17. Map out your current identity | Rewrite your self-concept note 2/5

In this episode of Rewired for Good, we’re diving into the sneaky ways our self-concept shapes our lives—without us even realizing it! You know those little phrases you casually drop, like “I’m terrible at relationships,” or “I’m just not a confident person”? Yeah, those might be running the show.

We’ll break down:
 ✅ Why your self-beliefs aren’t always based on facts (spoiler: your brain is a little dramatic sometimes).
 ✅ How tweaking the way you see yourself can literally change your reality.
 ✅ A simple yet powerful exercise to uncover your hidden self-concept—and start shaping it on purpose.

Oh, and we’re doing it all with a bit of humor, a few real-life stories, and an invitation to stop letting outdated labels decide your future.

So, grab your favorite drink, open a notes app (or, let’s be real, scribble on the back of an old receipt), and let’s rewire how you see you.

If you know someone who could benefit from listening to this podcast, please SHARE it! And if you like it yourself, please RATE it and REVIEW it so it can reach and help more people!

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Transcript

Humanitarians, what's  up?  I hope you've been good. I'm doing well. Work has been a tiny bit nuts, but feels a little bit like a lot of lost battles.  But I've been coaching my face off with eight workers going through crisis and we're really creating a lot of beautiful things together on that front.

Thank you for tuning in today. 

We are starting the magnificent work of what I call rewriting yourself concept note. This is episode two of the series. We're going to take a look at your current identity map and  go on a bit of a self-discovery journey.  We're going to figure out where you stand on you today. This process has brought so many breakthroughs for me, for every coachee that I did it with, and I cannot wait to walk you through it.

So amid all the very disturbing news that I've heard lately, and  you know there's been a lot of disturbing news lately,  there was one story that grabbed my attention.  There was a night in  northern Spain where a person who identified as LGBTQ  was being beaten up in the street.  And two guys, two Senegalese  migrants that didn't have documents showed up and saw the scene and jumped in to help and they subsequently got awarded  some honorific title by the town that they live in. And later  the footage revealed that  there was a lot of other people in the scene  and that they were just standing and filming the scene. 

And it got me thinking... what kind of self concept do you have to have about yourself to pull out your phone and film something like that. What do you have to be thinking about yourself  in order to be the person who does that? Right? You have to be thinking "I'm an observer",  "I'm someone who minds their own business", "I'm someone who documents history", "I'm a witness", "I am weak", "I can't throw a punch", "I can't fight", "I'm a dad, I've got to stay safe for my kids". I don't know. I'm, I'm, you know, I'm just imagining.  

And in the same way, what kind of self-concept what you have to believe about yourself in order to jump into a fight and defend someone even when it might get you into a lot of trouble physically but also administratively cause like I said the migrants that jumped in to help the guy, did not have any documents and so the police was gonna get involved and they were probably going to be discovered as being irregular migrants and clearly that's not an identity that prevailed for them at that time, they jumped in and they did it. Tragically it did not solve the problem the person later died of his injuries in the hospital which is obviously extremely disturbing but these guys had to think of themselves as some "brave human", they had to think of themselves as "people whose values prevailed ahead of their own safety" and all kinds of things, right? 

I just find all these questions extremely fascinating... how what you believe about you will lead you to act a certain way in life and take certain risks or not. 

So today we're exploring what you believe about you, who you think you are. 

You know, in my coaching practice,  people will come to me and say things like, "I'm not a good public speaker" or "I'm the girlfriend that guys keep on the side, I'm never the main one".  Or "at this point I'm unemployable". They'll say "I'm lazy", they'll say "I'm not brave." They'll say "I'm fat", they'll say "I'm an avoidant" or "I'm an introvert" and someone today in a session said to me "I'm very clumsy when it comes to human relationships". 

Now the humanitarians that I coach are hands down some of the best, most brilliant human beings you could ever come across, right? Thoughtful team leaders, coordinators with really unique soft skills, project managers that are technically on top of their specialty. 

