The Resilient Self: The Secret Power of Identity Transformation

My approach to change is to make the tiniest changes and to be curious about what happens.

Other people have a determined, forceful mindset. “I will!” they declare, only to feel mortified later and robbed of confidence.

Specific consultants I’ve met think they are smarter than everyone, so they will figure it out for themselves, and then they will tell everyone how to do it as they would, and bam, everyone revolts.

I’d remembered writing code as a kid. Sometimes, it would look like pure garbage, crashing all over the place, a seemingly lost cause. Often, all that was missing was a colon, a bracket, or a comma. One keystroke would make or break the entire affair.

Then I found out that that’s pretty much how humans work. Tiny little tweaks can make a huge impact.

The key to relationships isn’t whether you “trust” them; it’s what you can trust about them. We all have the predictable things we do, even when we try to perform otherwise, even when we try to convince ourselves and everyone else otherwise.

I have a client who is always late and will continue to be late until she embraces the comfort it creates for her when she shows up late. How could she be choosing comfort while claiming to be mortified all the time? Because comfort means having a well-established program for that situation. It doesn’t mean that it’s the best program; it means it’s the well-worn program.

Identity transformation is running better software. What would “better” look like? Well, that’s something to meditate on, because my perceptions are only my own.

Meditation is mind-body training. Your job is to convince your body that resistance is futile and that you are the boss. And the boss wants the truth for once.

Breakthrough Moments

Science says you aren’t going to like it, and you will fight it every step of the way.

As soon as you give in, that’s when everything changes. This isn’t simply thinking positively.

It is finding a reason to love the thing you are resisting. Often a case of booting ego out of the way and finding a new perception.

The truth about change is that it is always uncomfortable, and we tend to give up right before the breakthrough moment.

The ego believes in lack, survival, competition, and status. When these cloud your perceptions, you see an attack, a threat, and a loss. Identity transformation cannot happen when you become governed by protection and are trying to “get ahead”.

You don’t realize it, but you start seeing what you want wherever you look. You create data systems to prove what you want, even while you have no realization of doing so.

The ego causes you to fear the future, so you command and control it instead of allowing it to unfold as it has already been set in motion, and taking advantage of the white space around it.

Scientific American Mind magazine reported that there are only five ways to die when we have every option to save ourselves. One of them is the ability to interpret information that continues to inform our version of the truth, even as reality tries to save you.

Perception is everything. Identity transformation is a matter of perception transformation, as identity and perception are inseparably linked.

Discovering the Purpose

To change yourself, or to get someone to change, you have to set about discovering the purpose served by the identity. Take the purpose to the next level, and the identity will follow.

We all have a foundation of beliefs. On that foundation, we create a set of feelings, thoughts, and moods we call a personality. That personality is defined by the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. Identity transformation requires breaking free of the familiar.

When you are experiencing new things, you have the white space to start telling different stories, feeling new feelings, and creating new ambitions about what is worth the effort.

Part one, the hard part of any change, is deciding to do it. Since you are pre-programmed, you make that decision with a tiny fraction of yourself, and the rest of you spends 80-99% of your time trying to get you to give up and just leave things the way they are.

I know for sure that mastering your mind doesn’t come with information alone. It must be accompanied by practice. That practice will change how you think about yourself, how you act in the world, and in short, your identity will transform. Doing, taking action, learning, and trying again. Like going to the gym, you keep at it because progress builds upon progress, and you can’t imagine going back to the static, repetitive existence you knew.

When it comes to change, we only do it because doing so is better and more important than not doing it. That’s it. A simple heavy-sided teeter-tooter, with logic sitting like a fly-weight in the air and emotion stuck to the ground like a cannonball.

Training to Develop Intense Focus

With snowmobiling, it was an identity transformation of meditative and emotional proportions. It felt like I was blowing dumb thinking, tricky ways to explain the truth, and other such garbage out the back of my head. What was really going on was that I was processing memories and feelings I didn’t have time to feel, wasn’t prepared to feel, or didn’t understand what I was feeling when they were happening.

In processing those memories, I would cry, scream, whatever, because no one can see or hear in my helmet, and then it would be happy sailing for a while. Then the next piece of mental baggage would appear, and I’d work on that one.

Usually, work was simply being a compassionate adult to the hurt and frustrated younger me, powerless to do much, and needing both the hug and the guidance.

As each fell away, I was more and more present, no matter where I went. Fewer triggers in the world that would launch me into past pains and future fears. That’s the idea of being present, and when you become so, you realize how often you weren’t and how rarely others are actually with you.

If there’s anything that occupies the ego worried about survival, protection, and looking cool, it’s snowmobiling. It was white-on-white, like a mental whiteboard. Not too much to see, and yet I had to see the slight differences between the white of the trail and that of the ungroomed wilderness.

With the ego out of the way, the higher mind can play. Perhaps you’ve noticed that your best ideas come to you when you are occupied with mundane tasks? Have you tried being fully occupied and completely absorbed?

There were times I wanted to stop riding. However, I wasn’t in the lead, and although I had the freedom to stop at any time, I didn’t often exercise that freedom.

Over the years, I’ve learned a bevy of tricks to get myself to do things because I am stubborn, ambitious, and lazy. Identity transformation happens when you move things from the “I can’t” column of your self-assessment over to the “I Can” column.

One thing I’ve learned is that moment, the one where you can’t imagine being able to take any more, you can. You will learn your own bevy of tricks. Whether it is consulting the research and trying the latest techniques or finding your own unique ways, in a world of possibilities, there is always a way.

