When you are truly something, you don’t have to say you’re it

The thing(s) you think and say you are may or may not be what you truly are. Identity is negotiated socially. You need to embody an identity, which other people must validate for it to be real.

At the individual level (yourself), this doesn’t matter much. The more you are capable of maintaining a detached and welcoming posture toward other people's opinions, the more likely you are to live serenely.

At the societal level, this is important because it helps keep you and everyone else sane. Other people act as social checks and balances toward your grandiose or otherwise view of yourself and what you want to be. Other people help you identify yourself in the broader stage of society and the groups within it.

Someone once asked Ido Portal at a workshop something along these lines: “families seem to be increasingly disconnected and fragmented — how can we establish closeness with other people and support each other more?”

Ido replied (I am paraphrasing here): When you are truly there for each other and fully connected, there is no need to say it or advertise your relationship. “We’re a close family always there for each other”—that’s bullshit. When you are truly there and fully present and appreciative of someone else, you don’t have to say it out loud. You act that belief and it continues manifesting into the world through your presence and actions.

Similarly, your identity (habits, behaviors, beliefs, actions, and more) is tied to your reputation and it is determined by the consistent actions you do. In the early stages of expanding yourself to a new venture/habit, this is one of the main reasons why you experience a lot of friction. Because you are trying to be something that you are not yet. Other people may kill you for that (metaphorically and not so metaphorically speaking).

So, you may advertise your new identity to the world and play the game of experiencing the flood of resistance within and without you. Or you may continue developing your new practices/habits/etc. in silence and let your actions speak for yourself. This may be a slower process of achieving status (i.e., the value, respect, or esteem that others accord to an individual) since that is something also conferred by other people and closely related to identity.

Resistance within you and other people is always there in moments of change. An interesting game to play is to find out how much you can handle, and how you can explore the boundaries of your capabilities to become the person you need to be to live the life you wish to live.