Stop Renting Your Identity!
Coffee Thoughts are short reflections on life direction, self-improvement, growth, and loosely formed general ideas that are designed to make you think. Subscribe and receive a new one every Saturday, along with a blog every Wednesday!
When you choose a goal, you’re not just trying to achieve something, you're also shifting identities.
You’re not just a person trying to hit a target, you’re a person trying to be the person who is capable of hitting that target. The difference is huge.
Shifting identities is no easy task, and it only makes the difficulty of achieving goals that much harder. However, the good news is, there is something you can do to help make this shift a little easier to bear.
Stop renting the identity, and just buy it.
Renting something is vastly different to buying. When you rent, you get to have the thing without fully committing to it, without being responsible for it, and without it ever truly being yours.
And when it comes to the identity of the person you want to be, there's little difference.
Renting an identity looks like setting a goal, doing a few things that make it seem as though you’re trying, whilst continuing to do the self-limiting stuff you’ve always done, until your commitment to that goal slowly sizzles and you’re back to being the same old you.
To successfully shift to the identity you want and increase the chances of achieving your goal, you need to commit. And to commit, you have to start thinking, believing and doing what the person who’s capable of achieving your goal would think, believe and do.
Not only that, but you also have to slowly kill off any aspects that contradict that identity, too.
If your goal is fitness-related but you’re someone who has always neglected your health, then continuing to vape, drink 3 times a week, and constantly cheat on your diet runs opposite to who you’re trying to be.
Adding elements of the identity you want without leaving behind the ones that contradict it is renting, renting increases contradiction, causing further cognitive dissonance, lowering the chances of full commitment.
You don’t have to be perfect, but you should also be very careful about thinking, believing and doing the stuff that runs counter to the person capable of achieving your goals.
Buying the identity is committing, being all in, leaving behind the parts of yourself that are holding you back. Buying is taking responsibility, it’s refusing to give yourself an easy way out.
The next time you set a goal, figure out the areas of yourself and your life that oppose the person who is capable of achieving it, then slowly start leaving them all behind.
Do you care about who you want to be? If so, stop renting their identity!