Who do you want to be

When you are trying to do something new, or start a new habit, the words you say to yourself are very powerful and can result in significant changes.

Instead of saying to yourself ‘I am going to run’ or ‘I am going to eat healthy’, use a more powerful way of phrasing things, one that is about your identity — say ‘I am a runner’ or ‘I am a healthy eater’.

This way it’s about your idenity. It’s about who you are and who you want to be. When you talk to others, you’ll say ‘I am a runner’, not ‘I want to run more’. This small but powerful change can really influence how you think and act, and it trains your brain in the right identity that you want for yourself.

For example, if you are at morning tea at work and there are cookies and cakes, if you say to yourself ‘I want to eat healthy’ it gives you the option of choosing whether or not you want to eat that cookie or that cake, and allows your brain to give you reasons why it’s ok to eat that cookie.

If instead you say to yourself ‘I am a healthy eater’ then eating that cookie is in contradiction to your identity and our brains dislike contradictions like this. You therefore easily skip that cookie. And you don’t even have to say it out loud or to anyone else. Just say it to yourself. You are identifying as a healthy eater, it’s who you are.

Another example — running. If you want to run more frequently, tell yourself ‘I am a runner’. You then identify as a runner. So when your training run comes up in your calendar, you don’t choose whether you want to run or not, your identity is that of a runner, and runners run.

I’m using this powerful tool this year as I train for a half marathon.

I’ve also signed up for two races to help with my ‘I am a runner’ identity:

I’ve paired the half marathon with going away for the weekend to a lovely part of the country with a group of runners, so it adds so much fun to the goal too! Another motivator for me is that I don’t want to have a hard race or hurt myself by being unfit for these races, so I remind myself of this each day as I follow the training plan.

I am a runner!

What other self-identities do you want for 2023? I’m really keen to try and eat less chocolate…what self-identity sentence could I use for that one?

P.S. An extra tip — the brain hears positives, so if you say ‘I don’t eat chocolate’ the brain translates this as ‘I eat chocolate’ which results in exactly the opposite outcome you are looking for. So you always need to use a positive phrase e.g. instead of ‘I’m not a chocolate eater’, you could use ‘’I am a healthy eater’.

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