Leadership success, I have learned, is not just about grand gestures or occasional bursts of brilliance. It’s about the daily grind, the small actions and habits repeated consistently over time – these are the things that will ultimately define your leadership.
Most importantly, those consistent, small actions will also shape your own identity and self image as a leader.
In his influential book Atomic Habits, James Clear wrote: “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.” (By the way, if you’ve not read Atomic Habits, I heartily recommend you add it to your reading list, pronto!)
For some years now, I’ve been exploring the concept of self identity and how it translates to performance. What I have learned is that we can only ever perform to the edges of who we believe ourselves to be.
What is self-identity?
Put simply, it’s how you identify and define yourself. Your self-identity or self-image captures all of the things about yourself that you believe to be true, including your personality traits, your skills, interests and even your physical attributes.
For example, as a young girl growing up I heard from a range of sources that to be a leader, it was necessary to be firm, bossy, a little bit mean … and male. I was directly told that I was “too nice” to be in charge. The self-identity I formed around that was that I was a good person whose opinion wasn’t valuable and who was never destined to be influential.
A range of internal and external factors influenced that identity, including my family, ethnicity and culture, where I lived (regional Victoria), the media I consumed, the experiences I had at school and later in my workplaces and so on. Whether those beliefs were true or not is irrelevant. I believed them and I shaped a self-identity around them.
Can we change our self-identity?
I am here to tell you emphatically yes! I have learned that identity is just a set of beliefs we have about ourselves that is formed from past experiences. If we allow ourselves to be moulded into that identity, we will create exactly the same results in our careers and our lives time and time again.
There came a day for me when I decided I wanted something different for myself because I understood on some level that my self-identity was at odds with my aspirations and goals.
So I decided to change my self-identity, beginning with the knowledge that the past does not define who I could become in the future. I decided to believe I could lead with authenticity and integrity and have an impact in my community.
Decide who you want to be
The first step, of course, is deciding who you want to be. It’s an exciting thought, right? You get to choose what kind of person and what kind of leader you become! In my case, I knew I wanted to have a positive impact in my community and to do that, I needed to change what I believed about my ability to influence others. I didn’t want to change my personality, because I kind of like that I am kind! But I wanted to believe that “nice” people can also make a difference.
From there, my job was to visualise that person is as much detail as I possibly could. I needed to understand how that confident, influential version of me thought, acted and lived.
This is important, because it’s essential that we train our brains to look to that new self-identity as a truth. The clearer the instructions we can give our brains, the better.
Professional athletes know this better than anyone. There is no Olympian who steps onto their field of endeavour without having first run that race thousands of times in their mind.
Trying your new identity on for size
Having decided who you want to be and visualised her in detail, it’s time for the fun part. Now you get to become that person. How? You begin by thinking like that version of yourself. You make decisions from where you want to be at that future point. You may even begin to dress like her and surround yourself with the people she chooses to invest her time in. It’s a little bit like trying on a new outfit – it may feel a little new and odd at first, but over time, it becomes more comfortable and worn in.
The power of tiny habits
Enter James Clear. Every decision action you take is a decision for the person you want to be. Your actions, even the tiny things you are doing without really thinking about it, are all lodging a vote either for the person you want to be, or against it.
I’m certainly not there yet. There are so many things I want to learn and experience to expand my mind about what could be possible for me. But for now, I understand that the small and seemingly inconsequential decisions I take every day all add up to be very consequential indeed.
So… what are your daily actions and habits telling you about your self-identity and you believe you are? How could you incrementally change those actions and habits to intentionally shape the person and the leader you wish to become?
