Are You Experiencing Identity Drift and What Can You Do About It?

One of my clients came to me dealing with deep uncertainty about himself.  His lack of confidence was at an all-time low.  He was de-energized at work and that was bleeding into the rest of his life.  He was having a difficult time making proactive decisions.  He felt stuck, almost paralyzed in his creative work.  And the more stuck he felt, the more he withdrew and didn't give his best contributions. "How do I find my place of confidence and self esteem again?"  he asked me with deep sincerity.

He was experiencing what I call Identity Drift.

What Is Identity Drift?

Identity Drift is when

• you begin to lose your sense of self;
• you're not sure who you really are anymore;
• you're feeling uncertain about yourself, little by little unable to recognize what makes you You;
• you find yourself trying to take on qualities and attributes that are no longer yours but are someone else's (you're trying to be something other than what you really are);
• you've lost confidence in yourself;
• you're becoming more and more satisfied with status quo (not rocking the boat wherever you are for fear that you'll get judged, criticized, or devalued, which is more blows to your sense of self worth--so you prefer to simply go with the flow and not creates waves)--you begin to simply drift along with whatever current you're in;
• You've lost your center and place of most authentic power.

Have you ever felt some of those things?  If so, you're not alone.  Many of us are caught up in Identity Drift.

What Are Consequences of Identity Drift?

The consequences are painful:

• living in a state of high stress and anxiety
• losing your confidence
• lowering your sense of worth / value
• feeling lack of energy
• feeling depressed about yourself, your future, and everything else in your life
• comparing yourself to others and always coming up short
• wishing to disengage and withdraw either emotionally or physically
• experiencing the onset of physiological symptoms and health problems

So what can you do if you find yourself caught in Identity Drift?  How do you stop the drift?  Here are several suggestions.

5 Ways to Stop Identity Drift

Know your strengths

Because your strengths are based on your natural preferences (specific wiring in your brain), when you discover them, embrace them, and pay attention to them, you are placing yourself right in the middle of your true Self.  They are accurate descriptions of who you are and how you best live your life.  Leaning into your strengths places you in alignment with authenticity.

Identify how you're currently using your strengths in your every day life

The more aware you become of how you're using your strengths, the more competent and confident you become.  Paying attention and developing awareness are key.

Keep a diary in which you record evidences of strengths-based behaviors you engage in during the day

Increasing awareness and consciousness of your strengths increases exponentially when you keep a record of you behaviors and actions that manifest your strengths.  And every time you write a note describing an action, you're increasing your sense of self and your confidence in your abilities to live well.

Stop comparing yourself to others

Reducing Identity Drift comes about by focusing on yourself not on others.  When we're drifting, we tend to compare and think that we should be more like others (since we're not very clear on who we are).  But we need to stop confusing ourselves.  We need to pay more attention to how we're strong and how we use those strengths.

Intentionalize ways to step into your strengths more frequently

Start identifying specific actions you can take that are genuine expressions of all your strengths.  Write them down.  Look at them every day.  Set one behavior goal each day based upon one of your strengths.  Why?  When you're using your strengths in authentic ways you increase your sense of self, confidence, and personal energy.  You're aligning more deeply with the way your brain is wired.  You're rediscovering some very core pieces of what makes you uniquely You.

When you choose to become the expert of your strengths, you are making the decision to step more fully into who You are.  I have yet to see someone who makes this a priority not recover their personal confidence and core power again.  The drift lessens little by little until it finally stops.

So go ahead, leverage the real You by embracing what makes you unique and intentionally choosing to live that out, expressing it more fully!

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Upcoming Work About How to Build Your Strongest Marriage or Committed Relationship

There is such a thing as Marriage Identity Drift--when two people lose their sense of couple identity--they simply float along without any energy or confidence in their couple presence.  If you want to experience my strengths process in your marriage or committed relationship, check out the upcoming workshop I'm giving on this.  Go to Events for more information and registration details.  Registration deadline is this coming Monday, March 17.  Space is limited to 10 couples.

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Looking for a Speaker or Coach?

If you or someone you know in your organization is looking for a keynote speaker or workshop teacher for events in your company, congregation, or association gatherings, I would be happy to come speak on this theme or others like it.  And interested in strengths coaching?  Feel free to email me at greg@gregorypnelson.com or look at the Speaking or Coaching pages of this site.

