how do you know what your true identity is keep watching this is life mastery
gym I'm Damon Cart and I teach people just like you cutting edge NLP processes
and techniques so that you can master your life and take charge of your
destiny so if that sounds good make sure you subscribe to this youtube channel so
you can get these videos on a regular basis defining personal identity this is
probably the most important thing you could possibly do in your life so I'm
not going to cover everything in this video but there are more videos that
I've done on this topic so I will link them here and of course I've done a lot
more training on this topic but for this video I'm gonna give you the broad
strokes and the understandings that are really really important to get down
about you and your identity so here we go the problem I think where most of the
confusion comes in about personal identity and defining the personal
identity is there's so much philosophy out there about personal identity and I
spent years use more so in my early 20s really delving into this philosophy
because I loved philosophy and it was something I indulged in quite a bit but
as much as I got some wise words or words of wisdom from some incredible
thinkers I found that it didn't help a whole lot in understanding myself and
understanding the world around me and making progress making changes in my
life that that could really benefit me and that's when I turned to NLP and
neuro linguistic programming opened a whole nother way of looking at personal
identity especially through Steve Andreas's self-concept model so I think
the first important thing to do is to really understand what is your personal
identity and that's the place that you would want to start and like I said this
can be really confusing for a lot of people because you hear all these
different things and you can ask that question Who am I endlessly and
get endless answers to it so what NLP does is it we the approach that we take
is we take more of a structural approach to it rather than a content-based
approach to it so philosophy is often asked answering questions of why and
what NLP likes to do is our instead of personifying NLP in NLP what we like to
do is ask the whole question how is this even happening so how is it we have a
felt sense of identity how is it we have a just that felt sense of self that some
for some people it seems like they have great identities and for other people
they doubt their identity they doubt themselves so what is that what is that
difference as well and I'm going to talk a little bit more about that later but
let's really talk about what is your personal identity your personal identity
is basically who you believe yourself to be or what you believe yourself to be
your personal identity is this huge generalization we make about ourselves
now this is pretty much what we do with almost anything especially anything that
we give sort of mind identity to and I want to use an analogy that I think will
make this a little more clear so when we think of a city we often will talk about
the identity of the city or the personality of the city I'm going to use
one of my favorite cities that I've been to Hanoi Vietnam as an example as you
could use this with any city I like that city a lot because of the concept that I
have of it I've been there before I knew it existed before I went to it and I had
an idea about what Hanoi was like before I went and then of course when I got
there my idea about it I would say that it changed but more importantly it grew
because now I had an actual experience of it and that's not the same experience
that everyone else has it's certainly not the same experience that people have
who have lived there all their lives it's not the same experience of someone
else who comes from a different culture speaks a different language and visits
and Hanoi we all walk away with a different
Sept of Hanoi or whatever city that you're thinking of the important thing
to understand though is we have a concept of it does the city actually
exist well yes it does you can show up and you can see it but the idea that
we've given a name called Hanoi that it has certain characteristics we these are
all generalizations we make about that city and you're going to make different
ones if you haven't been there than if you have been there and you had
experiences so based on my experiences and each and experience when I select
and collect those experiences and I put them in a category I didn't make a
generalization about Hanoi the people are very friendly the food is really
really good the architecture is amazing because you have these old crumbling
colonial buildings alongside these communist-era buildings and so these are
my experiences of that city but I'm not there right now but I take with me a
concept of that I have an idea a feeling of that city and then when I go back I'm
gonna take that concept with me and then when I have more experiences that
concepts going to grow the same exact thing happens with your identity from
the beginning when you're born well you don't know who you are you don't have
any experiences and then you start having experiences and you get these
influences from authority figures your parents your culture your society that
influences those experiences and then as you select and collect these experiences
especially the feedback you'd get about yourself you go to school what you're
told you're a good student you're told you're a bad student you're told you're
a good kid you told you're a bad kid and you take in all these experiences you
select and collect them and you create a certain collection of experiences that
reflect upon who you are and when I say select and collect these experiences
what I'm really talking about is your beliefs your generalizations that you're
making about yourself and so once you bring this all together it comes
together in one big generalization about who you are the concept of you just like
I have a concept of Hanoi or you know any other city you want
mention you've experienced you your entire life and you've heard feedback
from people who experience you from outside of you and so you bring all this
information together and create a concept about who you are the truth is
you will never know who you truly are the whole idea of an identity is a
concept so it's impossible to truly know who you are it's impossible for anyone
else to truly know who you are but given all this information we create beliefs
and why do we create beliefs we create beliefs because when we don't have
actual concrete tangible facts in front of us we have to fill in the gaps
somehow so you could go into all sorts of things like well you know Damon I am
a person I'm tangible I'm right here but then you would that would mean that you
