How You Identify Yourself On A Day-To-Day Basis

I’ve done a lot of research on the psychology behind the reason people take the actions they do in life, particularly those that are self-employed or independent contractors.

In watching a couple of videos created by some VERY smart people, I found several “golden nuggets” that can help us to become more productive and positive within our day to day activities.

As an example, I found that we don’t even know who we are as a person. We simply judge ourselves as we judge others. We do that based on the actions we’ve taken over a long period of time. So if we haven’t been waking up in the morning for a long time, we say “I’m not a morning person”. When in reality, we could very easily change our habits every day and before you know it, we’d be describing ourselves differently. We may say “I absolutely love the mornings! I get so much accomplished before 9am because nobody is distracting me and it really sets the stage for a highly profitable day.”

As you know, if someone goes and does a light workout at the gym every morning, they start to identify as that person. Even if they once were a fat slob that used to wake up in the morning and immediately start eating food all day, sitting around the house, they now see themselves as someone different.

If they start making good choices on every meal that they eat, after a while, they identify as that person and it becomes a complete lifestyle change for them. These are things you can do within your business as well.

I’ve always identified as a MARKETER first. The showing homes or writing contracts or dealing with inspections are all things we have to handle to make the money from the MARKETING that gets us paid. This was a huge change for me back in 2001 or 2002.

No matter what industry you are in, you are in the marketing business first. Everything I do with real estate, the coaching business, vitamins and supplements for horses and humans, the skin care business and the racehorses themselves, it’s all about marketing and the rest of the stuff just has to be completed as a task to finalize the transaction.

If you identify as a real estate agent that gets most of their business from past clients, you’ll sit around all day waiting on that to happen. So be very careful as to how you identify yourself.

That description won’t change until you change the actions you take every single day because THAT is how you change who you believe you are. Of course if you start closing 6 transactions every month from the efforts you are making, you start identifying as that person and having a month where you only close 4 would make you very uneasy. But an agent that’s been a little lazy on the marketing side and not doing much would feel HAPPY to close even 3 deals in one month!

So as it turns out, your personality doesn’t shape your behavior. Your behavior shapes your personality.

Read that again.

You can change your private and your public identity by simply changing your daily habits and the actions you are taking. Stop leaning on your personality to make excuses for what you do or don’t like. Stop eliminating opportunities based on what you think you are good at or bad at. Your behavior can immediately reshape your personality. Change those behaviors and you’ll start identifying as a bigger winner!