Transcription
The most powerful force in the human personality is the need to stay consistent with how we define ourselves. And you know, if you think of someone who's having quote an identity crisis, what is that? They turn a certain age and they quickly question everything they had accepted. A belief is something you feel absolutely certain about. You don't believe something if you start to question it. You produce doubt.
And so sometimes there are certain stages of life where someone suddenly goes out and has this identity crisis and they buy a sports car or whatever the case may be and they change their hair and they do everything else. But what's really happening is they're trying to redefine themsel having define themsel a long time ago and we all have these ways of defining ourselves.
But let me give you an example of just how powerful it is. So I'll give you a simplistic example. I don't know if you ever smoked cigarettes or know someone who did, but if you go to someone who smokes cigarettes and no longer does and you said to them, "Would you like a cigarette?" They wouldn't say to you, "What brand is it?" What would they say to you? No, I'm not a smoker. I'm not one of those. And that's really important because we define ourselves by what we are and by what we're not. And it's not effortful when you're not a smoker. It's not effortful if you say, "I'm a health nut to, you know, not smoke." It's just not part of your world. you don't even consider it because that need to stay consistent with how you define yourself is the basis of a human being's basic personality making decisions.
Now the downside of this of course is you can create a negative identity for yourself. You can have an identity that says let's say you've put things off a lot and you're about to go do something and then you get fearful. Everybody has the fear of failure, the fear of something of the unknown and the last minute you don't do it and then you say I'm really going to do this and you do it again and again. After a while, you don't want to disappoint yourself. So, you might develop a new identity and say, "I'm a procrastinator." And once that's who you are, that behavior is going to be consistent.