In this video, I’m going to discuss the identity shift that will change your life and why a paradigm is just a multitude of habits. I've got three books here. The first one you have probably never heard of. I was just rereading it and I got two others, but this first one right here isn't in bookstores. I'm kind of like a nerd that likes to read really old books. So this book is called "Paradigms" and it basically talks about how everything in your life, whether it's your career, your finances, or your relationships, is the result of paradigms.
This book right here is called Atomic Habits. It's probably the best book ever written on habits. It features the latest advances in neuroscience and psychology, and it breaks down habits. But what really surprised me about the book is that he said the purpose of a habit is to change your identity, your self-identity, and you cannot ultimately change your life or your habits without changing your identity.
The Identity Shift Must Turn You Into Someone Positive
So it's like this: you've been in debt forever. You want to get out of debt. You want financial freedom. Well, in order to do that, you want to change your life, right? You want to change your finances. Well, you have to change your habits, i.e., your paradigms. But in order to do that, you have to shift your identity. So what do you want? If you want to be someone who has financial freedom, you want to be a millionaire. You want to be retired, but your identity is someone who's always in debt.
Or let's say, for example, you want to get healthy and for the last 10 years you've been pretty overweight. You know, you have been, you know, you've had some health problems with it. The doctors said you needed to lose weight for your own health. They say you're having these problems and you identify yourself as someone who is overweight. But in order to change that, you have to have a new self-identity as someone who's in the best shape of their life. Your body looks better than ever. You feel fantastic.
Break The Habit Of Being Yourself
You can feel it in your stomach. You can feel it in your face when you smile. You're lighter, you're healthier, and you have a new identity. I was 19 years old when I dropped out of college, and I decided I wanted to be a writer like these people, and I had an identity crisis as a jock. I was an idiot. I only got into college because my mom wrote my S.A.T. stuff because I could never focus. I got kicked out of school. This book is called Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself.
So to change your identity, you have to break the habit of being yourself because all your personality is a collection of habits, also known as a paradigm. So your personality is just a habit, that's all it is, and what he says in this book is to change your personal reality. You have to change your personality. So I'm going to walk you through four steps to change your self-identity or your self-image. I'm going to share these four steps so that you can use them in your own life. So step number one is that you have to identify your memories that build your story.
Identify The Memories That Built The Stories
So think of your outside reality as just a reflection of this pyramid. No, we're not talking about a pyramid scheme. We're just talking about a pyramid here. So at the bottom of that pyramid is memory. At the top is reality. The right is identity in reality because your identity creates a reality. So up here is the amount of money you want. The body you want, the health you want, the career you want, the life you want, the change in habits that you want. That's the end result. But to get to the end result, you have to identify the memories that built the stories.
That ultimately controls your identity, so another way to look at that is that memory creates a story that equals identity. Your identity is your personality, and your personality controls your personal reality. So I know we don't really know each other that well. Let me just tell you a quick personal story of how this relates and this is also all proven through neuroscience and Dr. Joe Dispenza's book, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself. So if you want to change your identity, we go back to that pyramid. It starts with your memories, right?
Your Passion Will Lead You To Achieve Your Goals
And I always loved basketball. That's what I did. It was my whole life. I was just a jock. I was going to go to school to play college basketball then. I was going to go play overseas. It was the only thing I cared about. I hated school, and I didn't really have any other passions other than basketball. But then in eighth grade, I failed my science class and I almost got my eligibility for basketball taken away.
So I tried as hard as I could to pass my classes because I cared about basketball. What ended up happening was that every time that I would spend all this time studying, I would do just as badly on those tests. I'd forget everything that I learned. I had to get a tutor then. I was diagnosed with ADD, and I thought that I was not very smart, and this led me ultimately to getting kicked out of my junior English class, and having to finish an independent study where you sit in a room by yourself and don't have a teacher. There's just a supervisor making sure no one breaks windows and starts throwing desks, and you're with all the other crazy kids that are also told they have all these ADD and ADHD problems.
