⚡Our malleable selves 💭

How do we change our identities? What is our identity, anyway?

Looking down from Storm King Mountain to the Hudson River during this gray, dreary winter. No snow in sight.

Hello, dear friends! I hope you are having a sweet February. I find this month hard for my health. How are you feeling? My body does not seem to like cold, and I grow more tired as the month goes on. Things that help are remembering my vitamin D drops, bone broth (here’s the recipe I use), baths before bed, and moving. (Moving is harder — it’s so dang cold and gloomy — but 20 minutes slow-cycling at the gym raises my mood like nothing else.) What helps you?

Anticipation is a major boost, too, and I’m looking forward to Winter Camp starting on Feb. 25. We have three amazing instructors who will lead virtual Zoom sessions on Saturdays from 11 a.m. to noon ET. I hope this will be a different kind of movement for you, a level up of joy from a gym machine.

March 4: Rebecca Sturgon leads us in DANCEMandala, a meditative movement
March 11: Ashley Leach leads us in gentle yoga and mindfulness
March 18: Malik Turley leads us in CardioBelly

Read more about the instructors. All the sessions are all designed to be fun for all levels — to get us feeling great as we move together, a sort of magical portal to motion in winter. If you haven’t signed up yet, I’d love to see you in Winter Camp. With the code ODYSSEYREADER you get $80 off, so it’s $120 for the whole month, plus U.S. campers will be sent a Winter Camp mug with their name on it, There’s also a pay what you can option. Let’s transform this last stretch of winter together. I really would love to see you there.

OK, onto today’s topic, which is … transformation. How do we change how we see ourselves?

How do we shift our identities?

A few weeks back, I wrote about a study that looked at dual-growth mindset related to careers, how thinking flexibly about your job position yielded better results when paired with thinking flexibly about yourself. I wondered if this could carry over into the health sphere: thinking flexibly about an illness and about yourself.

A dear friend left questions on my voicemail. I understand the “job crafting” concept, she said — Cool. But HOW do you change your own identity of yourself? What is that? How does that work?

Right! Fascinating!

(I plunge ahead with the usual disclaimers: I am not a doctor, a therapist, a pscyhologist, a psychistrist. I’m sharing what I’ve read and listened to, what’s worked for me, and I’ll do by best to cite appropriately. I would love you to chime in at the comments below if you know more or differently or have thoughts, too!)

Who are you?

This seems like a good place to start. Who are you? More importantly, who do you THINK you are? Where did that idea come from? How is it that you think of yourself as ABC rather than XYZ?

Where does your identity come from?

Well, from more than one place. We are a giant processing brain of input.

You received input likely from places like ….

… your parents

… your siblings

… your classmates

… your friends

… your teachers

… your faith

… your organizations, groups, hobbies, sports, schools

… your observations of other people, and how you compare

… your observations of what you have done and not done

… TV, movies, ads, books, magazines — CULTURE. This one is enormous and embedded so deeply in so much around us.

What I’m trying to get at is that your idea of yourself arose from SOMEWHERE.

Many, many places, in fact.

All of these inputs created thoughts in your mind, which were reinforced or not over time.

How you think about yourself wasn’t preordained. It’s not fixed in the stars. It’s not like gravity.

Your identity is mutable.

It can change.

And it can be changed, too.

But first, what is your identity? Do we even know what we think about ourselves?

Identity comes from our thoughts

When we think about who we are, the most meaningful and interesting parts of that are not the facts, but the thoughts — how we interpret the facts.

Let’s separate those two things.

Thoughts ≠ facts.

What you think about yourself — your deepest identity, in all its colorful and squirrely parts — is a judgment laid on top of facts.

Let’s take an imaginary person as an example. Let’s call her Beatrice.

Facts about Beatrice: She is 5 feet 5 inches tall with brown eyes. She lives in Virginia. She owns 210 books. She has five kids and a parakeet. She wears a lot of pink and orange.

What does Beatrice think about herself? What is her identity?

Here, I bet, are layers. Layers upon layers upon layers.

Maybe she has an identity as a mom. She is a mom. That’s a fact. But it’s much powerful, nuanced, and subjective than the single fact. How does she think about what a mom should be? What are the expectations to her? What does that role mean and not mean? What is at stake, to her? What is a “good” mom and a “bad” mom, in her mind, in her culture? How is she living up to whatever guidelines she has learned and accepted?

Whew!

You can start to see how your identity is malleable.

And a lot of it is woven so deeply into our lives that we don’t see it any more. You have to do a lot of thoughtwork, a lot of “why” and “why” and" “why” to get to the bottom of how you are secretly assessing and viewing yourself.

Clues are in your feelings

One place to start is just to notice when you feel badly about something. When feelings of guilt, shame, disappointment, frustration, anger, sadness bubble up, you can use those as a little clues. Something important to you is here.

What is it?

Why are you feeling that way?

What happened — the facts — and why did you feel [the emotion you felt]?

