Episode 158 A+A Podcast: The Identity Shift you Need to Achieve Your Big Dreams
The Identity Shift you Need to Achieve Your Big Dreams
Identity work is critical to achieving your big dreams and along with asking: what do I want to do or create, we need to ask: Who do I need to become to achieve my biggest business goals? As an entrepreneur, I'm sure you've already done your fair share of identity work. Spoiler alert: this work never ends!
You can become stuck in an outdated identity at any stage of business - this comes up for my 7 figure clients too. This might have you undercharging, people-pleasing, overworking, or resisting growth or visibility. You can end up holding yourself back without even realising it.
📖 Grab the free worksheet + guided visualisation for this episode at alignandattract.com/identity
In this episode of Align + Attract, we explore:
✔️ Why outdated identities sabotage success (and how to spot them)
✔️ The subconscious fears that can stop you from evolving into your next-level self
✔️ How habits, behaviours, and standards shape your identity
✔️ How to create more success and stay deeply connected to what matters most to you
I share real client transformations, a surprising lesson from Martha Stewart’s reinvention, and a powerful visualisation to help you step into the identity of the entrepreneur you’re meant to be.
🎧 Ready to expand into your next level?
Listen now on your favourite platform.
📖 Grab the free worksheet + guided visualisation at alignandattract.com/identity
💫 Join my Mastermind: http://alignandattract.com/mastermind
Related Align + Attract podcast episodes:
- Ep 151: The #1 Identity Shift that Changed Everything for Me
- Ep 45: Catching Up to the Reality of Where You Are
- Ep 36: Integrating your Identity
Don't miss next week's episode, we build on this ep with your Next-Level Habits!
Fabulous clients mentioned in today's episode:
Leonie Dawson: http://leoniedawson.com
Alysha Griffiths: https://www.breakawayeducation.com.au/
Jessamyn McLachlan: https://www.feltbrandstories.com/
Gulara Vincent: https://www.gularavincent.co.uk/
Gulara on the Align + Attract podcast
Transcript
As an entrepreneur, I know you'll be no stranger to identity work. It is something that comes up for us throughout our entrepreneurial journey, doesn't it? Right from that moment where you decide, I want to start my own business and you begin that transition and start to shift into that identity of being the business owner rather than the employee or the identity that you had before the business.
This work is ongoing. It deepens and there are more and more layers. Especially for those of us who do have big dreams, who do want to create things that we haven't created before, and who love being in that energy of expansion. If we are not really consciously stepping into that new identity that is a really solid match for what it is that we desire to create, we can be holding ourselves back without even realising it.
It can keep us stuck, undercharging, overworking. resisting visibility, or we just don't allow ourselves to achieve a greater level of success. Perhaps we don't feel worthy of it. We don't feel that we are deserving of that. So these updates are ongoing. In this episode, I'm going to be sharing so many little examples with you, my own examples from clients, examples from my mastermind.
We're going to look at how your identity shapes your results. We're going to look at the danger of outdated identities. I think we are aware of it. But it's really powerful to see how some of these outdated beliefs can hold us back.
We're going to look at how fears can hold us back from stepping into a new identity. And also we're going to be looking at the identity shifts that we're able to make through our habits, our behaviors, and through. Changing our standards and our expectations. So this is going to be a really juicy episode.
I do have a beautiful resource to go along with this episode and next week's episodes, I'm going to encourage you to download that right now. You can find it at alignandattract.com/identity. And the resource is a worksheet that is going to support you through the prompts and the questions that we're talking about in this episode and the next.
And I have taken an extract from a group call that I hosted. In the mastermind, you can only see me in this call, and I'm leading you through a visualization where you are seeing this. Next level version of you who has achieved what you desire to create over the next six months, 12 months, and you're really able to see what she's doing, how she's feeling and to make some really conscious, beautiful choices around that as well.
Let's dive into this episode. Your identity shapes your results. In Atomic Habits, James Clear says every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish And so what we're looking at here is becoming increasingly intentional about these actions, not from a place of perfectionism, but from a place of supporting ourselves.
And as I was thinking about this episode. I started to reflect on the Martha Stewart documentary that I watched recently. What a master of reinvention. This is an example of somebody who has really evolved her identity. Now I understand that Martha Stewart, she has got some problematic traits and so on.