And, of course, they're very self-aware because obviously they've been doing work on themselves. 

And the sentences that I just listed to you are all actual sentences that have been said to me, identities that aid workers have been mentioning in passing as background info, right? They'll be telling me a story about a problem they're facing and they'll just slip that in like, they're giving me an unquestionable weather report. 

But there's basically three things that coaching allows them to see:
- One, that these sentences they say to me are often factually untrue. And how do I know is that when I ask them to give me evidence of the opposite, they can give me tons of evidence, right? Like if someone comes and says, "I'm just so lazy". I'll be like, "well, tell me how that's not true". And they'll be like, "well, I did this, I did this, I do this, I do that". It's like, okay. 
- So that leads me to the second important thing that coaching allows them to see. Because they can find this evidence of the opposite being true as well,  they get to realize that these are optional belief systems, that they could choose to believe the opposite about themselves or at least something slightly less radical. Like for example, if we continue on the lazy idea, they could believe instead, "sometimes I make lazy decisions, but I'm capable of getting a lot of stuff done when I want to".  
- And the third thing that they learn through coaching is that these belief systems that they choose often lead them to act a certain way and create certain results and keep them stuck in loops of recreating the same stuff that they don't want.  

So you can take anything in your life, past or present, and twist into whichever identity you want, but be very, very aware of what you're doing because the narrative that you settle for day in and day out will determine how you move towards your future. Because from those identities, we actually make a lot of decisions. We will attempt or not attempt. We will give up or we will keep trying. We will show up for the struggle and become stronger for it, or we might hide from the struggle and lose the opportunity to build muscle. We will move or we will stay in place. We will step in and try to throw that punch to save the guy who's getting beaten up or we will stay on the sidelines to film him getting beaten up. 

So, to me, it's very important that you be very, very conscious of your self-concept  and the way it is shaping your life. We don't want hidden beliefs to limit you unconsciously and you will not be able to change something about your life that you don't like if you haven't identified it clearly and brought it to the surface of your consciousness. 

So for example, I've told you before that one of the things that I was struggling to solve for me was learning Arabic. I  sucked for years. I wasn't making any progress. found it horribly confusing. I was discouraged. I never dared to open my mouth in front of my Arabic speaking friends. I blamed it on myself not having the capacity to learn it. And then I also blamed it on the language itself for being too complicated. Right? 

And then someone, a very good friend, casually told me about this Franco-French girl called Camille who spoke Arabic perfectly. And I got to tell you, it just annoyed the crap out of me. You know, I speak five languages, including a Semitic language, which Arabic is, and that should make things super easy for me because I know the grammatical logic of Semitic languages, which is based on root systems.  

So why on earth was this Camille able to learn Arabic and I wasn't, right? Who does she think she is? And then it hit me like a ton of bricks. That was exactly the right question to ask. What does she believe about herself and about Arabic that  I don't believe about myself that allowed her to learn Arabic and that wasn't allowing me to learn Arabic. 

So earlier this year, I gained consciousness of the fact that I had to sort of switch my concept, my self concept on this particular topic.  And I just decided to borrow what I imagined to be her belief system. And I tried to apply it to myself, right? So I was like, "okay, from now on, I'm going to tell myself that I'm someone who can learn Arabic if I put my mind to it". Which honestly was the very opposite of what I believed before. And I'm working on it now and I've got a solid plan, making progress. But when I thought I was a victim of the language and of my own capacity,  I wasn't able to do that. Now I believe I'm someone who's in control of her own learning experience and it has changed everything. 

And I have a thousand examples to give you like this one from the aid workers that I coach, right? 

Marina, June 2022. She believed she sucked at dating. She was just so bad at it, she said, so she was surprised when her dates weren't going well. But then I asked her what she thought that someone who enjoys dating and who's good at it thinks about themselves. And that question changed everything for her. You know, fast forward two years later, she's in a very loving, beautiful relationship, very meaningful relationship. It was a journey to get there but she made it happen and it started with that, switch of like, how do you think of yourself in the dating world  in order to  show up differently, right, in every date. 

