inherited from your family, your culture, the women around you. Rules about what a good mother does, what a successful woman looks like, what you have to sacrifice to be worthy of respect.

Most of those rules are impossible to meet consistently. And every time you fall short of them, you chip away at how you see yourself.

Pick one role you play right now. Write down three rules you use to decide if you are doing it well. Then ask: are these rules actually winnable? If not, who made them? And do you want to keep living by them?

You cannot behave outside of your identity.

2. Take a Fresh Look at Your Personality

Your personality has four components: your likes and dislikes, your interests and apathies, your strengths and weaknesses, and the self-descriptors you use.

Here is the thing about self-descriptors: most of them were given to you by other people. Someone called you sensitive and now you call yourself sensitive. Someone said you were not a numbers person and now you believe it. You absorbed a version of yourself from the outside and never stopped to ask if it is actually true.

A weakness is often a strength gone wild. Stubbornness can be tenacity. Intensity can be passion. Sensitivity can be emotional intelligence. Before you decide a trait is a flaw, ask whether it is actually a power you have not learned to manage yet.

3. Replace Negative Labels

Negative labels are a form of self-oppression. Every time you say I am not smart enough, I am too much, I am not the kind of person who, you are putting a ceiling on what you will allow yourself to go after.

Nature does not tolerate a vacuum. So you cannot simply remove a label without replacing it. When you catch a negative self-description, replace it immediately with an empowering one that is incompatible with it.

You do not have to believe the new label yet. Start saying it anyway. Repetition builds belief. And belief builds behavior. Identity is not fixed. It is a story you keep telling. You get to decide what that story says.

Taking part in labeling yourself negatively is oppression. Stop that.