The Identity Shift Is An Outcome Of Your Paradigm Shift
I'm sitting there in this class and I'm like, "Geez, I'm stupid." I've got to get really good at basketball because I'm stupid. And then years flash by, and I get into college. I get to play basketball. My mom wrote my admission essays to college because I didn't know how to write or do anything. Then flash forward a few years later. I'm 19 years old, a freshman in college, and I'm sitting in my dorm room by myself reading all of these epic books. “This is what I want to do," I think. "I want to study human potential." "I'm going to travel around the world." “I'm going to write a book all about it.” It's going to be epic. I'm going to become a famous author. There's no reason to go to school because I already know what I want to do and school is not going to help me do it.
Then, just like that, a memory in your life triggers a story, and that story becomes a paradigm, or a habit, or a self-identity. So if you want to start to change your outside reality, you get to the core of your identity, which gets to the core of the stories that you tell about yourself. What are the stories that you tell about yourself from memories that usually occur in childhood? If you can go back to them, you can rewrite the operating script or the story. Big Idea number two is that once you identify the story, you have to reimagine it or build a new story, which in turn changes your identity, and then it changes your daily habits that control your life. This idea of a shift in identity or self-image was popularized by Maxwell Maltz.
Why Do You Need The Identity Shift?
Dr. Maxwell Maltz wrote probably the most famous psychology book ever. He was a famed plastic surgeon, and the book was called Psycho Cybernetics. So he'd have all these people come in and they'd be rich and they'd want these epic surgeries. He would do these epic surgeries and make them look freaking perfect. I chiseled chins, chiseled this, chiseled that. Everything was great. brand new nose. They were amazing, and then he would see them a month or three months or six months later.
Then they'd want to change something else, and he noticed you could change the outside appearance, but if you didn't change the self image or the self concept, then you could not get lasting change. Here's one of his most powerful quotes: “The science of cybernetics does not tell us that man is a machine, but that man has and uses a machine." Furthermore, it tells us how that machine functions and how it can be used. So the machine that governs your life is your self-identity, your story, or your self-image.
Cybernetics Is The Machine Within The Mind
A cybernetic mechanism is the same thing as a GPS. It has a pattern to get you from New York to Los Angeles. It has a pattern of flying from Los Angeles to Sydney. It's on an airplane. It's a GPS. Your subconscious, your self-image, your identity—that's your cybernetic mechanism, and that's why Maxwell Maltz titled the book "Psycho," meaning mind, and "Cybernetics," meaning the machine within the mind. Now here's the big thing: this machine controls your whole life. When I started my career and I wrote my first book, I finally broke through from having ADD and being stupid. I wrote this book and all the publishers told me no, and every single publisher said the same thing, "You are too young."
So, once again, I've had a traumatic emotional experience. My dreams are denied. I was told the same thing, "I'm too young." That emotion and that memory were stored in my subconscious as a belief system or story that I was too young to become a successful author. So essentially, a big part of self-development, the most important and lasting personal transformation, comes from unlearning. You have to unlearn who you think you are and who you think you aren't. It's just a story. It's just a paradigm. It's just a self-identity that's wired into your actual neural circuitry of your brain. The amazing thing is that we now know why this is one of the best times in human history to be alive is because we now know through neuroscience that the brain is plastic, meaning it's changeable neuroplasticity.
Create Your New Life Story
It means the brain's ability to change, and if you can tell a new story, then you can change your brain. You can change your habits, you can change your identity, and you can change your life. So you say to yourself, "What do I want?" You go through your mind, you find those memories, you find the stories you built, and then you say, "Who do I want to be" or "What's my new story?" My new story was that I'm not a young author that has ADD. I'm a world-renowned author, making millions of dollars and inspiring millions of people. Then you build a new image by first detaching from your old one and asking yourself, "What do I want?" rather than "What do I think?"
I can get what's possible based on my past, which is just the memories, which is just the old personality, which is just the old story. We now know through neuroscience that when you start to build that picture, you activate new cells in your brain. You build new neural connections. You change your brain. When you change your brain, you change the way it chemically and neurologically operates, which changes your mental activity. Your mental activity is just your personality, your identity, or your story, and thus you start to change your life. For now, the way that you do this is through a good old-fashioned journal. You pull out a pen and a pad and you write it all in the present tense in detail.
