Who are you? Let’s pretend you are going on a diet to lose weight and become thin. Are you a thin person? A thin person doesn’t go on a diet to lose weight, do they? You don’t even know what this thin person does, thinks or feels, do you? How do you think, thin people think about food? … is food really all that important to them? Do they think about it much? Do you think a thin person would want to celebrate a success by going out and eating? Is that how a thin person acts, thinks and is? Are you going to be a thin person that has to exercise for hours or just a little bit? Who is this person that will produce the results? Who we are and who we need to be seems amiss.
When this ďistance between who you are …… and the person you need to be for the results you want, is big, we often give up. This is where the notion of “just be you” comes from. Don’t try to be somebody else. Be happy with who you are! Be the best you, you can be. The evidence is pretty clear: We really don’t know how to become a different person, do we? It doesn’t mean you can’t be a thin person, It just means: changing the identity is where you start. Who are you, …… get it in control of your identity, unless you would rather have others take the job.
Who you are, your Identity, dictates so many things. If you are a fat person, you can exercise, diet and maybe even lose weight. But the statistics say you will soon gain it back. Hey, the statistics are you gain more weight back than you lost. Glass ceilings, the wall, …. the impossible! It’s just the way I am. Identity is powerful. I am, who I am and I can’t change that! ….. Or can you? Are you in charge or is someone or something else in charge?
Your Identity, who you are, is marketed to you and sold to you. Big Clue: you didn’t market and sell it to yourself so you could get your values, dreams and goals. Big surprise, you don’t have your values, dreams and goals, do you? So who marketed and sold it to you? I’ll let you guess who marketed and sold you the Identity you are presently stuck with. Stay focused for now on: Your Identity controls who you are or what habits you have or can express.
One challenge of habit development is that habits don’t develop if they don’t fit the Identity. Running is almost impossible if you are not a runner. Thin, that doesn’t happen to a person who sees themselves as fat. Smart, not a chance for a person who feels they are slow (polite for stupid). Athletic, a couch potato throws up at the thought. Leading is impossible if you are a hidder. Money maker is a faraway lottery dream to a broke person. These people can know everything about how to do it, but nothing will happen if the identity doesn’t match.
Your Identity controls the habit machine of thought, feelings and action. Marketing and selling a new Identity is the only way to get a couch potato to exercise, stupid person to be smart, a broke person to be a money maker. Marketing and selling opens the doors for the training of the habit machinery to make it all true.
How does this marketing or sales job happen? It happens in little moments of truth. No, not all the time, marketing of the new Identity happens in little moments of truth. Your job is to catch yourself doing just the littlest thing the new Identity would do, think or feel. …. then catch yourself again and again and again. .. Catching these little glimpses of the new identity is the sales and marketing. Let’s see how this marketing and sales might happen.
Take on a thirty day challenge, or a two week challenge to do something that isn’t you. Not too big, take on a challenge that is just a little stretch: you can sort of see yourself doing it. Take on a challenge and make a plan to succeed at the challenge. WOW, you can already catch yourself as a person who can do this challenge. Lets say your challenge is to write a short book and you plan to write to write every day. It isn’t important the quality of the writing, it’s that you write everyday. Now, you can catch yourself being a writer every day. If you catch yourself figuring out ways to make your writing better or coming up with ideas, your marketing of being a writer is becoming more real. If you see yourself letting your bad writing just being part of the process, you are catching yourself on the road to success as a writer. *(Yes the road to success has abundant failure and seemingly insignificant wins)*. Catch yourself making the little wins big deals and your catching the little wins of a writer. Let go of the low quality, move on, knowing you can do better and your writer confidence is catching hold. The marketing is working. Marketing only works with the actions, feelings and thinking happening and being part of the growth or becoming process.
Create your challenges, so you can catch yourself, market yourself into the new person or Identity. Let's say you are taking on: “ coming home from work and initiating a great evening.” It doesn’t mean all of a sudden you have great evenings. No, you have to become the person and develop the machinery to make it happen. It might go something like this:
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You get a plan, prepare and go for it
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Marketing catch #1 : You initiate and opened up the possibility. You actually are taking charge!
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The plan worked horribly, but you let go and ignored the failure, regrouped and planned the next day.
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Marketing catch #2: ignoring horrible and move on to better plan. WOW! Growing!
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You get the littlest win of a good evening then, it all falls apart. You take the win as a sign!
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marketing catch #3: You make the little wins significant, a sign of more good stuff to come. You’ve got a foothold. You have a chance!
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Doubt creeps in and you wonder: who you are kidding, but you stop the pity party, slam it down, and tell yourself you can do this.
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marketing catch #4: You are building hang tough muscle.
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You look back over the last few days or week and see all the mess up, little wins and pull from it possibility, ideas that you are just getting started, ….. Or at least you regroup with new hope and things to try.
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marketing catch #5: You are gaining mastery of this thing, you are starting to see how it works and how to work it. You will soon have this handled.
