What do you believe about yourself that’s currently preventing you from reaching your goals?

We all have a series of identities that guide our every action, often without us even realizing it.

What you eat, where you get your coffee, where you went to school, what you studied, your politics, how trusting you are of strangers, how open to change or disruption and on and on and on. All these decisions and more are rooted in the identities we’ve adopted for ourselves.

Often these identities are benign, helping us navigate a complex society by narrowing the near-infinite choices we face on a daily basis to a more manageable number of options that people like us would be open to.

Sometimes they serve us and the world, like, “I’m not the type of person who litters,” or “I’m not the type of person who eats meat.”

Owning the identity of a survivor, fighter, or hustler can help us persevere through incredibly challenging situations and emerge intact on the other side.

But while many identities we own for ourselves may serve us, many do not. In fact, many actively stunt, undermine, or otherwise sabotage the productive work we might otherwise be doing. Again, usually without us realizing it.

The most pernicious of these are identities that have served us well in the past and which we may wear proudly.

Frugality may have been a necessity at one point, but can easily transition to being miserly.

Pulling yourself up from your bootstraps as the lone wolf may have helped you start and build a business based on hard work and ingenuity, but there may come a point where that identity keeps you from asking for and bringing on the help you need to grow further.

Many freelancers and small business owners find themselves topping out at the revenue they remember their parent’s salaries being growing up, often accompanied with negative conceptions of the wealthy.

If you’ve hit a plateau that you can’t seem to break past, it’s might be time to look inward and ask which beliefs and identities are holding you back from taking the next step in your journey.

Humble Beginnings

Despite the myriad horror stories floating around the online freelancing circles, when I started out my career as a freelance podcast editor, one of the first places I turned to find work was UpWork.

I was working a full-time job at the time and could afford to work for less than what I knew my work was worth, at least at the start, while I built up my portfolio and client base.

It turns out that if you do it right, UpWork is not the career death many freelancers make it out to be, and I connected with some truly fantastic clients, one of whom I’m still working with many years later, no longer on the platform.

But while UpWork was instrumental in getting my business up and off the ground in the first few months, without realizing it, it had also embedded an identity in me that wreaked havoc behind the scenes in my business for the next year and a half before I realized what was happening.

It was Thanksgiving, and a client’s poor planning meant that my team and I were going to have to go into work over the weekend to ensure the client’s podcast episode was produced and went out on schedule on the Monday following the holiday weekend.

My girlfriend, Kelly, was not happy about my willingness to defer to the client’s requests and let work take priority over our holiday plans, and she let me know about it.

It was over a tense Thanksgiving brunch that I came face to face with the identity that was making life difficult for me, my team, clearly Kelly, and even my clients as well.

The Freelancer Mentality

Despite the fact that I had grown my client base, transitioned to an agency model, and was doing very little podcast editing myself anymore, I was still holding onto the identity of a gun-for-hire freelancer.

Instead of realizing that most people hire an agency to be the experts, dictate the terms and drive the work in order to get results, I was deferring to my clients at every turn.

I charged less than I should have, worked insane hours to appease them, didn’t set or enforce clear boundaries and it was severely crippling my ability to grow the business further.

I had faced burnout multiple times, and though things were slowly improving, the current status was untenable for much longer. The cracks in the foundation were starting to show.

My identity as a customer-focused freelancer had allowed me to quit my full-time job and establish a business where I could travel the world and work from anywhere, which had been my entire life’s dream.

But holding onto that identity was not going to allow me to build a team and agency capable of working with the level of clients I wanted to serve.

Shifting Identities Takes Time

Facing my own identity crisis was the first step, but it didn’t solve everything overnight.

It would take another year to dig my way out of that identity — one that had helped me achieve what had been my biggest dream in life — and seed and enforce a new one that would serve me better going forward.

Since that experience, however, I’ve become much quicker to recognize existing identities that are holding me back in one way or another.

When I find myself reaching a plateau en route to some goal or other, it’s become my standard practice to reflect and ask myself what the identity of someone who’s already achieved that goal is and if my current view of who I am and how I behave is in alignment with that.

Most often, I find that there’s some identity I’m holding, often proudly, that is holding me back from moving in the direction I want.

At these times, I thank that identity for serving me to this point, for keeping me safe, helping me get to where I am, and bid it farewell.

Each of us gets to choose who we want to be in any given moment, and those choices will ultimately define what we’re able to achieve and the lives we’re able to create for ourselves.

Choose intentionally.

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