But look at where she started. Like she was a homemaker. She was all about little details and making things beautiful in the home and then she really was from that point the very first influencer. She translated her knowledge and her passion into so many different products.
She had an entire magazine series and books. She had TV shows and she just went into so many different areas around homemaking, lifestyle, weddings, dinner parties, gardening, everyday food, holidays. And so that was an era and then she went through a really major takedown, which you will have seen if you have watched that documentary.
And then it was really interesting to see her comeback journey from that as well. Her company really took a massive dive. She was a billionaire. And then she was sent to jail for lying about aspects of insider trading.
Her reputation was ruined in many ways. And then, she was a guest on a comedy show for the roasting of Justin Bieber. In that show, she met Snoop Dogg. And also on that show, she showed that she was really funny and she connected with an entirely new audience who didn't just look at her as a bit of a b-, they looked at her as someone who had a big personality and she had this sense of humour. She went on to have this great connection with Snoop Dogg. They had a show together, they did other things together, and then in 2023 at 81 years of age, Martha became the oldest woman to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue magazine. It's just wild looking at that evolution of her identity. I'm not suggesting that you or indeed any of us aspire to be a Martha Stewart but she's a master of the reinvention. I know you'll be able to think about other well known people or even just entrepreneurs that you know, who have also been able to evolve their identity, whether that is to then pivot or whether it's to, to enjoy increasing levels of success or to come back from setbacks. I think we can all find lessons in some of those stories.
Let's look at the danger of outdated identities. In my work with clients, I have had thousands of client sessions over the years, many of those with entrepreneurs, and I get to hear so many limiting beliefs. Things like I can't achieve that.
That's too hard for me. I'm just not that kind of person or people won't like me if I now some of these beliefs we really need to dig into to find them. Because what I do find with a lot of entrepreneurs, especially those of us who have achieved some success, we can be really smart in outwitting ourselves and almost pretending that we don't.
Another really common one is I'm not enough. I'm not good enough. And you might not feel any one of these things all the time, but it might come up when you are experiencing a challenge or something is not working as planned.
These are the times we want to look out for those limiting beliefs and what they're triggering in us. And sometimes that can be something from childhood, something from an earlier time in our life. And we've gotten a little bit stuck. In that identity, we haven't caught up to where we are right now.
In terms of the psychology of this, our brain is always going to be seeking evidence to confirm what we believe about our identity. If you see yourself as someone who isn't good at marketing or who hates selling, you're going to unconsciously sabotage those areas. You're certainly not going to market or sell as much as you might if you really believed you were fantastic at those things, or you saw yourself as someone who was learning those things, and then if you think something like, Oh, people are not going to like me if I become more successful. This is also quite common. Then you'll interpret people's behaviour that way. Even if their behaviour or what they've said is nothing to do with that. It's nothing to do with you. You might be seeking that and if you're seeking it, it can be more likely that you're going to find it.
When we're able to evolve our identity into seeing ourselves as the type of person who can handle that, it does not have the same impact as when we see ourselves as somebody who can't handle that.
A really big identity shift that I see so many of my clients make is into seeing themselves as a leader or seeing themselves as the CEO of their business, rather than feeling like a CEO. In some way, they're along for the ride, or they are the healer, or they are the practitioner, or they are the coach, or whatever their modality or their skill set is, once you see yourself as the owner or the leader, the CEO of your business, that can really change your energy, your decision making, how you show up, and what it is that you are willing to do.
So I've got an example. A client who was in my mastermind, Alysha Griffiths, when I first started working with her in the mastermind, she saw herself as somebody who was a tutor, a former teacher, also she did have a tutor centre. We did so much work around her seeing herself as. The tutor centre owner, which she was, and a former teacher who had really exceptional additional qualifications, which really served this iteration of her business and added so much value to all of the clients of the centre.
And as she developed her leadership, she started to utilise team more. Her communication became so much clearer and more refined. And she really started to value and grow that business in a way that she hadn't done to the same degree when she had that different identity. And she also started paying herself more once she really understood her role as the business owner and the leader of that business. That's just one example of those kinds of shifts that we can make that can be incredibly transformational.
Let's have a look at the fears that can come up as we are evolving our identity and the fear of who you might become. Now we can have these subconscious fears of who it is that we will be if we create more success.
We might fear that we're going to become greedy. Or lazy or work obsessed or a workaholic will have some kind of negative association with creating more success. Or we might feel that creating more success is going to make us a bad friend, a bad partner. Or a bad parent, someone who's disconnected, not engaged.