The Identity Shift Needs You To Forget Old Habits
Who do you want to be? How do you want your life to look? And you evoke the sense of "what is it going to feel like?" "What does it really look like?" What does it look like when you wake up and you're 20 pounds lighter and in the best shape of your life? Your heart is better and your blood pressure is lower. What does it feel like? What does it look like when you look at yourself in the mirror and your eyes are whiter and your smile bigger? What does it feel like to wake up and see the beautiful mountains from your brand new house now that you're a successful business person? What does it look and feel like? And you pull out a pen and a pad and you take five to ten minutes and you ask yourself, "What do I want?" Who do I want to be? What does it look like and what does it feel like?
You detail that specifically in the present tense. You've officially started to write a new story and build a new paradigm. The reason that I'm so big on combining this with hypnosis is that science tells us now that, as I stated earlier, the most important part of self-development is unlearning. Unlearning your story, unlearning your identity, and thus unlearning your habits can help you recreate your entire life. So when I do this, I do it daily. I put on my Free Success Hypnosis. Step number four comes from atomic habits, the latest studies on how to effectively change habits. In order to do that, there's something called "implementation intention''.
Use Repetition Regularly To Put A New Identity Into Your Subconscious
Now this is when you set a clear-defined effort goal. The way that effort goal is something you show up for, and the way that this looks in order to change your identity is that you set your intention of implementation around re-reading what you wrote out in the previous step. So every day I read out how I'm inspiring millions of people. My books are sold all over the world, and I used to tape this to my fridge and read it aloud twice a day, twice a night. The reason this is so powerful is because you start to activate new cells in your brain and you start to regularly use repetition to start to put a new identity into the corners of your subconscious. Now, this is an easy step to do.
You can just tape it up to your fridge, you can tape it up to your mirror, and you can read it every single solitary day. So now we're getting to the end here. You found the memories that control your story. You went back into your childhood, the early years of your life and, just like I said for myself, you found the memory that created the story that equals your identity. I have ADD. I'm too young, so it's my identity. I'm living a limited reality. Those memories build the stories that create your identity and your reality. Now you can go back in and you can build a new story. The reason that this is so important is that imagination is what allows you to build a new self-image.
Imagination Sets The Picture Of Your Goals
So what Dr. Maxwell Maltz started doing with his patients in his book Psycho Cybernetics is he would bring them in, not just for their plastic surgery, but for a form of self-image counseling where he would help them use their imagination to build a new self-image. Here's what he said about why this is so important: "A human being always acts and feels and performs in accordance to what he imagines to be true about himself and his environment, for imagination sets the goal picture, which our automatic mechanism works on." We act or fail to act not because of will, as is so commonly believed, but because of imagination. "
Now think about this. Your life right now is the product of your own imagination. I imagined that I had all these learning problems, and I wasn't smart because I had a memory that I deduced. I got a meaning from it that says I am not smart, but then I just imagined it. Maybe I wasn't good at science in eighth grade because I didn't care about it. Maybe that was just it. But we use our imagination negatively. We imagine that we're being cheated on. We imagine that we'll always be alone. The right guy or the right woman isn't out there. We imagine we don't have the resources. We imagine we aren't qualified enough. We imagine that we could put all our energy into something and it wouldn't work out. It seems rational; it seems logical because it's based on a memory of a past experience, but we're carrying that into the future.
Changing Your Old Story Through Imagination Will Result To Identity Shift
Now you can use your imagination constructively or destructively. When you use it constructively, you unlearn what you imagined in the past and you build a new picture. a new perspective on how you treat yourself; on how you eat; on your health; on your exercise; on your money; on your daily life; on where you live; on how you feel; on how you interact with others. This new image builds a new picture. This new picture builds new neurological connections. This new neurological connection builds a new brain which controls you chemically, which controls your mental activity, which controls your identity, your paradigms, your habits, and the outside results and circumstances of your life.
It begins and changes through the repetition of imagination. The only reason your self-identity or self-image exists is because it was repeated. You can start to change this every single day by reading these statements out loud in front of the mirror. Remember, when you change your identity, you change your life, and you can change your identity by identifying the memories that often were early in our lives that we built a certain meaning or story. That ultimately controls our perception, our habits, and the results of our lives, but remember, you are not the victim of these circumstances and you can change them through the power of your own imagination.