habit helps you stay consistent, and identity helps you stay disciplined
You want to become successful? Start building habits and an identity to rapidly achieve your success.
When habit and identity are combined, you become unstoppable.
I always thought that habit was enough. You don’t need an identity.
I mean, identity will build itself while we build habits, right?
Well, yeah, but not always.
There are many examples of this, and one that we can see is reading, writing, etc. Those activities that we do might really need habits to do them every day, and we use habits, but identity is different.
Identity is where you accept yourself as a reader, writer, or whatever you are building. The best thing about identity is that you can become more disciplined and thrive on improvement and growth more than habits.
The power of habit and identity
Habits help you stay consistent.
Habit helps you to show up every day with ease and automate all of your work. Identity, on the other hand, is to make you disciplined.
Identity helps you stick to those habits much faster than ever.
Identity helps you to always improve in every session, every work, and every project that you do.
I built my identity as a writer not long ago. At first, when I’m writing, I don’t build an identity at all. I just write when I want to, and I have built the habit of writing at least once a week.
Then, after the habit formed, I thought I needed something else to improve my writing even more. The writing sessions that I do started to look like chores.
This is where I build my identity as a writer and improve my writing rapidly.
The big difference that I had when I only used habit rather than identity was that I became much more motivated to work.
When I have an identity as a writer, I can’t live without writing. I want to write. Every day.
This is why identity is so strong.
How does identity help us become disciplined?
Identity helps us become disciplined because we become the ones with the activity.
We are someone who does that job, and our identity defines us as professionals. We aren’t just mere writers or designers. I am a writer. I am a designer. I work professionally and focus on becoming that. My identity is not just a mere badge.
This is why identity can make us take action.
Once you build your identity, just imagining yourself as a writer can make you start writing.
Without identity, you can still become disciplined in what you do, but not for long. Identity helps you claim that badge as a writer and motivates you to do the work. It helps you to do the thing even if you don’t want to.
You just changed your perspective from lazy to I’m doing it.
That’s how identity magic works.
Well, discipline can’t last long enough, right?
That’s why habits are going to be built after you are motivated enough at the start.
You do it repeatedly, and over time, it becomes a habit. The more you do it, the more you are being consistent, and the more you are one with the work. The more you do it, the stronger your identity becomes.
The difference between mere building habits and building habits with identity is in progress.
Habits help you progress in showing up every day.
Identity helps you improve every day and each session by working hard.
How do I build habits?
When habits are built, consistency is built too.
You can’t build habits without consistency, because a habit is a repeated action that becomes regulated.
The first step to building habits is to choose what you want to build first. I’m not going to explain it a lot here because I’ve written an article about it too.
- First, you need to know what you want to build.
- After that, start as small as you can to consistently build it every day.
- Then gradually increase the difficulty until you achieve the result that you want.
An easy example of this would be reading.
If I want to read for 60 minutes, I don’t just jump into reading for 60 minutes right away on day 1.
I will start with 1 minute.
Then consistently do it for 7 days.
Then increase the difficulty the next week until I achieve the 60-minute mark.
Then how about building identity?
Well, if you already have a habit like that and successfully build it, you can easily build your identity.
You can affirm to yourself that you are a reader because you have actions as the reasons for that. You have proof that you are a reader.
It’s easy to build identity, but not most people do it. Most of us think that identity needs no awareness to be built because, the moment we do it, our identity is already built.
Identity needs awareness to be built. If you always say that you aren’t a reader but you read every day, you can easily not become a reader.
The key is that you affirm to yourself that you are a reader, for this example.
The identity that you can build is by doing self-affirmation:
I am a reader, and I love to read.
Once you believe it, with the habits that you have developed, it will be much easier for you to keep on doing them.
Identity is really effective at the start of building habits.
To thrive even more, identity can help you start gathering ideas and being creative to improve your habits.
Habits with identity are unstoppable
So, it is important to have both.
Not one of them. We have different identities to hold, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have many identities. I use my identity as a reader whenever I read some books.
If I’m not reading, I don’t use that identity as a reader. This applies to my writing, my work, exercise, etc. This might seem like alter ego, and it might be.
You change your identity in order to gain focus and increase your percentage to get into the flow state.
Habit helps you stay consistent and do it every day.
But identity helps you become disciplined and a master in no time.
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