Going Beyond Limitations: How We Cling to Familiar Identities and What to Do Instead

Who are you?

You can probably come up with a long list of ways to answer this question, many of which refer to your sense of identity. A husband/wife, a mother/father, an entrepreneur, a leader, a kind person, a grumpy person. There are countless ways to define yourself through your identity and, in many cases, they’re useful. Without some ego boundaries, we would wake up each morning and face the unenviable task of constructing our identities from scratch.

The problem comes when we adhere too tightly to an identity and forget to check whether it’s working for us. Emily, for example, is the successful CEO of a startup company. She has developed intense work habits and sees herself as something I call “the work-harder martyr.”

She wasn’t born with this identity, but it’s become so familiar to her that it feels like part of who she is. As the daughter of workaholic parents with high-powered careers, she was exposed to a strict work ethic from an early age. She grew up part of the Ally McBeal generation, watching television shows about high-performing lawyers and doctors, an image that informed her opinion of herself without her even realizing it.

Now, Emily works in Silicon Valley, surrounded by people who live their lives focused on work, so her over-the-top work ethic is highly valued among her peers. In fact, it’s nearly inescapable; in the last twenty years, this driven mindset has become an acceptable norm—even a prized ideal.

The cultural reinforcement of her mindset drives Emily to work even harder, no matter what kind of problem she faces. In intimate relationships and friendships, she applies the same principles as she does to her work, with considerably less success. She has developed and become attached to the idea that her identity as a hard worker is the key to her success.

Emily has come to think that this “work-harder martyr” is who she is. If she never steps back from this fixed view of herself, she’ll never realize that it’s not all that she is, and she’ll struggle to come up with creative solutions when faced with new challenges.

Perhaps you can see something of yourself in Emily. You might not identify with the role of the “work-harder martyr,” but maybe there’s another familiar identity story that drives much of your behavior. Perhaps you too find yourself falling back on strategies that work in some areas of your life in other contexts, even if they work much less successfully.

Detaching Your Identity Story from Your Self

Sadly, it often takes a crisis for people to start examining their identity stories. As long as the pain of our current lives is tolerable, we may resist looking more closely at the tools we use to handle the different aspects of life.

People in Emily’s situation tend to double-down, assuming that hard work will be enough to overcome any challenge. Perseverance has always worked in the past, so they hope it will continue to work in the future. Eventually, like Emily, they hit a threshold of diminishing returns. She has attached herself to the belief that she has one identity story that’s true all the time. Unable to see beyond that, she stays stuck in a familiar rut and remains unaware of alternative approaches.

The good news is that there are always alternatives. You don’t have to change who you are, but you can hold your stories about yourself and about what works in the world more lightly, so that you can accept the possibility that there are other ways of being, acting, and doing. For example, maybe Emily needs to let other people take control of specific details, to delegate, and to practice distributive leadership.

You can nurture the habit of examining the identities you hold tightly, so that you can explore whether they’re truly serving you and consider alternatives. Here are two questions that I find especially valuable in this process:

1)    Is this always true?

Emily might ask, “Is it always true that if I work harder, I get the outcome that I want?” Probably, the answer will be “no,” which opens up the possibility that she can try some other approaches.

It is rarely the case that something is always true, so using the word “always” is a way of finding a crack in your own armor. You can think about yourself in a given set of circumstances and say, “Am I always like this in these circumstances? Do I always respond to crises in this way? Do I always do this?”

When you discover that you have other options, you can consider which strategies might serve you and the people around you better.

2)    How might others do this?

This simple question can open up a treasure trove of unconsidered ways to tackle the same situation, while simultaneously breaking your attachment to your habitual approach. Have you seen someone else handle a similar situation in a different way and get the outcome you were looking for? What beliefs about themselves and the world might have allowed them to create this outcome? When you look outside the realm of your identity, the problem you are trying to solve takes on a new shape. You gain the space to identify solutions and opportunities you haven’t previously considered.

There Is Nothing There To Lose

When you first try to loosen your grip on your identity, you may experience a lot of resistance. Considering alternatives to a cherished identity can feel scary. Many people fear that perceiving their identity as a story denotes a lack of authenticity. They suspect that they won’t know who they are without it. They may even feel that they are losing the central core of themselves.

Actually, these questions aren’t about losing anything. They’re about discovering new ways of being in the world. You’re probably familiar with the expression that if the only tool you’ve got is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. In Emily’s case, the only tool she has is hard work, so every problem looks like an opportunity to knuckle down and exercise elbow grease. If she could take a step back and explore other approaches, she would surely find other tools that could be more useful in certain circumstances.

In summary, I’m not suggesting that you lose part of yourself in this process, but that you expand your story to include stories about others, yourself, and the world around you. You have nothing to lose but a limited sense of identity.