Ep. 76 Your Identity and Your Habits [Jumpstart Your Year: Day 16]

Happy New Year!

Welcome to the 2024 Jumpstart Your Year series, where we're coming to you every day this January with mini episodes to help you get reflecting on what's working and what's not in your parenting and productivity journey.

Our goal with the series is to create momentum and spark creativity so you can go into the new year with clarity and intention.

On Day 16, Christina reflects on the question:

How does your identity impact your habits?

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Transcript

Christina: Hey, I'm Christina, life and business coach, work from home entrepreneur, homeschooling mom, co host of the Parenting and Productivity by Design podcast. And to jumpstart your year, we're coming to you every day this month with mini episodes to get you reflecting on what's working and what's not in your parenting and productivity journey.

Our goal with this series is to create momentum and spark creativity. So you can go into the new year with clarity and intention. And today we're going to be talking about identity and how that impacts our activities and our habits that we have. So a lot of times when we look at what we're trying to do and what habits and things we're trying to shift, it's going from who we currently are into this new version of ourselves.

But we don't always take it to that full new version. We'll just start to adapt some different habits but consider that all brand new. So we're not actually adopting the identity of somebody who does these things. Normally, we're still in our old persona of somebody who doesn't do this and who's trying to do this new habit or trying to incorporate this new these new activities into our life.

So, for example, we're I never identified as somebody who was athletic, and we talked about that. But when I started doing the Couch to 5K and started running, I had never run before. And when I was doing it, it was as somebody who wasn't a runner, and who wasn't active, and who wasn't athletic. And I was just trying this new thing.

And the longer that I kept with that mentality, the more it felt like this was something strange that I was doing. This is something that I wasn't good at. It was kind of free and forcing all of these, even though I was still doing the activity, it still felt like it was something out of the ordinary.

It was not something that was just a part of me. And as I began to do it more and more, I started to adopt the attitude of. I am a runner. I'm not someone who runs sometimes. I am a runner. And when I started doing that, it just became something that I just did because I'm a runner. Therefore, I run rather than I'm this person who doesn't do these things and I'm trying to do this.

So it actually allowed me to incorporate the habit and kind of fully integrate it within myself and be able to become this person who does this. And there's been a lot of. Talk about this shift in identity and how you can use this to your advantage. We often hear a lot about the imposter syndrome, and I think a lot of that comes down to this.

It's when we start to expand beyond our comfort zone and expand beyond what we think is possible for ourselves. That we start to get these feelings of that imposter syndrome. Like, this isn't really me. I'm just trying this on. I don't really know what I'm doing. And then you're have that cognitive dissonance of what you think that you are versus what.

Your actions are doing and you're just constantly kind of battling back and forth and your, your body and your brain doesn't really know where to go with that. It's like, sometimes I run, but also I don't like this isn't who I am. So this is just kind of pretend, but when you adapt and you fully embody and you fully just go into it and adopt that new identity as I am a runner, or I am a business owner, or I am.

Someone who keeps a clean house, you know, whatever the, the new kind of thing that you're trying to do and you just. frame it as someone who does that and who is that, then it just becomes a part of your normal every day because obviously you're going to do that thing because you are that person and not say that it's going to take away all the cognitive dissonance.

You'll probably have a little bit in the beginning, but it'll smooth that over much quicker and you can just kind of become This person who does that, and then as that habit becomes routine, and it is just something that you do, that's when you get to then stack on these additional habits. So, the source, and the way you think about your identity can have a really big impact and I think so often we get stuck on the actions of this is what I need to be doing these are the next steps.

This is how I need to do it, I need to make sure that I get up, you know. I'm going to start getting up early in the morning. So I'm going to set my alarm for 5 30, but I'm not a morning person. So like, this is hard. And this is something that's out of the ordinary and a lot of times we might stick with it for a while, but then we'll go back and we'll revert to our previous things.

Like I'm, I'm not a morning person, but I tried it, I tried it for a while. But that's just not who I am, where if you start to inhabit those. I am becoming a morning person, or I can be someone that gets a lot of productivity done right away in the morning and start to identify that as part of who you are.

The stories that we tell ourselves are the things that we want to be true. We want to be right. So if we tell ourselves that we're not a morning person, we're going to look for things that validate that, that say, yeah, of course, like, obviously I can't get up in the morning because I'm not a morning person.

Look at all this evidence. But if you start to look for and identify as, you know what, I can get things done in the morning, I can get up and I can be productive and I can have these nice quiet moments, your brain will look for evidence that that's true because you're constantly looking to prove your brain's constantly trying to prove itself, right?

So when you inhabit these identities, you can actually start to change the chemistry in your brain that will. Look for all of this evidence that that is true, and that becomes just your new identity. So as you're looking at, and as you're going through and working through this process with it, look at the things that you're trying to implement.

Look at the things that you want to do. Or, you know, if you vision like what your future self and who your future self is, or your higher self or your favorite self, I've also heard it called. What are the things that That they do. And then how can you start to embody that identity? How can you pull that into your current identity?

And then what are the habits that person would do? So how do you make it become more true and make yourself actually believe it? So you're not fighting against what you perceive as your current limitations. So that's our journal prompt for today is like, how can you look at and how can you identify? and switch your identity to implement the things that you want to do and the things that are important to you.

So if you like this episode, you might also like the village, which is our community and cowork space where we offer opportunities for connection, accountability, and intention setting. And you can check out the link in the show notes for the upcoming meetups. And you can also sign up for an email where you can follow along with our daily prompts and do the work with us.

And if you'd like more personalized support, feel free to reach out for private or group coaching with either myself or Kimberlyn. I will look forward to seeing you on another episode of Parenting and Productivity by Design. Thanks.