We want to really catch this. We want to see this. And then we want to remind ourselves that I get to choose and we get to be really conscious here rather than just letting life happen to us. So you can choose who you want to become.
And I have an example. this of a client who does this really well. Leonie Dawson holds the standard that I'm a seven figure business home owner, and I'm a very present connected wife and mother. That's a non-negotiable for her. So all of her decisions align with that. We work on things that might relate to her being a wife or being a mother within her sessions, even though they are predominantly focused on her business, but because she has that standard, she wants across the board, her life to reflect those standards and what she requires.
I'd love you to keep an eye out for yourself and find out where you are feeling like I'm going to lose, or there is some kind of negative side effect if I achieve more success. Notice where you are making this a black and white scenario where you are separating these two things, and I'd invite you to find how you can unite them.
If it doesn't feel possible, your reframe can be, I am learning how to be this. That's something you can get your energy behind when you do get your energy behind it. It's going to make all the difference. Another huge fear that I see come up for my clients, is this fear that you cannot handle more success. So yes, I want the success, but I cannot handle what is going to come with it.
That can look like more complexity, more clients, more decisions, more communication, more requirement to have refined systems, potentially more marketing, greater levels of Leadership. Now this can all be true. There might be more complexity, there might be more load in certain ways. There might be more responsibility.
This is more likely to be true than not. And the way we want to be thinking about this, we want to be using our growth mindset. So that's Carol Dweck's concept of the growth mindset and seeing ourselves as someone who is able to step into this identity, who is learning how to handle that, who can expand your capacity and who can begin to hold more, receive more, delegate more, lead with more refinement, that it is really not that you're going to be the exact same person and all of a sudden all of this extra responsibility is going to land on you like a pile of bricks.
You're going to evolve into that and you can choose to consciously evolve into that and to become the person who' is much like this version of you that you are now. If you were to hand the version of you from five years ago, your current load, responsibility, all of the things that you're juggling, would she be able to handle it? Possibly not, depending on that growth trajectory you've been on in different parts of your life.
And yet. You are right now, right? Even if you think, Oh, I'm juggling something. Some things feel hard. It's like you are still managing. And so that can continue. And in fact, you can see yourself as someone who is handling it with even greater ease and greater levels of refinement. And skill. That's the kind of work that you can do when you're really engaged in this identity work.
I've got a really beautiful example here with my client, Gulara Vincent, when she was creating her practitioner training, and I had Gulara on the podcast just recently. Initially, she didn't feel like she was the type of person who'd be able to hold 20 people in her practitioner training. That wasn't even her initial goal.
And as she was attracting people in, we did this work around identity and her being able to see herself as someone who could hold space like this. And she did it with ease. It wasn't even something that we were working on once she actually was working with those 20 people. She did the work up front to shift her identity and that made all of the difference.
It wasn't her skill set that needed to change. It was the way that she saw herself. And I'm sure you can relate to this. Now, let's look at stepping into your future identity and how we can create identity shifts through habits, behaviours, and the standards that we have. And what I've got for you here. Is an actual exercise and a video, and you're able to sign up for this at alignandattract.com/identity. What I have done here is I've taken an extract from an actual mastermind call. You can only see me on the video and I'm taking the group through a visualisation. And so I'm inviting you to do this. As well with us, and in this video, you are deciding what is the future identity that you are consciously stepping into.
This is going to help you to bring together everything that we have been talking about. My mastermind participants loved this whole call and this visualisation that we did was so powerful for them.
When you're doing that, just remember, you do not need to choose between this or that. You can have both. Remind yourself, I can have this and that, particularly when you find things are coming up for you. Let's set the intention.
I can learn how to do both. I'm going to be able to do both of those things. Can I find any examples of anyone in the world who has done both of these things? And can I believe that I can do both of these things? And then. As you start to see this possibility, then you can move forward and intentionally anchor into it, decide this is what I'm going to do.
This is the standard that I'm setting for myself. So for example, I can have the successful business. whatever that looks like for you and the wonderful connected relationship with my partner and the present time with my family. And the question to ask yourself is who do I want to be when I achieve my business goals?
We don't become happier because we achieve our goals, but we can become happier because of who we've allowed ourselves to come. We can feel happy in pursuit of a goal. We can really enjoy that journey of being really intentional about what it is that we are creating.
