Crafting the Social Identity - The Surprisingly Effective Tool for Authentic Confidence

There is no amount of skill that will make up for limiting beliefs about who we are and how others perceive us. This is a practical framework to transform our relationship to self and others.

Dec 27, 2023

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“At the end of the day, people will do the things that align with who they think they are.” - William Alexander (Father of modern psychology)

I’m excited to share this practice with my substack readers. For years, this has been one of the most impactful exercises I have utilized to help my coaching clients eliminate unnecessary reactivity in their social and emotional lives.

Reactivity = T.A.R. (Tension, Anxiety and Resistance)

I want to start by saying that this practice is not a simple theory or technique for me. This work has had the highest return on investment of any personal development work I’ve committed to in the realm of improving my relationship with myself and others. Many of my clients would say the same thing for themselves.

When it comes to feeling confident and connecting naturally with others, there is no amount of technique or skill that will make up for a limiting Social Identity.

This is one of the foundational ideas in James Clear’s #1 mega-bestseller, Atomic Habits, “Maybe you can trick yourself into going to the gym or eating healthy once or twice, but if you don't shift your underlying identity, then it's hard to stick with long-term changes.”

When it comes to relational skills, we often spend a lot of time focusing on the strategies and tactics that we feel are important to feel good and show up powerfully with others.

For example, if our goal is to connect deeply with people, strategies and tactics might look like…

Strategy (what I want to do) - I will spend more time asking questions than talking.

Tactics - (when/how I want to do it) - I will ask people questions about who they are and not just “what they do for work.”

While strategies and tactics are helpful, if we are harboring unconscious limiting beliefs about ourselves, they will hijack our ability to implement strategies and utilize the skills in real life.

Our Social Identity is constructed of the beliefs we have about who we are, what we’re capable of and how we think others perceive us. Colloquially, our social identity is the answer to this question; “Who am I, how do others perceive me and how do they typically respond to me?”

For example, a common limiting belief for most people is “I am not enough” or “I can't be thehonest or people won't like me.”

If we are harboring these beliefs in high pressure social settings, our behavior will shift to align with the unconscious identity we have about ourselves. This might result in withdrawing from the conversation or straying away from the real questions we want to ask that could make someone uncomfortable.

For many of us, our Social Identity is full of limiting beliefs, self-doubt and draining comparisons. Over the past ten years as a coach, these are the most common that I encounter with my clients:

I’m not good enough
I can’t be the real me or I’ll be judged…or abandoned.
I am not pretty or handsome enough.
I’m too old or too young
I don’t have enough time or money
I’m not smart enough
I don’t have enough experience
I’ll never be successful
I’ll never have enough money
I’ll never be one of the best
I’m not talented enough
I’ll never be a great leader

That’s why the first step to cultivate more authentic confidence and Social Flow (a flow state with people) in our lives, is consciously constructing our Social Identity.

The steps below will show you precisely how to do this.

Part 1 - Limiting Beliefs / Tracking the Conversation

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” - Carl Jung

Start by sitting down and making a list of all of the limiting or critical beliefs that you frequently encounter. A limiting belief is any enduring thought about yourself that limits your authentic expression of being or makes you feel like you’re not enough.

Helpful tip: Sometimes it can be difficult to conceptualize these limiting beliefs because they have been subconscious for so long. I find it is helpful to think about the areas in our life where we frequently experience self-doubt, fear or anxiousness. That could be in relationships, with work, dating, public speaking, money, or in social situations.

Once you have pinpointed that area of your life, take a moment to simply be with yourself and visualize your internal dialogue. What were you saying to yourself, about yourself when that anxiety was present?

If you need help going deeper, try to recall a specific situation or period of time that brought you anxiety. Repeat the process and ask yourself the question, “What was I saying to myself about myself”

Limiting beliefs often start with word stems like…

“I am not…”

“I’ll never be…”

“Other people think I am…”

Helpful tip: Another way to approach this exercise is to do something called the repeating question exercise. Simply ask yourself a question like “what keeps me from feeling confident with other people” and ask yourself that question 10 times. You’ll be surprised how much new insight can be found when we give ourselves the space to go deeper on our blocks and challenges.

Tracking your internal dialogue for a week

The first step in shifting any unwanted thought or behavior is awareness.

Now that you have identified some of the overarching beliefs that may be present, we want to take it even deeper and notice the limiting beliefs that are present throughout our day.

Whether we are aware of it or not, we are having a conversation with ourselves all day long.

The next task is to create a new note in your phone and title it “Internal dialogue tracker”

Write down the most frequent limiting beliefs that you have about yourself and number them.

For the next week, anytime this story pops up, add a tally next to that story.

Additionally, any time you are feeling any way other than you’d like to with other people, whether that be anxiety, shyness or self-doubt, ask yourself the question…

What am I saying to myself about myself? Or, about what others are thinking?

And write down any new stories that feel like they are also frequent visitors.

Keep a log for the week. In addition to identifying limiting beliefs that are present, you will begin to develop the habit of noticing these beliefs when they are activated.

Before we transform, we must become aware. This exercise will show you how often you are interacting with reality through the lens of a limiting story.

You are probably thinking, “okay, well what do I do with all these limiting beliefs?”

First, I defer to the most powerful framework I have ever encountered for dissolving limiting beliefs and bringing us back to presence - The Work, by Byron Katie.

