Recently, I had a crystallizing of an idea that I've shared a few times before.
The idea is how we think about our identity.
You may carry multiple identities. Parent, partner, friend, best friend, whatever your job title is, child, etc.
For the sake of this post, you can pick any one of them.
***
I want you to imagine a piece of wood.
It's the shape of a cylinder, it's as tall as you are, and it's as wide as your shoulders.
This piece of wood is sticking out of the water, several feet away from the shore of a big sandy beach.
Got it?
Now I want you to imagine standing on it.
It doesn't really matter how you got up there, but you're up there now. Standing on that piece of wood.
Suppose now you see a wave coming.
The wave is as tall as the piece of wood you're standing on.
How might you feel in this moment?
***
Ok let's get you off that piece of wood.
Now, I'd like you to imagine standing on that big sandy beach instead.
You can still see the piece of wood out there, and you're no longer standing on it.
You see a wave coming and you notice it's the same height as the piece of wood.
How might you feel now?
***
I'd like to draw a parallel to how you felt in each of those moments and what that can teach us about identity.
When our identity is rooted in something very specific, it feels like standing on that piece of wood.
When our identity is rooted in something much broader, that's when we're on the beach.
The wave is a metaphor for a thing that threatens your identity.
Waves will always come. That's their nature.
When our identity is rooted in something broad, we're in a much better position to handle threats to it.
***
If you're wondering how to go from the piece of wood to the beach—how to move from the specific to the broad—I can share what's worked for me.
Instead of rooting your identity in being a thing, try rooting it in doing an action.
At one point in my life, this was the difference between being a marketer and being someone who loves to learn.
When I was a marketer, it was so easy to fall into the trap of comparing myself to other marketers. Whenever the term "marketing" was talked about in a meeting at work, I would find myself getting very sensitive. When some people would come to me specifically seeking an "expert" in marketing, I would struggle with living up to that pressure.
When I made the change to root my identity in being someone who loves to learn, it made my actual job as a marketer much more enjoyable. Instead of comparing, I would get curious about what other marketers could teach me. When "marketing" was mentioned in a meeting, I'd be keen to understand how it might add value. When someone sought me out as an "expert" in marketing, I would pivot to call them "experts" in their own fields and move to a space of us both having shared expertise that we can learn from.
I'll end this post in simple grammatical terms.
Be a verb, not a noun.
p.s. If you're curious about different versions of this same idea, I wrote about them in Always a Phoenix (2 min read) and The Things We Save in a Flood (3 min read).