And moving towards that. And so often, what we discover is that this future identity that we desire to step into, we can start embodying that now. We can change our behaviors now. We can change habits now. We can change our Now, and it brings so much of that power into this moment, we can be it.
Right now. It's just so incredible when we really click into this. So remember there is a worksheet that goes along with this and there is a video and you can find these at alignandattract.com/identity. The link is in your show notes so you can just click through and I can't wait to hear how you go with this.
And I know already how incredibly powerful. It is because of all of the incredible feedback I received from my mastermind clients when we did this. And I just really want to remind you of this power of making these identity shifts and Doing that work to allow yourself to change the way you see yourself to change what you believe is possible for you.
I have another beautiful example of this with a client in my mastermind, Jessamyn McLaughlin of Felt Brand Stories. She's a social media manager. She owns an agency and that was. Such a big part of her identity, of course, but she had this other hidden side to her identity. It was hidden at the time, which related to her intuitive abilities.
And she had this deep desire to hold space for other people, to Really tap into and tell the stories that matter in their business and to bring these to light through. This beautiful process that she takes her clients through. And so she's created this space. She's created this circle and she's stepped into this new identity of, yes, it's still being the social media manager and owning the agency and also being this incredible intuitive.
woman who is leading a community in this work. I have my own stories about how I have shifted my identity. I actually am a strategist as one of my primary skill sets.
And hadn't really seen that I had this story running from back when I was a teacher so many years ago that said, I'm not good at business. I don't have this business background. And then it became, Oh, I'm a healer. It just happens to be that I'm good at business for a healer. And ultimately it was like, no, you just happened to be like, Great strategy for a strategist, not just for a healer or not just for a teacher.
Another story I've had where I needed to evolve my identity was as my children were just moving out of those real little tiny years. And I was starting to really get that sense that I was ready to step back into the business.
a little more and grow my business. I found these fears were coming up and it was just as we've been talking about today. I can't have this and that. I can't grow my business and be a good mom. I can't, expand. And, do this other part of my life really well and be really present, do all the things that I desire to do outside of my work.
It's like this feeling of, I have to choose, or there's going to be these downsides that are going to come increased visibility or with the increased complexity within the business. It's Oh no, that's, it's too much for me. I can't do that. I can't handle that. So I had some work to do to really understand that I am the person who can handle that and to really step into that identity.
And then additionally, I have ADHD and I had stories around that as well. Oh, it's really hard for me to be. organized and I didn't feel like I wanted to commit to longer projects and to plan long term. And look, maybe it took me longer to figure it all out and to put all those pieces together, but I did.
And so that was an update to my identity as well, being able to incorporate the truth that I do have ADHD into my identity. And like to add the and I can also learn how to do these things in ways that make sense for me. And as a result of that, both of these things integrating this belief that I can be a beautiful mother and have this beautiful expansive business and that I can have a PhD and I can grow a more complex business.
I totally changed my business model and now I've got a business that has multi five figure recurring revenue which is, it's pretty incredible in terms of what I truly believed was possible for me. doing this identity work to step into that has truly been so transformative.
And the final thing to say is this, that this identity work that we do, it doesn't just happen in an instant. This work is often incremental.
It's not that you don't create big shifts. It's just that ultimately these shifts happen over time. You make a shift and then the world reflects something back to you and then you create a new shift and then the world's reflecting something else back to you. And it's this constant communion that you are in with life and with your business and you're continuing to expand and deal with challenges.
in new ways and deal with success in new ways and that is really powerful. And I really do love doing this work with my clients in my mastermind because I am in Slack with my clients on a daily basis during the week. My clients can come in and ask me a question every weekday, should they choose and we can do these micro shifts.
It's related to the identity that you're stepping into. It's not just the only thing that we're focusing on, but it can be one thing that we're focusing on as it comes up. And in just a really short audio that I might record for you, you can make that micro shift, you can integrate that aspect of your identity, and then you can move on.
You can make fresh decisions, you can make new choices, and you just keep on having that opportunity to step in. We are doing this work over time. And of course we also do have the group calls, which you get to experience if you sign up for this video that I created for you with the worksheet.
Find the worksheet and guided visualisation here: alignandattract.com/identity.
You can find my Mastermind here.
* This transcript is lightly edited for clarity, please excuse any errors!