I can also tell you about Claire who just three months ago started coaching with me and she brought a lack of self-confidence to her sessions. She was like, I'm just not confident enough, I can't do things. And three months later, she's honestly unrecognizable. She speaks up in meetings. She's taking on responsibilities and projects. She speaks her mind and it has really changed everything for her on a daily basis. I could go on and on.  

So in these times when a lot of us are facing joblessness, painful accusations on how our jobs are done, seeing our humanitarian values and principles jeopardized all around, and just all this uncertainty that we're all floating in, with a lot of existential doubt, when there's so little control that we can apply to external circumstances that are way way way way bigger than us, the best way to not be thrown off balance to get where you're going is to examine yourself concept and to develop an identity that is conscious without too many blind spots, some understanding of yourself that is deliberate and of which you are not a victim. 

So that's what we're gonna do today.

To get started, it's important to note that basically your self-concept, your identity is nothing but the collection of thoughts and belief systems that you have about yourself. It's in your head, but you think it's built on solid evidence. It's generally the product of a lot of things, right? So:
- your experiences up until today, your analysis of them, right? So do you classify them as failures or triumphs? 
- the culture that you grew up in, for example, if you grew up in Africa or the Middle East or the Northern hemisphere, we all have different beauty standards and we all have different understandings of what is appropriate for a woman, of what the duties of a man are or what the eldest of the family should be doing.
- if you have a religion,  it's the same, it comes with a lot of guidance and rules and standard practices
- depending on the parents you had... Did you have supportive parents, hippie parents, absent parents, narcissistic parents or helicopter parents?
- of course, the people that you hung out with most of your life, was it journalists? Was it bureaucrats? Was it factory workers? Was it farm workers? All of that is going to shape your understanding of you. 
- and it also comes from your general level of self-awareness, 
- your genes, 
- the feedback you've gotten over the course of your life from the people who liked you and also from the people who didn't like you so much... And whether you took  the feedback with a grain of salt or whether you took it very seriously.

So it really is, this self concept of yours, the combination of a lot of things. And it's kind of random when you think about it, right? You throw all these factors into a bag, in your subconscious, and it leads you to measure yourself against certain standards, make certain decisions, take certain actions. And of course, the result of all this is the life you're living  and the judgments that you have about you. 

Now... if you feel like you don't have a very strong sense of identity, if you feel like your self-concept is just as rubbly as the humanitarian world is today, it can come from a number of things, right? 
- It can come from having let other people decide how you should live your life, right? Your mother, your society, your religion. If you don't question it,  you may be living someone else's life, not yours.
- It can also come from having  lived your life based on habit or autopilot, basically just repeating the same things over and over again, not really consciously going where the wind blew, choosing the paths of least resistance and not making very deliberate decisions for yourself. 
- It can come from having repeatedly fled difficult moments and avoided them.  So you never really got a chance to  test and assess what you were made of.
- It can also come from a deep rooted belief that you're not that great that you have a lot of flaws and so that leads you to constantly question yourself but not in an empowered way, you know what i mean, all that time that you spend in negative self-judgment is actually limiting your vision instead of expanding it with curiosity 
- And finally it can also come from repeatedly numbing your uncomfortable emotions  with external substances like food or alcohol or drugs or medication or social media or tv shows, right, stuff that makes you not really experience the reality of your life, so you're a bit disconnected from that reality and you're not really getting direct feedback from your experiences. 

Again I want to make it very clear that I'm not here to tell you that you can't limit yourself. I think constraint and focus are extremely powerful and necessary. You're free to limit yourself in whichever way you want. I limit myself every single day. I could, for example, learn to play golf, but I really, really don't want to. So that's a form of, limitation, but it's a very, very conscious one. Right. 

And my job, my hope here with these episodes is to make sure that you choose things intentionally for yourself, deliberately, not accidentally because of something that was whispered to you by society or by others, by an overly critical father or teacher or a boss. 

