I’ll give an example of what I mean by identity-building. For years, decades even, I was a person who wanted to establish a habit of going to the gym. I kept failing at it, and failure to go to the gym became part of my identity.
And then, after years of the most abject failure, I did figure it out and now I go three times a week with zero effort or exercises of willpower. To the contrary, I love going. It’s my favorite thing. Trying to white-knuckle it instead of tackling it through the side of identity was a mistake.
Here’s what I did. An existing strong part of my identity is that I like to gamify everything. I’m also into productivity tracking. Yes, it’s very neoliberal, duh. So I started doing a challenge where I have to reach 10,000 steps a day. I had to sneak in those steps sometimes in the most bizarre conditions. I find it massively entertaining because nobody knows that I’m doing it. I have an 8 to 4 office job. It’s totally a quest to do the steps every day. I’ve managed to do my steps during blizzards, on intercontinental flights, and during all-day diversity trainings. This is so much fun that I didn’t even notice how I became an active, on-the-move person instead of a clinically sedentary one. From there, it was a short journey towards enjoying physical activity and wanting more of it. I downloaded an app, built a graph, and now I have a new game related to weight-lifting.
Of course, many people aren’t into gamification like I am. They have to figure out their own path of integrating things into what actually is their identity.
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