Dealing With the Fear Of Taking the Risk To Be Alive

"Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive - the risk to be alive and express what we really are." Don Miguel Ruiz I spent some time this morning at the Federal Building for Immigration downtown San Francisco supporting one of my gay friends, a dear colleague in ministry and one of our leaders of Second Wind.  He appeared in front of an immigration judge this morning to tell his story in order to apply for legal asylum here in the States.  His request is based upon the real dangers of being gay in the religious subculture he lived and worked all of his adult life within in his home country.  When he emerged from the court room with his lawyer and we debriefed the experience, I asked him what it felt like to retell his story in great detail.  "It was cathartic in many ways but also very painful - remembering all the awful things I encountered when I came out as gay:  the ostracization from my church community, the loss of my pastoral occupation and reputation, my marriage, the pain for everyone including my kids who had to put up with ridicule from their friends and others, living with the fear of rejection every day, often experiencing it in painful ways.  But I feel good about how clearly and openly I told my story to the judge."  His son was there to speak to the judge on behalf of his father, too.  "I want for us both to be able to live here in this country and build our lives here," he told me.

Now my friend (along with his long time committed partner) waits for two weeks to hear the immigration judge's verdict.  And we wait with them as their friends and spiritual community who love them and are committed to the journey of life together.

And I'm reminded of the great courage and bravery he's manifesting to take the risk to be genuinely alive, the risk to express who he really is in spite of the consequences he's both faced and continues having to put up with even in this country.  I admire him for his honesty and his integrity to live with transparency and congruity.

It's not easy choosing to be alive and really live life in alignment and integration.  It takes risks.  We have to encounter our fears.  We have to be willing to fail from time to time but then to pick ourselves up and keep moving forward.  It's not easy.

Have you ever asked yourself what your biggest fears are to living the life you feel deep inside you're called to live?  What does the cage look like that might tend to keep you from being really alive?

Maybe that's why in my work with people I encounter so many who are simply trying to survive, to make it to death safely, not pushing the edges of their lives, simply maintaining the status quo.  It's easier that way - it appears less risky.  But notice I say "appears" because in actuality, it's more risky.  When you live your life out of alignment, not being who you really, trying to live someone else's life instead of your own, when you're not living your calling and purpose, settling instead for status quo, your inner spirit and physical body pick up on this lack of congruity and create what we call dis-ease - a restlessness inside, a lack of ease.  Experts remind us that this condition is a condition of stress.  And when you live with this state of stress for a long time it becomes chronic.  And chronic stress has been shown to be terribly debilitating to the body, leading to a susceptibility to disease and illness on multiple levels, including depression.  Our human systems are designed to experience maximum status when there's complete alignment between our emotions, our feelings, our thoughts, and our behaviors - when we're living within the integrity of our true selves, when we're using how we're wired with boldness and confidence and purpose.

As I listened to my friend's lawyer giving a thumbnail sketch of the process this morning and where it goes from here, I felt deep admiration for her as a professional who is so committed to helping people enjoy the opportunity to live life deeply and freely in this country.  I was reminded of the profound statement of mission and purpose Jesus stated when he began his ministry.  He quoted from Isaiah 61, applying the mission of God to himself:  "God's Spirit has anointed me and chosen me to bring freedom and liberation to the captives, to proclaim this as the year of God's redemption and favor for all."

In my opinion, this powerful and professional lawyer who is helping our friend and all her other clients has stepped into the legacy of the great prophets of old and Jesus himself who came to give all people the joy of freedom and liberation to be alive, really alive.

Filming the event this morning was another of my friends here in the City.  He and his wife (both leaders in our Second Wind spiritual community) are producing a documentary about gays who are trying to reconcile their sexual identity with their religious and spiritual orientation.  These two courageous people are sacrificing everything they have to travel the country (carrying their 20 month old daughter along) filming stories to highlight this tremendous need.  They, too, have stepped into the legacy of Jesus' mission of announcing the freedom and liberation to be alive, really alive, for all people.  I admire their persistent passion and boldness.

