It's your life. Your Identity. Your choice.

"Don't wait for permission to become who you've always wanted to be!"— James McPartland

As human beings, we are meaning-making machines. We can make "reality" be whatever we need it to be, in order to safeguard our position in life.

However, if we do not face what we are resisting in our lives, we can end up stuck, being more committed to staying where we are than doing the work to shift into who we say we want to be.

Being stuck could be our own case of having a mistaken identity. We have our wants and too often they are in conflict with our needs.

There is a version of ourselves that we want; an inspiring vision of who we want to become. Yet we get stuck when we wait for that ideal version of ourselves to be approved by certain people in our lives... (many of whom don’t really even know us).

It’s as if we are waiting for what we want to be signed off by those whose opinion of us we think is more important than the opinion we have of ourselves.

Can you just picture the ridiculousness of it?

Imagine a document titled “Identity Granted” that describes who it is you intend to be, signed off by a group of people who have finally given you their stamp of approval and what you want for your life. It sounds absurd-- but that's what we do sometimes! We outsource our identity!

Here's the better way: Don't wait for permission to become who you've always wanted to be! Begin to craft your new identity, one that you intentionally live into each and every day.

Picture yourself practicing on a new playfield. After all, we are playing the game of life, and life is one elongated practice session.

You can change who you are by changing what you do. Stepping into a new identity amplifies the paradox of small improvements. If change is important to you, and if your why is strong enough, any first step, no matter how small, is actually a BIG step.

Getting out of our heads requires action, and it is far easier to act our way into a new way of thinking than to think our way into a new way of acting.

Don't feel you need to get it perfect right away. Just get it going. You got this.

Stay tuned for more on this No Straight Lines series!

Mac 😎