Last week, I shared with you about brokenness.
You learned that no matter how hard you and I strive for some kind of boundless perfection, it's all really an unfulfilling, vain pursuit if we fail to see that we are broken…
…and that someday we are going to be even more broken, but that we can, during our life in this broken body, by the grace of God, become the best version of our broken self—not so that we can better serve ourselves, but so that we can better serve God and others.
Let's talk about that “best version” part, specifically, how you can identify with great clarity how to achieve it.
But first, you must identify what's holding you back.
Bear with me here, because I'll take a quick circuitous route before coming back full circle on how to be your best version, but bear with me here.
You're no doubt familiar with the phrase “how we live our days is how we live our lives.” In Outwitting the Devil, Napoleon Hill describes the type of hypnotic trance that I expound upon in this article.
These two concepts are intertwined, and here's why:
We all tend to fall into daily habits, rituals, and routines, often shaped by our desires, our environment, and our upbringing. We tend to become so comfortable with these that they gradually draw together to form the Etch A Sketch of our identity, which we must invert to redraw.
For example, for my male reader, let's say you grew up a little skinnier than the other boys, you were always the underdog in sports, you found yourself constantly warming the bench, but you eventually discovered that fitness, exercise, hard training, and weightlifting were able to get you the respect you craved. You carved yourself into a man whom “they” would finally respect.
Years and years later, you still feel as though there is a potential threat of disrespect and loss of self-confidence if you don't hit the weights and run the hills. So now you're a fully grown man with inner fear and anxiety about losing your big muscles or strong lungs. You're not really training for anything in particular, except to feel good about yourself.
Because a significant part of your identity and how you feel about yourself is wrapped up in your fitness, you're blinded to any sense of training for a specific challenge or sport or focusing on metrics of health and longevity like VO2 max or grip strength, and you're simply wasting hours “junk training” because your only objective is to “feel good about yourself.” As a result, you're constantly wasting valuable hours in the gym, battling injuries, hooked on energy drinks for motivation, and your biomarkers have gone to crap.
Or let's say you're a woman who realized growing up that you could get the most praise from your parents by getting good grades, graduating at the top of every class, and being a total academic workhorse. Now fast forward 20 years. Your parents really couldn't care less how well you are managing your giant list of to-dos and email inbox, but you continue to pride yourself on your inherent tendencies to “please someone” by staying on top of everything—even if it means short sleep, rushed conversations, and skipped self-care to ensure zero inbox, with every last piece of analog and digital paper filed away properly.
You're always busy. Indeed, that's actually your go-to response anytime someone asks how you are doing (“Busy, how about you?”), because your identity is wrapped up in being that person who doesn't let anything slip through the cracks, often to the detriment of your health and relationships.
If you're the man in that scenario, one of the things you identified as holding you back from your best version is your addiction to working out to feel good about yourself.
If you're the woman in that scenario, you may have identified that something holding you back is the excessively strict standards you've set for yourself.
What's the opposite for the man?
In a sentence: I want to be confident about who I am, no matter what my body looks like or how fit I am.
In a word: confidence.
What's the opposite for the woman?
In a sentence: I want to be known as someone who can relax and sometimes just let things go.
In a word: serene (or perhaps zen).
Do you see what I did there? Let's review:
I (or you) identified a character, trait, tendency, or habit (what we can call the hypnotic trance), we described it in one paragraph, and then we described in one sentence the opposite of that future, and finally, distilled that down into one word. We inverted an identity.
It's that simple.
You're essentially doing three things:
- Identifying a conscious or unconscious identity pattern in a paragraph.
- Naming the redemptive opposite in a sentence.
- Distilling that sentence into a single word.
So that's Identity Inversion. That's how you shake, reset, and redraw the Etch A Sketch.
Next week, I'm going to walk you through what the Identity Inversion exercise looked like for me.
WARNING: I identified 10 things to work on, so brace yourself for a deep dive into my psyche.
And don't worry, I'll also tell you what to do with all these great words once you have them.
In the meantime, leave your questions, comments, and feedback below. I read them all.
P.S. It's important that you know I am not a psychologist, psychiatrist, pastor, counselor, or anyone else who has any type of certificate or special formal experience in self-improvement. I made this exercise up myself. I would not be shocked if it exists in some form already, or even already has some kind of fancy name or book about it. But for now, I'm going to claim “Identity Inversion” as my own recipe. Correct me in the comments if necessary.
P.P.S. This exercise is not self-theology, self-worship, or an attempt at becoming a truly perfect version of yourself for the mere sake of self-improvement. Human striving, moral polish, or identity refinement, when disconnected from loving God and loving others, always stalls out or turns inward. So any growth that comes from this exercise is not about becoming more impressive but about becoming more available: more dependent on God, more present with others, and more faithful with the life you've been given.