It involves asking four simple questions about any belief that causes us pain:

Again, here are some example beliefs that The Work could help with:

Other people won’t love the real me
Successful people don’t see me as their equal
I don’t have enough experience to speak up

When they show up, you would ask these four questions…

Is it true?
Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
How do you react when you believe that thought?
Who would you be without the thought?

After answering these questions, respondents are asked to come up with a “turnaround,” a sentence expressing the opposite of what one believes. So, for instance, “He doesn’t understand me,” could become, “I don’t understand him,” or, “I don’t understand myself.”

Now that you’ve taken the time to articulate all the reasons you think you suck, let’s take a moment to consider all of the reasons that you are friggin awesome.

Part 2: Empowering Beliefs

We are subconsciously collecting evidence for the stories we have about who we are and how people perceive us in every interaction. Think about that for a moment.

The brain craves certainty and it will find evidence that backs up the most dominant self-concept in our head, even if that is a limiting belief or negative story about who we are.

If we let those negative beliefs go unchecked, I.e. “Not enough” or “unlovable,” every interaction takes on this incredible weight because if we fail, the negative story becomes truer to us.

The fun part about beliefs is that we get to make them up. As the existentialist Camus famously said, “life is empty and meaningless.”

While that quote may seem depressing on its own, it changes when you realize that all it is really saying is that we are the creators of meaning in our lives. We get to make it up. Meaning does not originate from life, we assign meaning to life and everything within it.

The same can be said about beliefs and our identity, they are not true or materially real. They are simply enduring thoughts that we have about ourselves and the world…similarly, we get to make them up!

Let me be clear, it is not helpful to make up beliefs about yourself that don’t feel true.

It is helpful to get clear on the positive beliefs that we have about “who we are” and how others perceive us that feel true.

As we become more aware of these empowering beliefs, we subconsciously begin to collect evidence for the empowering identity that supports our authentic expression of being.

Take 15-minutes and make a list of your empowering beliefs

Consider these prompts to start writing:

What do your close friends admire/appreciate about who you are?

What do your colleagues and peers respect about your work?

What do you like about how you show up in the world?

How do you impact people in ways that are meaningful to you and them?

What are the nice things people say about you behind your back?

Reminder, only write down the ones that feel true for you.

Here are some examples of empowering beliefs:

People feel safe around me
People come to me with their problems
My friends have a lot of fun with me
I am a really good friend
I am a great communicator
I am trustworthy
I am kind
I am a good person
The people who really know me, love me
My friends’ live are better for knowing me

Don’t skimp! We so rarely give ourselves the time and space to celebrate who we are and what we have already achieved.

This exercise is all about taking the time to articulate what we ARE, instead of what we are not.

Part 3: Clarify Your Core Values

What does it mean to “be yourself?”

I’ve sat with that question for many years and the simplest answer I’ve been able to boil it down to, is this…

Being yourself is living your values.

Our values are what we believe to be important, meaningful and good in the world.

They are our personal code of conduct. “To be me, I must express these.”

When we are conscious of our values, we are more capable of taking aligned action.

On the flip side, we are also more capable of identifying behavior that is out of integrity with our values.

Values Work

Start by answering the following question and creating a list of your core values.

* What values are essential to your life?

* What values represent your primary way of being?

* What values are essential to supporting your inner self?

Helpful tip: Here is a list of the world’s most influential values to get you started.

While it is helpful to conceptually articulate our core values, there is another way. It is slightly more time consuming, but also, I find that it is often a more pragmatic and authentic way to uncover what our values truly are.

Look back on your life, focus on the past couple of years and think about a moment where you were feeling your best. A moment where you were in the flow and simply being the most YOU.

I guarantee you that your core values were being expressed in that moment.

Our peak experiences are fundamentally just moments where our values are being deeply expressed.

On the other end of the spectrum, the darkest moments and valleys in our life are often those moments where our core values are being suppressed.

So, if you want to take this values work a bit deeper…

Walk through several of your peak experiences from recent memory and then write down the values that were being expressed in that moment.

Then, walk through several of your low points in recent memory and write down the values that were being suppressed.

This is a great way to build out a truly exhaustive starter list of our core values.

Trim the list

I think it is important to limit our list to 5-10 values.

Once you have your exhaustive list in front of you, take some time to trim it down to only the most essential.

This practice is a powerful way to refine what truly matters to us deep down.

The fewer there are, the easier they will be to remember and integrate moment to moment.

BONUS POINTS: Create an acronym that makes your values easy to remember.

Closing exercise

I have spent years thinking about confidence, communication and connection.

At the end of the day, I believe that confidence is simply the result of liking yourself and telling the truth.

That first part is super important, liking ourselves.

For me, liking myself is tied to an appreciation of “HOW I am in the world,” it is most correlated with how I act, relate and show up. Loving myself is more tied to WHO I am, an internal reverence for myself.

For me, I believe we are only truly capable of liking ourselves when we are expressing our values.

Take your refined list of core values and then rate yourself on a scale of 1-10 for each one.

Base your answer on the question “how fully am I expressing this value in my life?”

10 being fully and 1 being not at all.

After you are done, take a moment to be with yourself and see how you feel. If you are an 8 or above, you're doing great. Anything below an 8 and you know where you may want to allocate additional energy and attention

Our next step can always be found by asking ourselves the question.

How can I live this value more deeply?

Learn to fall in love with that question and let it guide you again and again. Until one day, you’ll wake up feeling confident, knowing, without thinking, that you are living the life you are supposed to be living.

Of course, Rilke said it best.

I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke