3 Reasons Why Your Past Identity Doesn’t Determine Your Future Identity
Photo by francescoch
When it comes to defining leadership identity, our default is to look back to who we’ve been in the past as a starting point. This is natural, but is actually incredibly limiting, handcuffing our ability to make any forward progress on stepping into the leader we can be.
For example, our self-perception might be negative because of an important influence in our past, like a significant failure, a traumatic event, negative comments from an influential person in our lives, an addictive pattern or simply not living up to our own personal expectations. Even if our self-perception is positive, it can have detrimental impacts if this becomes our primary identity. There are many people who have based their identity around their success in a previous role, only to be thrust into a significantly different role and create uncertainty about who they’re supposed to be.
I see this backward-first tendency frequently in my coaching sessions when working through the results from the Harrison Behavioral Assessment, which provides data-driven insight into how we set ourselves up for trouble when we base our identity on our self-perception from the past. Ultimately, our past identity shapes our ability to accept ourselves, or in the terminology of the Harrison Assessment, we struggle to like ourselves and accept that “I’m okay the way I am.”
A Real Life Example
The image below is a Self-Actualization graph from the Harrison Assessment (one of the 12 Paradox Behavior graphs used in the Harrison) of a coaching client. This client had a number of influences that drove him particularly hard to excel in life. As a result, my client developed a life-long pattern of rigorous self-improvement behaviors, always trying to get better and be successful.
But his pursuit of perfection was unknowingly inspired by a belief that he didn’t quite measure up. His self-critical behaviors were often interpreted positively as “setting a high bar for himself.” Yet the warning signs are also present. As the graph indicates (see the red “storm” symbol), under stress his behaviors would flip from being self-critical to being defensive. This showed up as outbursts of anger, blaming, frustration and sudden shifts in goals and strategies.
“We struggle to like ourselves and accept that ‘I’m okay the way I am.’”
This graph reveals that his intense developmental efforts—and all the success and recognition they brought—disguised his primary motivation: to overcome a negative self-perception. The more he was esteemed for his self-improvement and rewarded for his success, the more entrenched his false identity became.
Freedom came in realizing he wasn’t who he’d been all his life. He has since become grounded in the truth that his identity is defined by who he is now and who he ultimately wants to be, not who he has been. He’s much more content, comfortable with himself and with others, and rarely has the outbursts that previously were commonplace.
“The more he was esteemed for his self-improvement and rewarded for his success, the more entrenched his false identity became.”
Backward Referencing
We have the tendency to simply accept our self-perception from the past as a permanent reality, whether positive or negative. I call this Backward Referencing: the process of using who we were in our past to define our current identity. Here are three reasons why Backward Referencing your past identity doesn’t work.
1. Who you are and who you want to be is a willful decision, not a prescribed, predetermined or fixed reality. It’s not what your environment has told you. It’s not what other people have said about you. It’s not the roles you’ve played and your performance in those roles. It’s not the emotions you’re harboring (Note: our emotions are important, and we should pay attention to them—but they don’t define us). You are not the experiences you’ve lived through in the past.
YOU decide who you want to be. This is simultaneously the most obvious and yet most elusive of truths about our identity. It is liberating and empowering when you accept it; it is also sobering, as you realize your identity is your responsibility to manage. Once you are aware of this truth, everything becomes simpler.
“YOU decide who you want to be.”
2. It’s impossible to define your identity by avoiding who you don’t want to be. You don’t get humility by trying not to be prideful. You don’t get to peace by trying not to be anxious. You don’t get strength by trying to avoid weakness.
This is true for doing anything in life. Hitting a baseball, for example: You can’t consistently hit a baseball when your approach is to avoid striking out. Neither can you hit a baseball today just because you hit well yesterday. You can’t be who you are uniquely created to be in the present—much less in the future—if your point of reference is who you were in the past.
3. Who you are is a developing reality. In Are You Who You Want to Be, I reveal that modern psychology has recently been utilizing the concept of narrative identity. It’s classified as “narrative” because our self-conception is a story in-process. Dr. Dan P. McAdams, Professor of Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern University, defines narrative identity as “a life story—an internalized narrative integration of past, present, and anticipated future which provides lives with a sense of unity and purpose.” In this view, our identity is continuously evolving as we go through life, and each of us is forming our identities as we interact with each other.
“It’s impossible to define your identity by avoiding who you don’t want to be.”
Forward Referencing
When we reframe identity as a present and evolving narrative that we’re writing as we live each day, it becomes readily apparent that Backward Referencing is only useful for gaining perspective and learning wisdom. Most of our effort should be directed toward Forward Referencing: Focusing on the ideal identity of who we want to be. This aspirational perspective moves us quickly into an Inside-Out approach toward discovering and living out our identity. It motivates us toward our unique purpose, toward change and ultimately toward how we can best influence our world for the better and serve others’ interests.
Elements like faith and beliefs powerfully shape our ideal identity. For me, as a person of faith and follower of Jesus, this ideal identity is informed by how the Bible describes us: God’s children, deeply loved and uniquely created to be just who he designed us to be. His intent is that we become like Jesus in character and behavior. If you are not a person of faith, then center on the timeless truths, character qualities and core values to help shape your ideal identity. This ideal identity is the compass we align our lives with.
“Create your future from your future, not your past.”
If you constantly compare yourself to who you’ve been in the past, the best you can possibly hope to be is some rehashed version of who you’ve been in the past.
Looking back is helpful for reflection. But you can’t drive forward by keeping your eyes on the rear-view mirror. Ultimately, you create your future from your future, not your past. Unless, of course, you choose to create your future from your past. But that’s a choice.
