I don’t know about you, but I’ve found that my life is a day-to-day journey to reach my full potential. Whether it’s reaching my full potential in my health, my income, my relationships, or really anything I put effort into. The harsh truth is that a lot of us consistently fall short of that potential, despite making an effort. Sometimes it’s even us giving everything we have only to find out it wasn’t good enough. So how do we finally win? How do we stay motivated to keep giving more?
The answer: make an identity shift. Odd answer to hear, I know, but I promise you it’s the key you haven’t yet tried that’s keeping you locked into a difficult place in your life. Your life is a product of the automatic thoughts and actions you take on a daily basis without even knowing it. Where you see a hardship that could be an opportunity, a choice that you see as fate, or an impossible battle to fight that give on instead of pushing through and seeing a high chance of success. Your identity is, in fact, the root of all of the things that make up your life. It’s who you are when you’re not thinking about who you are.
Ever wonder why some people have the Midas touch and everything they touch turns to gold? It’s not luck or an accident, it’s simply that they carry an identity that is rooted in a set of beliefs, thoughts, and actions that see and approach the exact same situations in life differently than yours do. This is how they stay motivated in hardship. This is how they always find a way to win. It’s rooted in them. They didn’t get there easily and you can, in fact, get there also. It starts with realizing that you have identity gaps.
These gaps are equal to the gaps in your potential, and the bigger the gaps, the closer you are to rock bottom. There is a simple way for you to find and close the gaps. You seek the areas that scare you the most and that are the most difficult. If you find a moment where you can’t work any harder, work harder. If you find a moment that you’re scared of taking the next step, take the next step. As simple as this sounds, there is a lot going on psychologically and emotionally that is in fact shifting who you believe yourself to be. The more you do something, the more you get invested in it at an identity level. In fact, what you create creates you.
When you painstakingly fight inch by inch for something or in preparation for something, you get to a point where you feel like you’re owed the thing you’ve been working for. So when the moment comes that you are presented with a hardship, you stand up and dig deeper to fight instead of sitting back and letting the opportunity disappear.
If you’re looking to reach your full potential in life, it’s not going to come by accident. It’s going to come from you putting in the work to shift your identity to your core so you can wake up one day and realize you created a new you by what you fought to create.
Are you looking for more opportunities to transform your thinking and grow your capacity as a leader? Attend a Leadership Institute this year, by yourself or with your team, to invest learning resources in topics like organizational design, team habits, strategic planning, teacher retention, and more. Developed by education consultants and experts for leaders who are looking for deeper learning and leadership development, the Leadership Institute series promises 2 days to engage deeply with respective topics, and come away with a practical action plan to begin implementing at your organization. Register to say before the early bird deadline!
