You Don't Build Habits, You Build Identity

My Old Bad Habits

Last year I was badly addicted to social media, constantly looking for attention and validation online from strangers. It’s kinda weird to seek validation from people who don’t even know you in real life or have anything to do with you, and I knew something was really wrong with me and that what I was doing was pointless. Despite knowing it’s wrong and constantly trying to change it, I couldn’t break the habit of doing it, even after a lot of suffering, and I keep failing to change.

To myself, I was a pathetic and miserable person, someone who doesn’t stop crying about his situation, someone who never succeeds in changing himself for good, someone who’s not disciplined or strong enough, and someone who’s always stuck in habits he hated doing. At this point, giving up on it feels like a burden off my shoulders, but leaving myself in such a situation was something I never allow myself to do.

One approval and it felt great, but later I needed one more. One validation and I felt worthy, but later I needed more. It was a vicious cycle I couldn’t get myself out of, and the more I struggled to get out, the deeper I sank in. Because every time I tried to change myself, I needed validation of whether I was doing it right, and I’d go back to my stuck pattern through the back door.

I could do anything to get out of this cycle, which has no end, to get rid of this leech that’s sucking peace from me. I spent a lot of time figuring out myself, watched a bunch of youtube videos on self improvement and healing, consumed all the content, books and articles I could get my hands on to figure out what actually is wrong, what am I doing wrong and how can I actually get this right to break myself free.

Identifying The Problem

The problem was somewhere in my beliefs about myself; maybe the reason why I’m not able to change is that I believe that I’m someone who can’t change. The more I tried and failed, the more this belief about myself became stronger. Cause every failed try to change myself is proof that I am someone who fails at changing myself.

I kept trying, and it kept failing cause deeper I knew I’m someone who needs validation from strangers, so the very reason of failing to change myself, is that I think I’m someone who can’t change; unless and until I change this belief about myself, nothing is going to change. The problem was this identity.

Habits Are Shaped By Identity

By Identity, I’m not talking about a name or any number; I’m talking about the beliefs about oneself.

• If someone works out to build discipline, their identity would be a disciplined person or a strong person.
• If someone eats healthy and has a good lifestyle, their identity would be a healthy individual.
• If someone smokes, their identity would be a smoker.
• If someone writes code and builds stuff, they are an engineer.

We all have some identity associated with ourselves, and it’s in every aspect of life. In professional life, one might be a teacher, engineer, or a manager. In social life, one might be a funny person, neighbor, landlord, or a friend. In family, one might be a mother, father, brother, sister, wife, husband, and so on. In other aspects of life, one might be an athlete, gamer, runner, singer, pianist, painter, writer, reader, breadwinner, provider, caretaker, and the list goes on.

For everything you do, there’s an identity that gets activated during the action. Crafting with wood makes you a carpenter, waking up early makes you a morning person, and telling kids to stop messing around in the street makes you an obnoxious adult, or maybe a responsible one.

Likewise, for every identity of yours, there must be some habit that you do for it to exist. You aren’t an engineer if you’ve never built anything; you’re not a funny person if nobody laughs at your jokes.

Every action you do is a prove for the person you are. Every habit is shaped by identity, and each identity is built by habit.

Habit Change By Focusing On Identity

Imagine two people trying to quit vaping: one person is offered a vape by his friend, and he declines, “Sorry, I’m trying to quit.” This sounds like a good response. He is trying to quit but still believes he’s a vaper who’s trying to be something else; he’s hoping his behavior can change while carrying around the same belief.

Second person is offered a vape, and he declines: “Sorry, I’m not a vaper.” See the difference? It’s small, but this signals a change in identity. It strongly implies that he’s not a vaper; thus, he’s speaking from his identity who doesn’t vape. Vaping was part of his former life, not his current one. He no longer identifies as someone who vapes.

Most people don’t consider identity change when they are trying to build or change their habits. They start by focusing on outcome, “I want to achieve this body (outcome), so I should start eating healthy and go to the gym (process).” They set goals and determine actions to achieve their goals without ever considering the beliefs that drive their actions. They never change the way they believe about themselves, how they look at themselves, and they don’t realize how their old identity can sabotage their plans of chasing their outcome.

Every system of action is driven by a system of beliefs. Everything you do is driven by an identity that you have. You can’t go to the gym consistently unless you believe you’re someone who works out. No one can build a habit of going to the gym and start having discipline in their life while believing they are lazy, and someone who has discipline in their life doesn’t believe that they are lazy.

Why Most People Fail

Why is it that most of us fail to change our bad habits? Why is it so easy to keep repeating the bad habits we want to change, but so hard to create good ones?