And so again, I cannot emphasize enough. What we'll be mapping out today is not fact. We're going to try to map out the result, the sum of all the factors that I have  listed up until now and gain some visibility on your operating assumptions about yourself to see what you're working with. Right.  

So you're doing it today... it's going to be very different than if you had done this exercise six months ago, and if you do this again in three years, it's likely to be very different again. 

For the data scientists listening or the people who are very well educated in economy or finance, this is what we call nowcasting, right? It's the picture of where you stand today that can help forecast the very immediate future. It's going to show you where you're headed and where you're preventing yourself from heading and why. 

So there's two rules for this exercise. 
- The first one is we're not going to beat ourselves up. We're not going to try to change anything today. We just want awareness for now. want pure observation, pure curiosity. 
- And the second very, very critical rule for this exercise to work  is you are simply not allowed to say or think, "I don't know", "I have no idea", "I got nothing". You got to know that your prefrontal cortex, which is the part of your brain that you use to think consciously, intentionally, can only focus on one thought at a time. So if you allow it to be mobilized by the conscious thought "I don't know",  you're going to miss out on all the wisdom that you do have. 

This framework that I've developed is extremely unique. You won't find it anywhere else. It's tried and tested with many of the aid workers that I coach. And so, uh, well, without further ado, why don't you open a document on your computer or your notes on your phone or tablet, whatever you want to use. 

I don't recommend for once that you use handwriting for this one, cause you might want to go back and edit quite a bit along the process. 

So  are you ready? If you're multitasking, come back. I need you with me. Have you parked the car? Have you told your best friend that you will answer her nine minute and 23 second voice note later? All right.

First,  I want you to imagine a tree.  And in the trunk of the tree, the bottom of whatever it is you're writing on, is the part that we're going to put all the official information about you. When you have to fill out a form and they ask you who you are, it's a bit the most unmodifiable part of you. 

So we're going to write our age, We're going to write our nationality or nationalities, if you have several,  sexual orientation, gender identity, your country of residence, if it's different from your nationalities, your ethnicity, your religion, your height and your weight. Right? So this is like ID stuff, super simple. 

I'm 39. I'm Spanish, Algerian and British. I'm a woman. I'm heterosexual. I'm living in France, currently. I'm a Mediterranean. I'm a bit of a mix of Christian and Buddhist values, but overall I would describe myself as agnostic on the religion front and... I weigh 58 kilos for 160 centimeters. 

And on top of that base, the trunk, we're going to make five columns.  These are like the branches of the tree. 
- So branch number one is going to be everything that has to do with body health, fitness. 
- Column number two, branch number two, is going to be anything that has to do with mind, spiritual, and basically emotional life. 
- Branch number three  is going to be everything that has to do with work, career, job, profession.  
- Branch number four,  column number four is going to have the relationship stuff.  - And on the last column, the fifth branch of the tree, we're going to put everything that has to do with creative, fun, leisure, art  stuff, right? 

And in each of those columns, we're basically going to write at least  five words,  nouns, roles, hats, and you can put whatever comes to mind. Let your stream of consciousness flow here. 

So for example, for branch number one, which was the body and the health stuff, I put marathon finisher. put amateur yogi. put midlife woman. I put pretty fit.  I put fat and overweight.  I put Miller Fisher, which is the autoimmune thing that I have. And I put bad sleeper.

For branch number two, for example, all the stuff that has to do with mind, spiritual, emotion, I put mindful, thoughtful, meditative, open-minded,  and I put too emotional. 

Branch three, anything that has to do with work, I put manager, I put coach,  I put advocate, I put communicator, I put hard-working, I put not enough.

Branch four, which is everything that has to do with relationships, love, family, friendships. I put for myself, mom, daughter, very loved.  Um,  I put  sister, I put partner, I put  drama avoidant. 

And on branch five, uh, anything that has to do with creative, fun, art, leisure, passion, I put  guitar, singing, dancing, plants and  not very creative. 

