What was new to me was the idea of intentionally shifting your identity. Now, I’m not talking delusional or criminal, as in Inventing Anna. But I’m someone who for years has struggled to see myself the way others have. I’ve battled low self-esteem, massive self-doubt, and even depression. Inwardly, I saw myself as mean, a failure, less than, unsuccessful in all the ways people measure success in life.
At the same time, I would have people tell me, you’re so kind and smart and talented. It didn’t fit with how I saw myself, which actually made me beat myself up even more. If they see me that way, why can’t I? Why don’t I feel that way about myself?
Enter the idea of intentionally shifting your identity.
I looked at these different ways that I knew people shifted their identity and wondered, “What if you can just choose to shift your identity?” Around the same time, I was on a healing call as part of a Coaching Mastermind that I’m a member of. During that call, the facilitator said to me, (something like), “You overidentify with other people.” Meaning, I think what I see and hear and feel because I understand it or can relate or empathize with the other person means I am like them. I was making everything part of my identity, even what didn’t serve me. Unfortunately this left me with no sense of myself.
After these aha moments, I set out to intentionally shift my identity, to find a way to see myself the way others see me, but more importantly, to choose who I desire to be and who I get to be, who I feel I truly am and live into that identity. We get to create who we are and how we’re seen in the world. For me, it was less about how the world saw me and more about how I saw myself.