Starting new habit with a new motivation feels great for couple of days, but it’s easy to fallback to old pattern, even with sincere effort and motivation, it become hassle and you lose the will to do it anymore. Good habits that most of us want to build, like exercising, meditating, reading, running, working out, waking up early, going to bed on time, being mindful, controlled screen time, only seem reasonable and fun for few days but then becomes so hard. You may say laziness takes over, or start justifying it with other reasonable excuses that don’t make you feel bad about yourself for quitting.

It probably fails for one or two reasons: you’re trying to change it the wrong way. To understand it, let’s consider three layers of changing a habit.

• Focusing on outcome
• Focusing on process
• Focusing on Identity

Focusing on outcome is concerned with the results, or the final output. For example, an outcome may be to lose 10 kg, build a business, or save money. Chasing outcomes is the most common one, and the majority of people know habit change by focusing on the result the want to have, which leads them to failing cause internals beliefs which derive the process doesn’t change.

Focusing on process is concerned with the set of actions needed to achieve an outcome. For example, going to the gym every day to lose 10 kg, hunting clients every day and providing services to build a business, putting 20% of each month’s salary into savings accounts for 3 years. It works fine with enough discipline, but the internal beliefs that drive every action are what matter more. With the wrong beliefs, it’s hard to repeat a process that’s fighting against them, and you fail to turn this into a habit.

Focusing on Identity is concerned with the internal beliefs that drive every action to achieve an outcome. It’s the foundation, root of every habit and most important for habit change. For example, if a person’s identity is a disciplined person, it makes it easy for them to go to the gym consistently. On the contrary, if one person’s identity is a lazy, fat/skinny person, they won’t be able to consistently go to gym more than a couple of days, cause the process of going to gym is fighting with their beliefs of being a lazy person.

For every outcome to be achieved, one needs to do the process needed to achieve it. For every process to take place, one needs to have the set of belief which drive them to do the actions required for this process.

These are three layers stacked on top of each other, with outcome at the top and identity at the bottom, and process in the middle. A habit can not be changed by focusing on top layers while the bottom one doesn’t support them. For a skyscrapper contruction, ground floors needs to have foundation needed to build floors on top of them, if ground floors aren’t built for the floors on top of that, the building will likely collapse.

Correct Way To Build Habit

With the full understanding that the outcome is achieved by doing the process, and a process is driven by internal belief (Identity). The correct order of focus should be

1. Focusing on Identity
2. Focusing on Process
3. Focusing on Outcome

With the wrong Identity in place, no process can take place long enough to achieve an outcome. To lose 10 kg, one needs to start by being a disciplined person, let go of their identity of being a fat person, and stop looking at themselves as a fat, lazy person. Once the correct belief is in place, they can start going to the gym regularly, enforcing their identity of being a disciplined person every day, eventually losing 10 kg, which was their outcome.

Every Action Is A Vote For Identity

As they say, you can not become confident by repeating affirmations to yourself in the mirror. You become confident by having undeniable proof of who you say you are. Every action is proof of your identity.

If you’ve never run a mile, you can never believe that you’re a runner by repeating affirmations to yourself. Every time you run a mile or a marathon, it gives you undeniable proof of being a runner; the more you do it, the more it stacks up, and this identity becomes stronger.

You become more confident the more you achieve something. If you’ve never achieved anything, you can’t build confidence. That’s why they say practice is key to building confidence, cause being confident itself is an identity, and you need proof for that. You need actions that vote for this identity, which makes it stronger.

Every time you show up at the gym, it gives you a vote for being a disciplined person. Every time you eat healthy, it gives you a vote for being a healthy person. But this vote needs to match with your conscious voice telling yourself, yes, this vote is true, so accept it.

If you believe you’re a lazy person, and even if you go to the gym with sincere effort and motivation, but you’re telling yourself that this gym isn’t for me, I’m a lazy person, so I don’t belong here. You’re intentionally cancelling this vote, consciously enforcing your identity of being a lazy person, feeding your internal beliefs to fight against going to the gym, and it’ll become harder and harder to keep doing it; eventually you’ll fail.

Be Mindful Of Conscious Voice (And How It Sabotages Habits)

Every action is proof of your identity, but this will work against you if action is forced and you believe something else.

Eating healthy will vote for being a healthy individual, but if you’re forcing it and internally believing that you’re someone who eats a lot of junk and can’t stay consistent with eating healthy, this habit is likely going to fail. In fact, doing it will vote for being a junk eater instead of a healthy individual.

Your internal conflicting belief will fight against it; you’ll quit it a few days later. But it won’t stop there; this quitting will become a vote for your new identity, “Quitter,” cause this is an action on its own. You tried and failed, but this failing will vote for being a failure that will further sabotage your future habits. The more you quit, the more you’ll become a quitter, and every time you try to build a new habit, this quitter inside you will sabotage it cause you’ll believe you’re someone who quits; hence, you’ll be acting on your beliefs.

