Who do YOU Want to Be?
Identify with your Desired Identity.
One more time - IDENTIFY with your desired IDENTITY. You are not defined by what you do, you are defined by WHO you are. You are not your job, you are not your body and you are not your bank account. You are the person that can make any of those things as you want them to be, but they do not define you. We often set goals based on WHAT we want to achieve when in reality we need to set goals based on WHO we want to be.
This may seem like an absurd way of approaching your current goals, but you must understand that when you are in the process of working towards a new goal, you are also in the process of changing who you are. If the current version of you was able to accomplish what you want, you would have already done so. You are (hopefully) constantly changing, and in order to make the most of your changes, take control of WHO you become from the beginning.
WHAT GOALS?!
To show you how setting WHAT goals work we’ll take the popular goal of weight reduction. For example purposes only, let’s say you weigh 200lbs and you want to weigh 150lbs. Your WHAT goal is 150lbs, and this will not be achieved until you shed each of those 1lb units 50x’s over, and if you’ve never successfully been able to shed that much weight, you may not realize the length of time and effort that it takes to do so. You probably have an idea about what’s involved: reducing your caloric intake, increasing your physical exercise and being more cognizant of your daily choices. This will all seem exciting when you start out and you may have some success, but what this mindset does not prepare you for is the struggle you will experience during the process. You will get frustrated, the scale may stay the same or even go up when all you want it to do is go down. Some days you’ll feel energized to go the gym while other days you’ll have to force yourself or perhaps even skip it. You will get very little reward during the entire process, because your WHAT GOAL is based on a weight you have yet to achieve. You can break the goal up into smaller goals, 190lbs, 180lbs etc, but at the end of the day these are still outcome based goals that are really just results of your own behavior change.
WHO GOALS.
Take this same goal and instead of focusing on the WHAT ask yourself “WHO do I need to become, to reduce my weight from 200lbs to 150lbs?” Hopefully you thought of either an example of someone who has achieved this goal or at least come up with some version of a healthy person. Now you know who you must become, and can start listing the characteristics, habits and values of a healthy person. If you are unsure well thank goodness we have Google! For this example I typed in, “what are the habits of a healthy person”, producing 163,000,000 possible search results. So just clicking on the top result, this is what I found:
Drink plenty of Water
Exercise 30min daily
Eat lean protein
Eat natural foods
Sleep 7-8hrs a night
Define a way to Manage your Stress
Connect to a Purpose bigger than yourself
https://cooperaerobics.com/Health-Tips/Fitness-Files/Seven-Habits-of-a-Healthy-Person.aspx
You may not agree with all of the criteria, which is fine and maybe (for this example) you remove Stress Management and Purpose from your list of attributes. The bigger idea here is that you now know the habits that you need to begin to foster and grow within yourself to become who you want to be.
Setting it up like this brings awareness to your current situation and your daily choices, which will be uncomfortable to look at, but will also gives you the power to meet your goal with every good choice you make. At the end of the day, if you’ve met all the criteria of a healthy person then you ARE a healthy person. Which will feel fantastic, what this will make even more clear and hopefully allow for some self-compassion is that changing behavior is extremely hard, because you are basically changing who you are.
Have you ever witnessed a birth, or a plant growing from a seed? Does any of that look easy??? NO! It is extremely uncomfortable to change who we have become, just like a plant emerging from a seed, things will break, there’s much effort and work that goes on before it even sees the light of day, but with every centimeter it grows it gets closer and closer to becoming it true self. There will be days where you’ll want to crawl back into your comfortable seed covering, telling yourself it’s okay to just be a seed, but deep down you know it’s not. When this feeling erupts inside of you - GET HAPPY - when you get the stomach churning sick feeling and you just want to give up - FLIP THE SCRIPT. That stomach churning is not coming from the version of you that you are creating, it is coming from the version of you that you are replacing. That is the old you, the tired, worn out and stagnant you who is trying to cling onto any shred of power left who is afraid of the new stronger, healthier proactive you that is slowly climbing the ranks. The trouble with self-improvement is that you are both who you were and who you are becoming, and during the beginning there is more attachment and perceived comfort in the old you. You must remind yourself of who you are struggling to be, the new you that is emerging through the painful process of shedding your old skin.
“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.” – James Clear
As James Clear stated, each decision you make is a vote, and each vote that is placed for the new identity you are cultivating, changes how you perceive and approach your new habits. When enough votes have been placed you will no longer need to say “I should” because your response will be “I am”.
You do need to have and end in mind, you always need to know the direction that you’re heading in, but it’s even more critical to understand who you must become to get there. YOU have the power over who YOU are, YOU define you NO ONE else does, and you define yourself by your daily choices and actions. Every choice you make, every action and inaction reinforces what is important to you. This might seem harsh, and it is a harsh truth, but hopefully you also find the power within it. Through the choices you GET to make, you get the chance everyday, heck every minute to be who you want to be.
Copyright 2019 Strength & Grace Life Coaching LLC