Stop Being “The Kind of Person Who”
I was recently speaking with a few leaders and I noticed how they were constantly referring to themselves as a fixed identity.
“I am a rebel”
“I am not creative”
“I am very structured”
“I am not smart”
“I am not a business person”
The problem with that is, if I believe who I think I am is already set in stone, I will unconsciously be instantly limited to what I believe I can and cannot do, to what I allow myself to experience and what I automatically avoid. That’s a huge blindspot.
Imagine how many opportunities a person can turn down if they hold on to the belief “I am not creative”?
Brainstorming sessions? “Not for me.”
Coming up with ideas? “That would be difficult”
Trying to learn a new instrument? “I can’t do that”
Who you think you are becomes your way of operating in the world and if that appears fixed, every attempt you make to change any behaviour or way of thinking will be a lot more difficult because it will be ON TOP of the very solid story of “me, myself and I”.
Who You Are vs Who You Became Along The Way
“Your personality is just your habitual pattern of thinking.” – Sandra Krot
Take a moment now to make a list of “I am” statements, a way to describe your identity. Who are you?
As you do this exercise, notice how every single characteristic that makes up who you are is something that was learned during your life. It’s a trait, quality, attitude or conjunction of behaviours that were repeated over and over again until it made sense for you to refer to yourself as this persona.
But, are you those statements all of the time?
Sometimes you can find someone who refers to themselves as being “calm and reflective” and notice they can be quite agitated and loud playing a sport or you meet an “extroverted” who appreciates quiet alone time. I have worked with people who thought they were lazy and who took a lot of action in another area of their lives.
It’s common to put ourselves in boxes because it’s easier for the brain to deal with what it knows, it makes our actions more predictable. But it also limits what we see being possible for us.
The Story of You is Not Set in Stone
If the voice in your head is you, who is the one listening to it? – Byron Katie
In the book The Untethered Soul, Michael A. Singer talks about how one of the most important questions we must ask ourselves to attain inner freedom is to continuously ask “Who am I?” and to look for that you that remains existing beyond any changes you may experience.
We usually refer to ourselves as our names, our job roles, our marital status, our feelings, emotions, thoughts, etc. But is that truly what we are?
If your name changes, do you still remain existing? What about if you change your job role? Your relationship status?
The truth is that if no matter what you think you are, that thought can change, what remains?
Behind every idea of who you are, there’s a power that creates that thought
“It may seem as though the self—your self—is the “thing” that does the perceiving. But this is not how things are. The self is another perception, another controlled hallucination, though of a very special kind.”
― Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness
The first time I started to observe how many times my mind tells me what I am and what I am capable of throughout the day, I was amazed!
It was doing that dozens of times!
“I am a people person”, “I am a good listener”, “I am a bad listener”, “I need to stay busy, that’s just who I am”, “I am not good at mathematics”
And it went on and on.
Every time I bought one of those ideas as truth, my world got limited by the activities of that persona. However, every time I was aware that I was just experiencing another story of who I thought I was and I let go of that story, I noticed that a space opened up and suddenly I had the ability to choose to take action regardless of anything my mind was saying.
That’s because one of the implications of how our mind works is that we are constantly having an experience of the thinking that looks true to us and at any given moment there’s an opportunity to have an insight, which is a fresh new way of perceiving life and yourself.
High Performance = Less of You
In flow there is no room for self-scrutiny. – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
The Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, famous for his research on what gets people in Flow and performing at a high level, stated in his book that one of the characteristics of being in a flow state is a Loss of Self-Consciousness.
If at any moment, the idea of who you are is not in your attention, it’s infinitely easier to deal with what’s right in front of you.
Here’s a passage of the book in which he describes that:
“Here is a climber describing this aspect of the experience: “It’s a Zen feeling, like meditation
or concentration. One thing you’re after is the one-pointedness of mind. You can get your ego mixed up with climbing in all sorts of ways and it isn’t necessarily enlightening. But when things become automatic, it’s like an egoless thing, in a way. Somehow the right thing is done without you ever thinking about it or doing anything at all…. It just happens. And yet you’re more concentrated.”
Or, in the words of a famous long-distance ocean cruiser: “So one forgets oneself, one forgets everything, seeing only the play of the boat with the sea, the play of the sea around the boat, leaving aside everything not essential to that game….”
Any overthinking while doing an activity decreases your performance on that task, and I would say self-consciousness is the most common form of overthinking.
Exercise
During the next week, pick an activity which you have experienced some challenges with and notice how much or how little you keep yourself in your attention as you perform that activity. See how it feels like to let go of most thoughts while you perform, especially the thought of you.
Conclusion
- Who you believe you are is not fixed in stone. It’s actually as changeable as thought because it’s made of it.
- When you stop buying into the ideas of the type of person you are, there’s freedom to act in any way you choose.
- Giving a lot of importance to who you think you are, ruminating about how you are coming across and simply keeping your self in your attention decreases performance.
- Keep coming back to the space before thought while taking action and see what happens.
References
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