Now, if you did this exercise, you already have approximately 30 data points that you can look at carefully and you can notice what you wrote and notice what you did not write. Right? So for example, if you wrote  NGO worker instead of aid worker, that's there's a difference there. Notice it. If you wrote negotiator instead of CMCoord liaison, notice it. There's a difference there. If you chose the word piano player instead of musician, notice it, there's a difference there. 

Pay attention to these subtle little differences because they are all very valid ways to look at yourself and to define yourself.  But some words are super limiting, right? And the upside of that limitation is that they're precise and they can really  make you feel strong. Now, there's other words that you may have chosen that leave a lot of possibilities wide open for you, which is really, really great, but they have the downside of being very vague. And so it might not help you feel rooted in an identity and feel strong when you have to make decisions. Right? Some of the words you may have chosen are very dry and some others have the potential to actually make you fall in love with yourself. So which nuance of similar concepts did you go for and why,  and what are the belief systems that are attached to every single word you choose.  

What  meaning do you give to your gender identity? What meaning do you give to your height and to your weight and to your nationality and to your ethnicity?  What meanings do you give to all of that is the first thing that you can do to make this exercise be extremely revealing for you. So look at it all and ask yourself why and question it.

The second exercise, very simple. I'm just going to give you prompts to journal on. 20 questions that will reveal your current self-concept. Write everything that comes to mind. Don't stop writing for every question until you're done and out of ideas. Pause the podcast in between each question and go for it. 

The first question is,  what are five adjectives that describe you at work? And what are five adjectives that describe who you are in your relationships? That's question one.  

Question two, what are you good at and what are you bad at? Again, don't stop writing.  Write everything that comes to mind. 

Question three, what are the three role models that you have? And what are three people you definitely don't want to become?

Question four, what's your biggest professional accomplishment to date?  

Five,  what's the biggest professional accomplishment you see possible for your life? 

Question six, what are you most proud of in your life in general so far outside of work?

Question seven, what are some things that you've done that you're ashamed of?  

Eight,  what are your biggest failures? This is different, right? One is shame and the other one is failure. Two very different questions. 

Question nine, what are the events of your life that have made you grow? 

Question 10, what have you quit in your life and why? 

Question 11, what have you fought for in your life and why? 

Question 12, what makes you feel joy? 

Question 13, what makes you feel angry? 

Question 14, what makes you feel sad?

Question 15, what are you afraid of? What keeps you up at night? 

16, what don't you like about you that you'd like to change but haven't been able to? 

Question 17, what's your biggest added value to this world? 

18, what helps you feel good and deliver the best version of you to the world?

Question 19, what makes you feel bad and deliver the worst version of you to the world? 

20, final question. Imagine you're 20 years older than you are today. What does that version of you have to say to you? What advice is it giving you? What areas of focus is it inviting you to pursue? What is it telling you to give up? What is it telling you to hold on to? Where does it want you to grow?  What does the version of you that is 20 years  wiser telling you today?

That's it friends, 20 questions and a tree to map out your current understanding of who you are and how you value yourself. Where you limit yourself, where you judge yourself harshly,  or where you want to start putting more effort. 

Your homework for the week, if you'll accept it, is to come back one time in a few days and read what you've written down and ask yourself why you wrote what you wrote. Where is it coming from? How true any of it is? Is there any other way to approach it and do these thoughts and beliefs that you have currently about you  serve you in creating the life that you want to create. 

The next episode, which will be episode three of this self concept rewriting series, we'll look at some really honestly mind blowing paradigm shifts that will build on the work we started today. And that will allow you to see the many, ways that you get to shift things, analyze your life differently, to see what's possible for you and to define who you are meant to be on this planet.  And I honestly cannot wait.  

Until then, keep reflecting on what your brain offered you today. Your identity is where it's at. Stay connected to it, my friend. 

I send you loads of love and strength wherever you are. I know these times can be hard. Keep showing up and keep taking care of yourself.