Many of us want to make changes in our lives that would enable us to become a better and more improved version of ourselves.
We all want to be and feel fit and healthy in our personal lives and feel successful in our careers.
Unfortunately, the majority of us rarely make the necessary changes to attain these aspirations for the simple fact that we are not focusing our efforts on the right task.
New year’s resolutions, the latest diet craze, seriously?
These are ephemeral actions that lead to failure and disappointment 99.9% of the time.
Luckily there’s a way to produce real change.
According to one of the greats, Tony Robbins, “the strongest force in the human personality is the need to stay consistent with how we define ourselves.”
However you are living your life right now is how you define yourself and every day your conscious and subconscious thoughts, beliefs and actions reinforce this identity.
What you must realize is that this “person” is built up of a compilation of outdated programs that have been installed into your mind since you were a child.
Can you imagine going into a computer store today and seeing a bunch of huge and ugly computers from the 70s or 80s? Well, that is what your mind looks like and is running off of.
It’s time to say F the BS and upgrade your mind’s software so that you can reinvent your identity.
Think about the people you aspire to be more like. Who are your heroes, who do you look up to?
Write them down.
To name a few, mine are Tony Robbins, Marcus Aurelius and Earl Nightingale.
Once you have a few, think about what qualities they possess that you want to instill into your identity.
Write them down.
For example, Tony Robbins has a deep passion for constant and never ending self improvement, learning how the best of the best improve themselves and then sharing and giving back to others by providing them with the insights he uncovers.
Now that you have a few, do some research on these people if possible and read/listen/watch as much content on/about them as you can. If they have interviews, podcasts, documentaries, their own books, etc, make it your top priority to consume and digest all of it.
As you do so, write down information that you find interesting, it can be a quote you really like or a specific concept that you would like to learn more about.
Armed with this information, take out a piece of paper (or type it out on your computer) and start writing down everything that you can think of that is related to what you’ve learned from this person (or people). Write it as if you were going to send it to a friend and explain to them, through your own words, what you’ve learned.
The method to the madness
When you have the intention of writing down what you are learning as you are consuming it, your brain kicks itself into a higher gear where your focus is heightened and a surge of energy flows to you.
When in this incredible state, your mind begins to associate past experiences and references with the incoming information of knowledge and automatically attempts to connect certain pieces together for you to make sense of it all.
And when you take these thoughts floating around in your mind and concentrate on formulating them into structured and coherent sentences, you start to better understand the context.
With a clear comprehension of the material, you’ll subconsciously seek out and naturally find more relevant knowledge that reinforces what you have begun to learn.
This momentum and feeling of progress is invigorating.
You slowly start to become what you think about.
This is the secret to creating a change in identity.
To take things a step further and really accelerate the process, actually share your writing with family and friends. This produces a social contract of sorts where you will begin to convince yourself and feel more confident in the fact that that you know what you are talking about and that because you do so, that you now have to live in alignment with the information that you are writing down.
Identity = changed
“It is not until you change your identity to match your life blueprint that you will understand why everything in the past never worked.” – Shannon L. Alder
P.S. – Now that you have written down the people you admire, the qualities you aspire to possess, and the knowledge that you’ve retained and shared with others, it’s really helpful to create your own database/bible of “principles” (that you can constantly update) that you strive to live by (here’s mine for reference – Principles to live by)