Last week, I shared with you about breakouts.
You learned that no matter how hard you and I strive for some kind of limitless perfection, it’s all really an unfulfilling, futile pursuit if we fail to see that we’re broken…
…and that someday we will be even more broken, but that we can, during our life in this broken body, by God’s grace, become the best version of our broken selves – not so that we can better serve ourselves, but so that we can better serve God and others.
Let’s talk about that part of the “better version,” specifically, how you can define very clearly how to achieve it.
But first, you need to identify what’s holding you back.
Bear with me here because I’m going to take a quick detour before coming full circle on how to be the best version of you, but bear with me here.
You’re no doubt familiar with the phrase “how we live our days is how we live our lives.” In Overcoming the DevilNapoleon Hill describes the type of hypnotic trance I discuss in this article.
These two concepts are intertwined, and here’s why:
We all tend to fall into daily habits, rituals and routines, often shaped by our desires, our environment and our upbringing. We tend to get so comfortable with these that they gradually coalesce to form the Etch A Sketch of our identity, which we must reverse to redraw.
For example, for my male reader, let’s say you grew up a little skinnier than the other boys, were always the underdog in sports, found yourself constantly warming the bench, but eventually discovered that fitness, exercise, hard training, and lifting weights were able to earn you the respect you craved. You carved yourself into a man they would finally respect.
Years and years later, you still feel that there is a potential threat of disrespect and loss of confidence if No hit the weights and run the hills. So now you are a fully grown man with inner fear and anxiety about losing your big muscles or your strong lungs. You don’t really train for anything in particular, other than to feel good about yourself.
Because a significant part of your identity and how you feel about yourself is wrapped up in your fitness, you become blind to any sense of training for a specific challenge or sport, or focus on health and longevity metrics like VO2 max or grip strength, and just waste hours of “useless training” because your only goal is to “feel good about yourself.” As a result, you’re constantly missing out on precious gym hours, battling injuries, getting addicted to energy drinks for motivation, and your biomarkers have gone haywire.
Or let’s say you’re a woman who realized growing up that you could get the most praise from your parents by getting good grades, graduating at the top of every class, and becoming an academic. Fast forward 20 years now. Your parents couldn’t really care less about how well you manage your giant to-do list and email inbox, but you still pride yourself on your innate tendencies to “please someone” by staying on top of everything-even if it means short sleep, hurried conversations and neglecting self-care to ensure zero inbox, with every last bit of analog and digital paper properly filed away.
You are always busy. In fact, that’s actually your response whenever someone asks how you’re doing (“Busy, how about you?”) because your identity is wrapped up in being that person who doesn’t let anything get away with it, often at the expense of your health and relationships.
If you’re the man in this scenario, one of the things you’ve recognized is holding you back from being your best self is your addiction to exercising to feel good about yourself.
If you’re the woman in this scenario, you may have recognized that something holding you back is the overly strict standards you’ve set for yourself.
What is the opposite for man?
In one sentence: I want to be confident in who I am, no matter what my body looks like or how fit I am.
In one word: confidence.
What is the opposite for woman?
In a sentence: I want to be known as someone who can relax and sometimes just let things go.
In a word: peaceful (or maybe zen).
See what I did there? Let’s review:
I (or you) identified a character, trait, tendency or habit (what we can call a hypnotic trance), described it in a paragraph, then described in a sentence the opposite of that future, and finally distilled it into a word. We reversed an identity.
It’s that simple.
You basically do three things:
- Identify a conscious or unconscious identity pattern in a paragraph.
- Naming the redemptive opposite in a sentence.
- Distilling this sentence into a single word.
So this is Identity Reversal. This is how you shake, reset and redraw Etch A Sketch.
Next week, I’ll walk you through how I found the Identity Reversal exercise.
WARNING: I’ve identified 10 things I need to work on, so prepare for a deep dive into my psyche.
And don’t worry, I’ll also tell you what to do with all those great words once you have them.
In the meantime, please leave your questions, comments and feedback below. I read them all.
PS It is important to know that I am not a psychologist, psychiatrist, pastor, counselor, or anyone else who has any kind of certification or special formal experience in self-improvement. I made this exercise myself. I wouldn’t be shocked if it already exists in some form, or if it already has a fancy name or book for it. But for now, I’ll claim “Identity Reversal” as my recipe. Correct me in the comments if needed.
PPS This exercise is not self-theology, self-worship, or trying to become a truly perfect version of yourself just for the sake of self-improvement. Human endeavor, moral normalization, or identity perfection, when disconnected from loving God and loving others, always stops or turns inward. So any growth that comes from this exercise is not about becoming more impressive but about becoming more available: more dependent on God, more present with others, and more faithful to the life you’ve been given.
