“The story you tell yourself, about yourself, has a powerful influence on your friends, family, business, and overall relationships. Pay attention to the story you’re writing.”
- James McPartland
Identity is the most powerful, potent source of energy we have. It can transform our lives and the lives of other people.
Identity is a story. It's a story we tell ourselves about ourselves, and there are usually three versions of it:
Who we are (how we came into the world)
Who we wind up being
Who we want other people to think we are.
In some ways, our identity can pull us in several different directions, and there comes a time for all of us that calls for a shift in how we define ourselves. Transformation requires giving something up. Yet we can be held back because we hold onto a story that we need to be something else for someone else in order to feel accepted, loved, or move forward in our life.
Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to simply be ourselves.
I believe that when we feel resistance, what we are often defending is the very thing we need to work on in order to develop and grow ourselves. We need to take responsibility for where we are stuck in our lives as opposed to placing the blame on outside forces. The choice is ours: we can live into a default future or we can rewrite the future.
What does our default future look like? It’s when we stay in the comfort zone where we maintain a sense of predictability. Now that’s not necessarily a bad thing… but the reality is the past several years will be indicative of what's to happen in the coming years, because if nothing changes, nothing changes.
So if you’re wanting to reach greater heights, you gotta do something different. You can’t do the same thing and get different outcomes.
The key to rewriting our future is to evaluate and shift our identity. We are ultimately what we pay attention to, and what we focus on expands.
How we see ourselves is one of the most important discussions we can continually build within ourselves. The story you tell yourself, about yourself, is going to have a powerful influence on your friends, on your family, on your business, on your contacts, and on your relationships.
So consider the power of your words. The story you tell yourself about yourself creates images. Images then reinforce your behavior. We have the power to choose the things we want to spend time on to get to that place we're trying to get to. The most important thing we can be is true to who we are and not be too concerned about what other people think about us. (Usually, other people aren't really thinking about us anyway.)
Life is practice and practice makes permanent. So be careful how you talk to yourself because identity is everything.