It takes courage to take the risk to be alive no matter what your orientation - "the risk to be alive and express what we really are."  This isn't about sexuality.  It's about being human on every level.  We all face it.  And it's risky business.  We have to take intentional steps forward every day, choosing to live deeply and purposefully instead of letting the days go by without any thought or awareness or momentum.  It's about choosing to live our God-given life, not someone else's.

But in the end, for those who are willing to take that risk for themselves and on behalf of others, the reward of living in alignment, of living with purpose and mission, of choosing courage and boldness instead of fear and intimidation will far outweigh the risks.  There's certainly stress in taking risks.  But this kind of stress - eustress - always trumps distress!  It's actually good for you.

I love the way George Bernard Shaw describes this kind of life.  This is the way I want to live.  This kind of life is the highest level of spirituality and it produces the most profound kind of transformation possible (Jesus' life showed this to be true).  Here it is:

"This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a might one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

"I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.

"I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live.  I rejoice in life for its own sake.  Life is no brief candle to me; it is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations."

So here's to taking the risk of being alive and expressing what we really are, for our sakes and for others and for Life itself!

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Spiritual Transformation: Liquify Or Petrify

[If you enjoy this blog, please SHARE it with your friends and others who might be interested.  You can click in the column to the right and choose how you want to share this.] As we talked about in last week's post, the butterfly's metamorphosis process is quite a profound metaphor for spiritual transformation and life development.  At the end of the post, I listed several lessons we can learn from those stages.  Let me comment on one of them that is particularly challenging for many of us.  I hear from people I work with all the time about this issue.  And having gone through a major transition in my own life, I can relate to this stage quite well.

One of the staggering things that takes place in stage three of the caterpillar's metamorphosis to becoming a butterfly is that once a caterpillar goes into its cocoon, it literally liquifies—completely changing itself all the way to the molecular level before it can recreate itself into a butterfly.  It basically loses everything, not just shedding its outer layer but a profound internal transformation - a complete disintegration of the old in order to take on the new original design for its ultimate purpose, a butterfly.

Dr. Martha Beck, a monthly columnist for O Magazine and the author of several international bestsellers, recently at a large women's conference, talked about this life transformation process and put it this way, "In a very real sense, when we begin a cycle of transformation, we have to experience the disintegration of our old self before real change can take place. The meltdown can take many forms, but often it has to be cataclysmic—break up of a marriage, loss of a job, or a deep physical crisis like a diagnosis of cancer or a very sick child. For many of us personal shock sends us into the cocoon."

We end up forming a cocoon in order to feel safe during these crisis or difficult times.  The cocoon experience often is like circling the wagons - trying to construct a safe place against the threatening forces around us and sometimes even in us.  We need to come to some clarity about what all this chaos means to our lives.  We need to figure out what our next steps are.

But there's a simultaneous danger from a huge temptation within.  Dr. Astrid Sheil, who blogged about Martha Beck's presentation at the women's conference, commented, “Here in square one, we have a tendency to want to become bigger caterpillars. In other words, we try to hold onto the status quo as  long as possible. Maybe if we just work 80 hours a week instead of 75, we won’t get fired. Maybe if we subsume our needs, we can keep a failing marriage from coming apart at the seams. But of course, we are just fooling ourselves. When it is time to begin the transformation process, there is no capitulation or compromise that can divert the process. However, transformation can be delayed if we are unwilling to accept ourselves the way we are. The key to beginning the process is to 'totally' accept ourselves and the reality of our situation. We must surrender to the truth—the old way doesn’t work anymore, we can’t go back, and the future is unclear and unknown."

I can relate to that temptation to simply want to become a bigger caterpillar.  The radical metamorphosis into the butterfly, which involves the complete disintegration of our selves, is too painful, too risky, to uncertain of the ultimate outcome.  Status quo is so much safer, or so we try to deceive ourselves into believing.  But the reality is, if the caterpillar remained inside the cocoon without its meltdown (its internal transformation), it would never end up fulfilling its ultimate destiny - flying and soaring as an adult butterfly.

