I’m a big fan of the book 10x is Easier Than 2x by Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy.
My favorite statement in the book is on page 69—
“[This founder] exhibits a quality that only the world’s top achievers do: the ability to rapidly accept a new identity.” — 10x Is Easier Than 2x: How World-Class Entrepreneurs Achieve More by Doing Less
There are two interesting things about this statement—
First, there is nothing in the rest of the book that explains how to do this.
Second, there is nothing in the rest of the book to suggest that entrepreneurs (or “top achievers” in the lingo of the book) are unique in this capacity.
Everything Comes From Your Identity
You’ve spent most of your life trying to figure out who you are—
Are you your achievements? Your job title or company name? Your relationships? Your history? Your sense of self-esteem?
All of these are concepts. Thoughts. They come and go with your moods, your physical state, and yes, the words you use to describe them. Even your stuff, the solid things that you have bought with money, are based on the concept of ownership. Another thought.
Every one of these things that we call “identity” happened in the past.
We talk of the “past” as solid and fixed but over the course of our lives we define and redefine its meaning over and over again.
Most of the time, most of us use the stories we tell about the past as a way to limit us. To keep us small and safe. And we change them only when absolutely necessary.
What if there’s another way?
How Have You Created Your Identity?
Most of us create our identity one hundred percent unconsciously, mostly in childhood, mostly by believing what authority figures have told us.
Once formed, we never touch it again.
You can see this, in yourself and others, every time someone uses a form of the word “is,” with or without the word “not” in front of it.
I am honest and hardworking. I’m not creative. That’s not who I am.
The rich are greedy and selfish. Life is hard. Nature is cruel.
Do you see that you’re not describing your reality with those words, but creating it?
How Tightly Do You Hold Onto Your World?
Even the most powerful leaders I coach, people who have grown companies worth hundreds of millions of dollars, will fight, sometimes for years, for their limitations.
One founder I work with continues to insist that only something outside of him (a sale of his company) will create “freedom” in his life. He hangs onto the pressure and stress he constantly puts on himself, terrified that if he stops, he will “lose his edge.”
He builds his prison quite willingly, moment by moment, insisting that it is useful, terrified to let it go in anything other than very small ways.
What Truth Are You Refusing to See?
Every step of the entrepreneurial journey requires a newer, bigger identity. Not one that takes on more, but one that lets go of more and more.
Until the very company whose success you poured your identity into now succeeds without any involvement from you whatsoever.
For most people, that level of success feels more like death. (I often hear of a valley of despair after successful founders sell.)
Are you willing to let go of your need to achieve and to get credit for that achievement?
Are you willing to?
A Faster Way to Learn New Skills
Most people learn new skills from their existing identity.
For example, an identity might learn the skills of “executive presence,” like a firm handshake or dominant body language or steady eye contact. Or communication skills, like reflective listening or nodding to show you have understood.
But anyone who had tried to learn skills this way knows how exhausting it is—
You have to not only maintain the identity that you have had your whole life, but you then have to learn the new skills through that identity. I have learned to be nervous and introverted and now have to paper over that with a firm handshake and eye contact.
The two are completely contradictory. Is it any wonder it doesn’t go well?
But when we stop trying to “be” something, we are actually presence itself. Those other skills emerge authentically and automatically.
They don’t have to be learned. They are innate.
Many of the other more holistic skills of leadership (connection, strategic thinking, emotional resonance) are also innate, if you can simply get your manufactured identity out of the way of them.
Who Will Challenge Your Limitations?
Most people are unwilling to see how their identity limits them, let alone challenge that identity. But identity can be changed and even dropped.
The first step is to see that identity can be developed, molded, changed. The next is to see that you can change in and out of identities as needed. Notice how you are different when you are at work, when you are with your partner, when you are with your kids or your childhood friends.
Notice who you are when you are at your childhood home over the holidays.
The final version of this is to see, to fundamentally realize, that your identity is 100 percent made up 100 percent of the time.
That you don’t even have to make up an identity to suit the occasion. You can just act.
And when someone else can see you and hold you to this, all the better.
The Easiest Way to Make a Dent in Your Identity is to Pick Now
Make one choice that is inconsistent with your current version of yourself. Something that you know you need to do that you have been putting off.
Take one small action, today.
What do you learn when you do this? What happens when you do it again?
Pick Now, over and over again, and your identity will change dramatically. You will see how unlimited you, your team, and your company actually are.
You will see your future possibilities differently because they will actually be different.
Want support on that? Reach out—I’m putting together something to help you change quickly and easily.
#PickNow