Snippet 18: Why Your Identity Determines Your Behaviour with Dr Julie Smith
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I think also when it comes to identity, one thing that I've found is that for people who are interested in getting things done and productivity and self-improvement and all that stuff, there is kind of a sort of super identity in a way that sits above the specific identities, which is sort of like, I'm a person that gets things done. I'm a productive person. I'm a sort of whatever. That means that kind of anything...

underneath that, which is basically everything else in life, becomes easier to do. Whereas I find with people who have told themselves that they are a procrastinator, oh, I'm just so unproductive. Oh, I could never do that. It becomes so hard to then do all of the other things like health and wealth and like caring about relationships, like all of the other stuff around...

what makes a good life is harder to do if you have an identity of someone who does not have their shit together proverbially. I don't know if that's something that you found at all. Yeah, absolutely. You can have set sort of core beliefs about yourself that came from, you know, maybe early in childhood and they've just persisted and then

And they can really, we don't think about them all the time. So we're not always even aware of them. In therapy, we'll spend sometimes a fair amount of time sort of trying to work out what those core beliefs are for someone and really sort of trying to get right down to it. And once we get there, there's often this sort of light bulb moment for people where they think, yes. And because you don't really think about your core beliefs

all the time, sometimes never at all. But they're that template that was perhaps set up for you early in life that is your template for the world. So it's your idea of, they're often I am statements. So it might be, I don't know, if it was something negative, it might be I am unlovable or I am unlikable or something, or it might be what to expect from other people. So other people will abandon me or other people will,

you know, hurt me or something or something about the world. So the world is a dangerous place or something like that. So those core beliefs are things that kind of sit under the surface and influence the choices that we make, but we don't necessarily consciously think about why we're making those choices. We have an urge and we go with it because we always did.

So, yeah, that's sort of all of that identity stuff. It's a big part of what happens in therapy, but we can do that kind of thing in a self-help approach. So with journaling and things like that, you know, you can really reflect on some of your own, you know, choices or the cycles that you seem to get stuck in and you're not really sure how to break it.

Getting it down on paper something we do in therapy a lot is getting a bird's-eye view. You literally draw maps of Behavior patterns and and then you look down it and you go. Oh, that's how I can break it. There's there's the exit Okay, now I know what I need to do Which can be really helpful says a lot of that in the book where there's a lot of things like journal prompts They're just questions for you to sit down and go. Okay, let's answer these and ten minutes and maybe you might have that moment when you go I

Yeah, I think journaling prompts are such an underrated technique because I've come across a lot of journal prompts and as I was reading through the book, I was like, oh, these prompts are really good. And then I didn't do anything with them. But I know if I just sat with any one of them for 10 minutes and actually just answered it, I'd get so much clarity on like...

stuff in my life yeah it just feels like and anytime I've done that in the past I've always felt like damn I'm really glad I did this I really should do this more often yeah and that's why doing this sort of you know the the therapy thing even though there's not a specific problem yeah that you're really trying to fix sometimes it can be that sort of introspection and and learning about yourself in the way that you might with journaling um where you just have someone to answer or ask those questions but then also

Reflect back on what they're hearing and things like that, you know a therapist can be a mirror essentially where they reflect back to you what they're hearing from you and sometimes that can be quite surprising what do you realize you're you're sort of giving out and