I also learned what’s possible when you master this stuff. You won’t believe me, so you will have to find out for yourself. Don’t let pain win. Don’t let other people, self-doubt, or your body trick you into quitting. Especially, don’t let fear win.

The new science puts all the power and control in your hands. It actually always was. Epigenetics is the field of science that explores how the environment matters more than inheritance, how genes can be expressed or not, and how DNA is more of a menu than a blueprint.

It’s all in your head. Your consciousness is your power. How do you think about what happens to you, and your intentions? Things people can’t see you do, and you can’t see other people do, which makes learning how to do it a challenge. There’s what happens to you, and then there’s how you perceive it, react or respond. The latter matters so much more and is totally in your control.

Using Emotions

As an introvert, I believe there’s no better playground than the one between my ears. I’ve also recruited people to help me do it better.

Cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) helped me learn what I feel and what to label it as in order to cope with life better. When coping became a low bar, I moved on to dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) to learn to avoid the situations I don’t want to have to cope with.

Eckhart Tolle taught me about the power of silence and nonjudgment. Over this identity transformation, I left my original programming far behind. My personality had changed and adapted, as did my personal reality. A new personal reality that is far more comfortable, far more expansive, and far more awe-inducing.

Productivity is the basis of mind mastery, but you can’t get things done if you can’t manage your attention and command your body to do what you want it to do, like sit still and get that work done. Your body is your unconscious mind, and it would rather get up and go do something else. Who’s in charge of you? Your body or your mind?

Authenticity is moving into your personal power, where things are magically easy for you, and you are surrounded by supportive relationships that want to help you succeed. You can’t do that if you don’t know what feels good and what feels bad and love yourself enough to want to move toward what feels good. It’s also about valuing your employees to do that as well, as Ray Dalio of Bridgewater has done with tremendous success.

More than Emotional Intelligence

You have to know how things feel. When things feel bad, that is information. When you decode the information, there will be a problem to solve or a change to make. Both of those are practical things you must do in your identity transformation to move away from stress, frustration, and fear. Solving problems and strategizing change are skills that can be learned.

It is impractical to simply wish them away or focus on the positive when you have work to do. There is real work in mind mastery – and that’s the simple solution to irrationality. There’s no avoiding our inner work, and there’s no delegating of it either.

Together, we can help each other, but there’s no helping the person who wants to continue to believe in the illusion of consciousness, the mechanistic view of biology, or the old-world limits of cause and effect. Changing your mind begins with opening your mind to new realities.

New realities include that it’s possible to heal yourself, but not if you can’t notice your thoughts. Self-healing is all about weeding out your mental garden of bad thoughts, but you can’t do that if you don’t know they are there.

What’s possible, as Ray Dalio has proven, is that we can achieve self-actualization in a corporate setting. Can, as in there is one glowing example, analyzed and studied by some of the top researchers. It starts with understanding that people are wired differently, which makes fit matter. It also requires insight to consciously choose the right fit, because it’s default behavior to pick people who are like ourselves, which is duplication, not fit.

Rewriting Textbooks

Gregg Braden asked a professor friend of his a question I’ve been asking for the past twenty years, when I figured it out. Now that you know this, why are you still teaching the old stuff?

In my experience, the list gets long and illuminating. First, what would that say about my career? It would make me look like a phony, invalidate my credentials, and take away my status. I get the same answer from Lean Six Sigma professionals who want to protect their time and effort investments. It demands an identity transformation.

Braden says, No, it proves that you have the wisdom to know better, that the process works. The conspiracy theorist who says that all you are doing is continuing to prove what you want to instead of asking new questions is right.

Yes, I say. If continuous improvement were continuously improving, why are the go-to methods the same as they were thirty years ago?

I’ve always found that exposing what you say yes to when you say no is a helpful way to show people the fallacy of their answers.

Okay, if you are personally brave enough, the next barrier is textbooks. We have to rewrite and reprint them. Yup, and that’s a long, labor-intensive process. So, are we too lazy to empower our citizens? I’ve also found that assigning a label they don’t like to their behavior works like a charm.

No, it’s too expensive, they say.

Braden points out the obvious. No, it’s the digital era. You store it on the server, and next week, when you learn something new again, you can change it immediately—none of these thirty-year-long dramas.

But then, protectors of the status quo forget that it’s a new age now—one of abundance and no one in charge.

More and more, I am meeting leaders who have realized that top-down leadership has gone the way of the caveman.

At a recent seminar on change leadership, a noticeable number of attendees left when they realized the approach being taught was top-down. “This will never work in my organization,” one leader said to me on his way out.

It’s not just that the people have changed – the pace has as well, and top-down governance isn’t fast enough. Command and control is actually very slow.

It’s possible that we are all leaders, regardless of rank or title. It’s possible that one day there will be no more followers. No way for someone to check out and go along with the flow.

Until then, there will be irrational people behaving instinctually, executing the instructions of their limbic brains, never knowing they aren’t as in charge as they think. It’s up to them to choose differently, while you get ahead of the game by polishing your powers of identity transformation.

Your emotions are a reliable indicator of your level on the curve of mind mastery. What do you feel most of the time?

We are all born with brains programmed to survive, and most of us are pretty good at that instinctual game. For some of us, we hit a wall and decide, enough of that. There’s got to be more here.

When I learned about how our brains make decisions, and how 80 to 99 percent of them are unconscious and automatic, I saw the awesome potential to explain why things weren’t going my way. It was a way that gave me power, not one that took it away.

There were simply too many bugs in the program, and I knew my way around programs.