By bayo Ogunmupe
It has been found that if you want to change your life, you must invent a new self. Changing habits never work, only changing your identity does. By the time you become great, you would have become a completely different person. You are more than one version of yourself throughout the course of your life. Every new experience requires you to adapt your identity to fit into your environment. Those who fail to adapt struggle for success in vain. But most of the time we adapt unconsciously. "It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change."---- Charles Darwin.
The elements of who we are become decided for us---our personalities are shaped by nature, the way we're raised, environment, religion, politics, family and our peers. Then, something happens to disrupt the narrative. A line in your story changes and your worldview is upended. We cope with devastating loss as our old beliefs don't make sense anymore. We realize we aren't the people we wanted to be. Life wasn't working out the way we hoped it would. Soon, you find yourself stuck in a hole of your own making. You are then forced to look around and ask: What am I doing that keeps me in this shit hole? It is at that point you wake up to realize that you have a choice to change or adapt to the world of your dreams.
At this point, identity becomes the foundation of your life experience. You realize, what you think you are. What you believe you see. Thus, nurture has a heavier influence on you than you realize. In psychology, the term for changing your identity in response to personal crisis and tension is called positive disintegration. This happens when your sense of self collapses, and you are forced to build a new self. However, you don't need to wait for a life crisis before you decide what your next identity will be. You can always become an active participant in your personal development of yourself, thereby avoiding many mistakes, discomfort and unhappiness.
Therefore, if you want to change your life, you must perforce, change your identity. When you are trying to change your habits, you think of yourself as being bad with money and that you are now trying hard to be good with money. You use your new identity of a person who is bad with money, wanting to become good with money to overwhelm your old self. As humans, we're wired to shield our identities. We unconsciously latch onto news that supports what we want to believe and block information that doesn't; because we are self affirming creatures. In that case, we're not going to act in a way that contradicts what we believe ourselves to be.
Indeed, if you want to change your life, trying to change your habits will always fail. This is because, in a habit changing mindset, you will always remain a person who cannot change his life without a new self. Thus in order to forge change, you have to focus a new identity, not new behaviors. Two identities cannot coexist in you simultaneously. You have opt for the new identity you would like to be ideally. If you know as a person you value: financial security, purpose and personal freedom; then you have to adopt those values and become a person who is fantastic with money, daily meditate his purpose and work towards long term financial freedom. Always imagine the best possible version of yourself; the version that you always wanted to be. Stop choosing to be less than you want to be.
Ask people about things they regret doing, they will usually describe those behaviors as being, not really them. That's because their mental identity at the time, did not reflect who they fundamentally are as people. To change your life, you have to imagine you are already the kind of people that can handle money, master challenges: your ideal self. You then build a new identity around being good with money, healthy, compassionate and forward thinking. Life gives you many opportunities to do these. In fact life has just given you one right now for being able to read this column.
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