Why did whatever happen not match your expectations?

Why?

And why that?

And why that?

Beatrice had a hair cut appointment on Sunday, and it was canceled. She was disappointed, frustrated, and almost in tears. This is silly! She thought to herself: It’s just a hair cut appointment. It’s fine. I’m being ridiculous.

Her feelings are a big clue, though. Why is she upset?

I was looking forward to it. It’s something small I can do for myself. I feel like I’m constantly running around to help other people, tired all the time, and here was ONE SMALL THING I could get out of the house alone, without my five kids, and take care of something that makes me feel good. It’s just a dang hair cut appointment! And even that is not happening!

One thing that can be helpful is the stew of emotions is to think of possible solutions, possible alternative reactions that other people might take, and feel the resistence rise up for you. That’s where you start to see clues about what you are holding onto as your identity.

What if Beatrice went out anyway, and just did something she wanted to do in the same hour or two?

Oh, no. I couldn’t do that.

She feels so much resistance. Why?

Psychologist Carol Dweck calls this a fixed mindset. She originally studied this in the educational setting, but it can be applied to all of us.

“Watch for a fixed-mindset reaction when you face challenges. Do you feel overly anxious, or does a voice in your head warn you away? Watch for it when you face a setback in your teaching, or when students aren’t listening or learning. Do you feel incompetent or defeated? Do you look for an excuse? Watch to see whether criticism brings out your fixed mindset. Do you become defensive, angry, or crushed instead of interested in learning from the feedback? Watch what happens when you see an educator who’s better than you at something you value. Do you feel envious and threatened, or do you feel eager to learn? Accept those thoughts and feelings and work with and through them. And keep working with and through them.”

The opposite of a fixed minset is a growth mindset, where you are curious and open to change, when you think you can learn and grow and look for ways to do that. Dr. Dweck cautions that the mindsets are not steady states.

“Let’s acknowledge that (1) we’re all a mixture of fixed and growth mindsets, (2) we will probably always be, and (3) if we want to move closer to a growth mindset in our thoughts and practices, we need to stay in touch with our fixed-mindset thoughts and deeds.”

For Beatrice, there’s a lot simmering there about her idea of what a mom should do and not do, what she deserves and doesn’t deserve, her identity in her role in this season of her life. A lot to unpack. A lot to think about. Maybe something to journal about.

Actions as evidence

Once we start to notice our identity, how we think about ourselves, how we think about what is possible and not for us, where we have fixed mindsets — now how do we change our identity? How do we change how we think about ourselves?

Notice that our identities come from our thoughts, which originated in part from absorbing of messages and actions all around us.

We can change the input — those messages and actions — and help to change our thoughts.

Actions can be a particularly powerful way to access and change your deeper understanding of yourself.

James Clear talkes about this in his book Atomic Habits:

“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. This is one reason why meaningful change does not require radical change. Small habits can make a meaningful difference by providing evidence of a new identity. And if a change is meaningful, it is actually big. That's the paradox of making small improvements.”

I love this.

Your actions are evidence to your brain.

It’s not like you go for a run once, and you think of yourself as a runner.

But each action represents a vote.

Votes build up to create evidence of who you are.

For example, maybe you want to think of yourself as a writer, but that identity feels uncomfortable to you. Calling yourself a writer, or an artist, or a poet outloud feels awkward, fake, not right. If you devote time to that creative practice, even a little bit, every day, you’ll start to accumulate evidence that makes it feel more true to your mind.

Maybe Beatrice’s identity includes being a mom who cares for her children and is there for them as they grow up, which for her is not compatible with going off on a Sunday afternoon by herself for fun. But maybe after noticing her feelings, going deeper into what is causing them, thinking through other options, noticing her strong resistance, she realizes that she will be happier and calmer with some time for herself, and that would actually support her identity as a caring mom. She starts to think of herself as a mom who models taking care of herself, and that becomes newly important to her, for her kids to see that she values herself and her happiness, too. As her thoughts change, her actions change; as her actions change, her thoughts change. And along the way, her identity changes, too.

What do you think?

I realize this is a little side path from what we might traditionally think about as wellness and illness, but I believe our identities are critical parts to being able to be curious, learn, and change. It’s hard to thrive if you can’t adapt in some way, tiny or big, to the unexpected hard parts, whether it is sickness or a challenge of another sort.

What do you think? Do you have a sense of your identity? Do you want to shift anything about it? (I confess, just writing this for you makes me realize how much I don’t know about what is baked under the surface in my own identity and how helpful it could be to excavate it, look at it in the sunlight, think about what pieces have outlived their usefulness and which ones to nurture.)

This is a tiny bit of the surface of this huge topic, but I hope it was helpful in some way. I hope you have a beautiful, thoughtful weekend ahead.

To our journeys,

Brianne

p.s. If you want to read more, here are a few books I recommend: Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol S. Dweck, PhD, and Atomic Habits by James Clear,