My personal struggle of trying to figure out who I was as a professional outside the religious organization I had spent 25 years serving within was painful and challenging.  I  had dreams regularly of being back leading spiritual communities where I had been before.  I would wake up and be tempted to think, "That must be a message to me that I need to go back somehow.  I need to simply be a bigger caterpillar.  Stay inside the cocoon where I was so safe all my life."  I would wake up from those dreams with feelings of fear, forboding, insecurity, uncertainty, a sense of doom.  In that paradigm, growth and transformation were simply within the cocoon rather than from cocoon to the outside world.  The emerging was too scary a thought.  But ironically and counter-intuitively, that paradigm was not in harmony with my ultimate purpose.

Dr. Sheil described it this way:  "We have all experienced these dreaded feelings. Limbo is scary. Not knowing is exhausting. Loss of identity can lead to depression. Why would anyone choose to go through the process of transformation? According to Beck, we have no choice. This is a cyclical process and we all go through it at different times and for different reasons. But like the caterpillar, when we get through the four stages of (1) crash and burn, (2) expansive imagining, (3) this is harder than I thought, and (4) the promise land—we are forever changed and expanded."

On a spiritual note, I'm reminded of how Jesus referred to the radical nature of this transformation experience.  Talking to a religious leader who came in the darkness of night to interview him, Jesus said to this man who of all people would have been considered to be living the "butterfly" life (surely he had already "emerged" to occupy the top of the religious-social totem pole, the pinnacle of the significance pyramid):  "Unless you are born again, you cannot enter the kingdom of God."  (John 3:3)

Now that's a shocking message to a person who thought he'd already arrived.  But in essence, Jesus was informing him that he was simply still a caterpillar who was trying to be a bigger, more fancy caterpillar - he thought being a caterpillar was enough - and that of all the caterpillars, he certainly was the biggest and best.

But being a caterpillar isn't enough.  Because the caterpillar is suppose to become a butterfly.  But if it wants to become a butterfly, it has to allow itself a radical, complete transformation inside its cocoon.  It has to let go completely of itself, allow whatever needs to disintegrate to disintegrate, in order to finally re-form and emerge as the intended butterfly.

You must be reborn, Jesus said.  You have to allow yourself to let go and become a new person - be re-formed inside the spiritual womb in order to be reborn into the person you've been designed all along to become.  There's certainly nothing wrong with being a caterpillar.  After all, that's one of the important stages of the metamorphosis process.  But we can't stay caterpillars because it's not in alignment with our ultimate destiny.  And the caterpillar that stays inside the cocoon ultimately dies, turning into a shriveled up, petrified skeleton.

We have to allow ourselves to go through the painful ordeal and struggle of letting go of whatever it is that might keep us from transitioning adequately to the next stage.  Often times these are limiting beliefs that if held onto disempower us from forward movement.  Some times they are relationships that are dragging us down or disempowering us spiritually or personally or emotionally and unless those relationships themselves are transformed or ultimately let go of, they continue holding us like heavy weights from running the race.  Most of the time, they are self-identities that are false or limiting or not accurate - we have become accustomed to connecting our sense of self with our productivity, or our accomplishments, or our connection to an organization, or our reputation with others, or our status in society - so that when those external circumstances change, we lose our sense of self and get side-lined and side-tracked and disillusioned.

Jesus said to that religious leader, if you want to enjoy life in the kingdom of God, you have to go through a radical transformation process that involves developing a whole new identity - a rediscovery of your true identity as a child of God who has inherent value, not based on your associations or accomplishments or reputations, but based upon who you truly are as that divine child.  Only then will you emerge from the cocoon, not as a bigger caterpillar, but as a beautiful, unique butterfly ready to lift off and soar into the skies of your ultimate God-given, God-designed purpose and destiny.  So maybe one of the most significant steps of being a caterpillar inside the cocoon is to learn how to embrace ourselves with love and compassion and acceptance for who we really are!

Our choice in life is to liquify or petrify.  Pretty starkly stated.  But clear.  It's okay to feel lost in the cocoon stage, to feel disoriented, to lose a sense of direction and purpose, to feel afraid and uncertain.  I certainly have in my times of radical transition and change.  But the good news is, that's all in preparation for the next stage.  As long as we don't let ourselves stay in status quo inside the cocoon - as long as we end up using that time to rethink, replan, reassess, refocus, restore, and embrace ourselves in the process - we'll be ready to emerge, not as bigger or different caterpillars, but as magnificent flying butterflies.  I'm all for that!