When Our Identity Becomes A Limiting Belief
(This is the final installment in the Legally Bold series on limiting beliefs and how they rob us of achieving fulfillment in essential areas of our lives. You can find the other posts in the series here.)
Our identity is a fully formed idea of who we are. It is our sense of self, and it shapes the way we look at our relationship to the world.
A person’s identity has many interwoven parts. Generally, it includes some relatively permanent self-assessments like physical attributes, personality traits, occupations, hobbies, and knowledge of skills and abilities. But it also includes political opinions, moral attitudes, and religious beliefs.
Using these guidelines means that in the past, I identified myself as an African American female attorney. I also knew myself to be smart, funny, liberal, Christian, and short, but not terribly athletic, artistic, or photogenic.
These self-identifying traits guided the choices that I made regularly and limited my view of what I thought I could do in the future.
When Self-Identity Becomes A Limiting Belief
Our identity becomes a limiting belief when our beliefs about who we are do not match up to the person we need to be to get the life we want.
In my case, because I considered myself to be smart but not artistic, I did not believe I was creative enough to be an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs come up with unique ways to solve problems. And because I did think I was creative, I didn’t believe I was cut out to be an entrepreneur.
Do you see how that identity might have stopped me from pursuing my dreams if I had kept it?
How To Create A New Identity
You don’t discover your identity in as much as it evolves over time. During adolescence, we grapple with who we are and what we believe. Then as we grow into adulthood, those ideas change as we acquire more life experiences.
Through all of those changes, the key to not letting your identity stop you from having the life you want is to adopt a growth mindset.
Fixed Mindset vs. Growth Mindset
According to researcher Carol Dweck, people either have a growth mindset or a fixed mindset. In a fixed mindset, people believe their qualities are fixed traits that cannot change.
So when I thought I couldn’t be an entrepreneur because I wasn’t creative, I was in a fixed mindset. I thought my lack of artistic ability was just part of who I was, and there was nothing I could do about it. So there was no way that I could become an entrepreneur.
Conversely, in a growth mindset, people believe that no matter who they are right now, their learning and intelligence can grow with time and experience. They can become smarter or more artistic if they just put in the time and effort.
By adopting a growth mindset, I learned what it meant to be artistic and creative. I started cultivating practices and habits to grow this area of my life. Over time, I stopped identifying as “not artistic” because I realized that I had become the creative entrepreneur that I always wanted to be.
People with growth mindsets achieve more because they see the connection between their efforts and success. They are not limited by their former conceptions of self. They know that through growth, they can create new ones.
What are some of the ways that you identify yourself? Do these identities help you pursue your dream life or drag you back down into old ways of thinking? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.