It’s all about catching the littlest things, over and over again until you become that person. The identity, flashed open, an instances that allows for the habit machinery to be trained. Besides the actions, there are feeling, thoughts, experiences to be caught in the marketing of the person you are becoming. The great coaches recall catching the tiniest things, in the beginning, to market to their untalented players, they are champions. These are just little glimpse of being the person or player they are becoming. It isn’t some hype, it’s catching these untalented players actually doing the littlest thing that a champion would do. For that instant, he wants them to feel they were a champion.
His hardest part is to ignore all the very untalented stuff they do, just waiting to catch and market the tiniest moment of being a champion. Yes, he still guides and instructs, but that’s not what he’s waiting for. He is in search of the champion. He builds, and builds and builds and builds until he they are champions. It’s plain and simple a sales and marketing plan, but execution is everything.
It is so tempting to market the loser they are, the trouble maker, the “you make my life miserable” person, ……but that is not the training: please, pray >> Lead me not into temptation! Waiting, expecting and catching the champion is not an easy training. Guiding, maneuvering, setting things up just to catch glimpses of the champion to briefly open up the possibility of training new habit machinery.
Ordinary training is to notice and point out flaws or your ordinariness, ….. To market the flawed or ordinary person. When you take on these challenges, the goals is to be like the great coaches prepared, ready and expecting to catch yourself becoming this new Identity. So pick something easy, but challenging. Plan, research and practice waiting expectantly to catch yourself being the person who wins the challenge. Practice catching yourself doing, thinking, feeling or being the person that can naturally do it. Catch the littlest thing. It doesn’t matter how small or short of time. Just practice catching yourself becoming the new person. Then do it again. Take on a bigger challenge and bigger and bigger challenge. You are becoming a person in control of their Identity.
It’s a sales and marketing plan! You have to know what you are creating. What does the person do? How do they think? How to they feel? What do they experience. There you go, the marketing plan is set. Now you are able to catch yourself becoming that person. It might feel something like this: You share with your friend you would love to be a quarterback for the football team. Your friend says you have the genetics, the body, why not go for it? You say you are not confident, don’t know how to throw a football, strategize or lead people. “So?” your friends says and tells you train yourself to be confident, throw a football, strategize and lead people. But you complain, you don’t like people, your not a people person. Learn to like people, your friend says.
It will take time, but you already have a feel for what you need to catch yourself doing, feeling or thinking. Catch yourself feeling confident, get a plan, set it up, stretch yourself and catch yourself feeling more confident. Work out and practice throwing the football. Hey, throw and catch, workout, train and repeat. Figure out how to play a joke on a friend, now your a strategist. Get your dog to follow you, now your friend, keep going your leading. Yes, it will take time. You didn’t become the person you are stuck with now, overnight either. Now you get to be stuck being the person you marketed and sold yourself on.
Can you imagine an ordinary coach catching his players acting like champions! OOPS, an ordinary coach is more likely to catch them not acting like champions and create the normal mediocre team. Parents, bosses, teachers, we are instructional on how to do better. It's how we were trained. We don’t know any better. We point out what they did wrong and how to make it better. Instructional is ok, but we don’t realize this person doesn’t have a sales and marketing plan to create his new Identity. You are the only person available to help him market and create a new identity. If you market the mistakes and flaws, that's the Identity you get. When you market the new person by catching them, if only for an instance, being that person, marketing is good, guidance and growth will naturally, automatic follow. When marketing is successful, even for a moment, during that time a whole host of new habits are possible. Learning is sponge-ified. It opens up the door. No more waiting 21 day or 66 days for a habit formation.
It’s not about getting all psycho and talking yourself into being a thin person or a champion. No, you have to catch yourself being that new person, in little moments of time. You have to do the research. Create a Plan. Set it up and get into action. Patiently wait and catch your new person showing up. You are so focused on catching the new you, you don’t notice the mess of your old self disappearing. Becoming this focused is a training. Start with some easy challenges to build your skill, habit machine or creature of habit: two week challenge, 30 day challenge.
Who are you, now? Who is the person you are creating? It’s not that tough to get in charge of your Identity. My son wants to be a safe driver. Ok, I added the safe part. He wants to drive, so training the driving machine or learning to drive is not the 21 day or 66 day thing. The marketing is done. He wants it. He’s been marketing and selling this to himself for a long time. He has watched me and already know exactly what it is going to feel like and how he is going to be. Developing the habit machinery will readily happen.
Are you ready, do the research, create a sales and marketing plan. Kids play and play being adults until they are. Start with the identity marketing, it opens up all the doings, thinking, feeling and experiencing, to easy training. Good marketing and selling of the Identity, make for easy training or building of the habit machine!
If you think you can, you can.
If you think you can’t, you can’t.
Take Charge and Sell Yourself
You Can!
It’s all in the sales and marketing of your Identity.
Who are YOU?
Who are you planning to market yourself to be?
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