How do you define yourself? How do most of us come up with our identities anyway? I believe it comes from a variety of environments or maybe I should ask; how do you define the people around you? How do you know if a person is a good person or not? The way we discover their identity is that we watch them through keen observation, we listen to them, we judge people’s identity based on their behavior isn’t that true? When someone treats you really harshly the next time you see that person, you’ll probably say; I know you, you are that harsh guy. Do you know what the issue is now? Once you decide that a person is harsh or nice, that becomes a belief or worse that becomes a conviction where nothing is going to change your opinion about it. Come to think of it, that person might have been going through a tough day, and happened between you and him was a transfer of aggression, but since you have already defined them that way, and are convinced that this is who they are, it will be difficult to change, so it stays that way.
What’s the point? We must know that we sometimes do this to ourselves. Sometimes we do something terrible and say I’m a terrible person, or we fail to meet up with certain standards, we say I’m a failure. Sometimes we caught in a pattern of behavior that is undisciplined, but if we start saying I’m an undisciplined person, it then becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, and then all of a sudden you start defining yourself as an undisciplined person, if that then becomes your belief as to who you are, not that you have been that way, everyone is capable of being undisciplined somehow.
Once you put that label on yourself, your future behavior and the results of your life are going to be colored by it. You’ve got to be very careful never to underestimate the power of the identity; you will always act or behave consistent with what perception you have of yourself. Of course there are several other ways through which we have defined ourselves, some of which are wrong, nevertheless, the most potent way of defining yourself is based on your own perception of yourself. If you see yourself as a king, you’ll begin to act as one. If you believe you are going to be extremely successful, surprisingly, the actions of successful people soon begin to dominate your character
