“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.”
James Clear, Atomic Habits
Two years ago, I found myself struggling with depression. For me, depression was a paradox of having everything I could ever want all the while feeling like a failure.
I had a great career, I was debt free, I was pursuing the hobbies of my dreams, but I could never shake the voice that told me I was underachieving.
When I was a kid, I had always been told I was destined for greatness, but when I looked around, all I saw was mediocrity.
The battle between knowing and believing was raging in a full-scale assault. I knew what I knew, but I felt what I felt, and that was the great depression.
Belief is the voice in our bodies that talks to us with emotions. It’s why we get angry when someone says Trump or Biden, it’s the resignation after indignation, the secret obsession that causes our depression.
Beliefs are particularly troublesome because they are rarely consciously formed—they’re learned from the day we scraped our knee at the playground, the way Dad yelled at the waitress, and how Mrs. Gerard scolded us for missing the homework assignment.
Our friends, our families, our culture—unknowingly, it all shapes. Our synaptic neurons fire on all cylinders when it notices our closest friends hang out in the library instead of the gym, or how we struggle to look a girl in the eyes during conversation.
We place ourselves in boxes, we tell ourselves stories, we create an identity so that we can make some sense of the world. And for most of our young lives, that identity serves us. It shapes our decisions, our hopes, and our dreams.
But one day—when we’re 25 or maybe 45—we realize those beliefs we forged in our formative years do not help us or serve us or simply stand by as onlookers.
They hold us back.
It’s on this fateful day that the boxes in which we categorized our lives come crumbling down and the stories we told become echo chambers that repeat, and repeat, and repeat. We know our belief is limiting, but there is a whole life worth of evidence to prove it.
On that day, an important question arises: how do we change our beliefs?
Contrary to popular belief, changing beliefs is not about achieving. For someone with the limiting belief that they cannot confidently socialize, they will not find their belief changed by managing to have a few great social interactions.
For me, who struggled with underperformance, suddenly getting a big promotion would not change my belief; even worse so, it would most likely make me feel like I did not deserve the promotion in the first place.
Achievement is the great fallacy we tell ourselves—if we get the girl, if we get the house, if we get the six pack, then we’ll be happy.
It’s not true, and the evidence to the contrary is quite significant so I won’t hound the point.
The true path to changing beliefs starts with choosing an identity—most people never choose who they want to become. Their identity is handed to them by the world around them. They were told they were one way and they follow that to the grave.
But if you had the power to choose any identity you wanted, imagine the person you could become?
How about changing your identity from a chronic TV-watcher and couch-sitter, to that of an active, healthy person? What kind of shift would that make in your life?
Or from a sad, underperformer to a constant learner and a positive hopeful? A shy, awkward type to a confident unashamed life of the party? A poor wage worker to a grinding entrepreneur?
We all have visions for who we want to become, but instead of focusing on the who, we laser on the what.
The difference is subtle, yet significant: choosing our who offers us a guiding light to transform our identity; choosing our what tells us we’re a failure as long as we don’t have the end result.
For example, every time we have the option to get up in the morning—what would the active, healthy person do? What would they wear? How would they approach their mornings and their days? How would they interact with other people?
Being the kind of person that is active and healthy is much more than just working out and having a six pack. An active, healthy person wakes up before the sun rises, they dress well and open their days with a smoothie bursting with antioxidants. They track their calories, especially their protein intake. They take the stairs instead of the elevator. And of course, when given the opportunity, they workout once a day.
As James Clear explains, each of these small actions we take cast a vote towards our identity. When we can’t wake up on time, that reinforces the story of a lazy person. But when we pop out of bed at 6 AM, that reinforces the story of an active, healthy person.
Changing our beliefs starts with the actions we take—from the way we dress and the accessories we use, to how we interact and show up over the course of a day.
When you have a whole lifetime of evidence to change, it takes time to change your beliefs in yourself, but not as long as you might think. For me, it took about a year before I fully bought into my self-belief of a constant learner and positive hopeful.
Identities and beliefs absolutely can be shaped, molded, and perfected, but it’s in the small decisions we take over the course of the day.
Every micro-decision, every branch in the road, and every regret tell our stories. And our stories are the only things that will be left behind when we pass.
Don’t let your story be told for you—choose to own it.
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