are only your body and we know that that's not true because we got a lot
going on in here and the other thing is that you every seven years you're a
completely physically different person and then you might gain weight you might
lose weight you might grow a beard you might shave your beard you might grow
long hair you might cut your hair so if you are your body there there comes a
lot of problems with that idea when you talk about the kind of physical changes
you can go through so understand yourself in the sense of what you
believe about yourself that is the only truth about you you will ever know so if
you wanted to define your personal identity you're going to find that in
what are the beliefs you make about yourself and how those beliefs come
together to form the overall generalization or concept of you now
when we look at that big picture that that big idea of what all that I just
talked about you can keep chunking this down into smaller and smaller structures
and I mentioned some of those the experience is sort of the the granule
that's the first piece of it you have an experience and an experience is a
subjective thing there's a beginning and there's an end and then there's a middle
when we talk about life you've never really don't remember your beginning
when you were born nobody does and you couldn't possibly know anything about
your end because you're still alive so your
experience has actually been non-stop there hasn't been a beginning and an end
but in order for our minds to make sense of life we create a beginning and then
when an end and we call this an experience so this is the very beginning
when we start creating experiences and this happens very early in life probably
around the age of 2 years old and then we started bringing these experiences
together and we start selecting and collecting them into these beliefs and
generalizations and some of these beliefs or beliefs about the world and
some of these beliefs are the beliefs about you and then this is how this
process continues to go so without understanding this this can this is
where we get stuck in all the philosophy about about life and the more you can
understand what I just explained more you start to explore the beliefs that
you have about yourself this starts to shine a light on them that your beliefs
are not set about who you are we tend to think of these as facts well I'm just
this way and that's just how it is or the world is just this way and that's
just how it is but the truth is is no these are beliefs
you've created and beliefs are not facts so therefore you can actually change
them they are malleable and you've believed many things in your life that
you don't believe anymore why because you may be a base that
belief on certain evidence and then later got contrary evidence that showed
you that's not true at one time you might have believed in Santa Claus why
because your parents told you there was a Santa Claus and when you woke up on
Christmas morning you found presents under the tree there was your evidence
so you thought well this must be true this is just how it is
and then later it gets revealed that what your parents put those presents
there your parents told you that it was that there was a Santa Claus so what
other experience you had but to believe that so that should show you that your
beliefs about yourself are not necessarily true and you might get
different evidence or you might seek out different evidence to find out that's
something you believe about yourself is not true and this is the really exciting
thing so for some people that feels she feels anxiety provoking that whoa
would be what if the things that I believe about myself are not true and to
me at one time that scared me but to me now that's what's really exciting about
life and you can spend the rest of your life being curious about yourself and
exploring yourself exploring who you really are and one way that we do that
very well is by challenging yourself by thinking about all those things that you
want to do especially the things that might scare you a little bit and go for
them anyway what do you have to lose the only thing you have to lose is maybe an
idea or a belief you have about yourself but in the process you're probably going
to strengthen other beliefs about yourself and you become more who you
want to be first to get a sense of who you are be honest with yourself who what
do you believe about yourself and then once you have an understanding of that
then you realize there's so much that you don't know about yourself so now you
get to explore that you get to explore who you are and like I said one way to
do that is through challenging yourself and not just challenging yourself over
and over nothing I'll give an example I love to travel and travel can be a
challenge sometimes it costs money I have kids so I have to find childcare
unless I take my kids with me which presents a whole new challenge so
there's always challenges to that but I feel like I discover more of myself
every time I travel and in some cases I feel like I lose some of myself in the
sense that what I thought who I thought I was maybe I don't I don't feel that
way so much anymore so define yourself explore yourself and then decide well
who is it that you want to be who do you aspire to
be and I'm not saying it like aspiring to be said like someone else don't don't
do that that's never going to be helpful for you comparing yourself to others
will only bring you down but knowing who you are now who do you want to be more
of in alignment with who you would like to be and then you can spend lots of
time as you explore who you are creating more and more of who you want to be
selecting and collecting those experiences that build the beliefs that
you want to believe about yourself that are empowering rather than limiting and
there is a beautiful process that is very
systematic that has very predictable results and you can do this for the rest
of your life making your life better creating more of who you want to be so
that you create more of the experience of life that you want to live so now you
have a better understanding of your personal identity and how you can
explore that identity and how you can transform it but what you don't know are
the healthy elements of a healthy self concept or I should say the elements of
a healthy self concept so what I've done is I created a free PDF that you can get
immediate access to there's a link down in the description and also and they
tend comments to comment at the top just click that link and you'll get immediate
access to the elements of a healthy self concept and this will give you these are
the guidelines of how to create a healthy personal identity if you liked
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