If you seriously want to change a habit, be mindful of all internal beliefs you’ve associated with yourself and be observant of how they are impacting your habit. Don’t let any conflicting belief cancel out the vote of your action, and don’t let the history of being a quitter succeed in making you a quitter once again. You’ll have to let go of all conflicting identities working against your process, and mindfully align your inner voice with the belief needed to drive the process, do it consistently, and achieve your outcome.

Let’s consider goal is to loss 10 kg, if someone’s believing they are fat and lazy, they need to let go of both of these identities first, they need to stop telling themselves they are lazy and fat, they need to form beliefs which will drive them to gym, they need to focus on becoming disciplined, consistent, and healthy person first. Then they need to focus on the process. Going to the gym will vote for their new identity; the more they go to the gym, the more disciplined they will become. They should be mindful of their conscious voice and avoid telling themselves that they are lazy, which will cancel their votes for a new identity. Soon enough, they will have a new identity, a new habit, and will weigh 10 kilograms less.

How I Changed My Bad Habits

As of last year, I was stuck in seeking approval and validation online. With a better understanding of how identity leads to habits, I now know the root cause of those habits.

I used to believe that I was someone who needed validation from other people to be worthy; my sense of worthiness relied on how people approved of me. It had become an identity of myself; I was chasing the outcome of stopping needing validation online while believing I’m someone who needs it, so it never worked out, and I stayed stuck.

My conscious voice worked against me cause the more I tried, then failed and fell back to my pattern of seeking approval online, it voted for being a failure and pathetic person, enforcing this identity more and more on every attempt.

It didn’t change unless I started focusing on identity, when I changed the way I looked at myself, and started focusing on changing the internal beliefs that drive that. I did journaling, affirmations, and redefined my identities. I learned to make my non-negotiables clear and be bold on boundaries. I learned the reward of saying no, and the cost of saying yes. I started recognizing myself by my non-negotiables, aligning myself to identities of my higher self that I wanted to achieve, and soon enough I succeeded in changing my habits.

Now I don’t need anyone’s approval; my self-worth doesn’t rely on anyone validating me. I’m complete by myself. Praise and approval add to my value, but I don’t need them to feel worthy, cause not having them doesn’t make me worthless. It’s my internal belief, and I don’t need to seek validation anymore. I don’t need to try harder to resist, cause it has become easy with the correct identity in place; I can shape the habits I want and end the ones I want to quit.

How You Can Change Your Habits

You may want better health, good sleep, and a muscular body, but if you continue to believe you’re a junk eater, night owl, or a lazy person, then you’ll never be able to change them. It’s hard to change your habits if you never change the underlying beliefs that drive all your actions, which leads to your cycle of falling back into bad habits after multiple tries of quitting cause your underlying beliefs are the driving force of your bad habits. You can’t end them until you put an end to the force that drives them.

Most of the time in life, these habit changes and identity shifts happen unconsciously. You may not be aware of all the identities that you have, but if you look at all the things you do every day, you’ll find an identity in each of them. With awareness and intentional effort, we can consciously bring our attention to our identities and choose to change habits, instead of living life on autopilot.

People who have a habit of doing skincare love their skin and believe that they deserve good skin. The more pride you have in a particular aspect of your identity, the more motivated you’ll be to maintain the habits associated with it. The difference between people who do skincare and love doing it and the people who don’t do any skincare and hate the idea of it, have one difference, which is that the people who take care of their skin have underlying beliefs about having good skin, and they are proud of it. If you don’t have any belief in having good skin, doing any sort of skincare will be a hassle for you.

If you’re proud of how your hair looks, you’ll develop all sorts of habits to care for it and maintain it. If you love how your biceps, chest, or back look, you’ll love to go to the gym and make sure to never miss working out. If you love how your car looks, you’ll maintain it regularly.

True behavior change is identity change; you might start a habit because of motivation, but the only reason you’ll stick with one is that it becomes part of your identity. Anyone can convince themselves to visit the gym a few times, or eat healthy for a couple of days, but if you don’t shift the belief system behind the behavior, then it is hard to stick with long-term changes. Change is only temporary until they become part of who you are.

• The goal is not to write a blog; it’s to become a writer.
• The goal is not to go to the gym; it’s to become a disciplined person.
• The goal is not to take care of skin; it’s to become someone with good skin.

However, an identity can work against you too, cause behind every bad habit is an underlying belief.

• I’m a weak and pathetic person.
• I’m emotionally unstable.
• I’m not a morning person.
• I’m terrible at relationships and ruin everything.
• I’m always late
• I suck at leaving a good impression.

…and thousands of different variations. The more your conscious voice repeats it to yourself, the more you’ll vote for these identities and become these people unknowingly. The more deeply these voices and actions are tied to your identity, the more difficult to change them. The biggest barrier to positive change is identity conflict. Good habits can make a lot of sense and feel great when you’re motivated, but you’ll fail to adopt them if they conflict with your identity.

If you want to build a new habit, focus on building the identity.