Identity Inversion: Part 1

**Ben Greenfield** (0:00)
Hey, it's Ben Greenfield. Every week, I release a quick podcast with some meaningful thoughts that hopefully make your life better. And this is it. If you would like these thoughts delivered straight into your email inbox, go to bengreenfieldlife.com/newsletter.
And when you do that, you can also get access to leave comments, leave thoughts, leave your feedback, because I love to hear what you think. All right, let's dive in. So last week, I shared with you about brokenness. You learned that no matter how hard you and I strive for some kind of boundless perfection, it's really an unfulfilling vain pursuit if we fail to see that we are broken. And I also talked about how someday we're gonna be even more broken, but we can during our life in this broken body, by the grace of God, become the best version of our broken selves. Not so that we can better serve ourself, but so that we can better serve God and serve others. In my opinion, the two most important things that we can do with our lives, serving God and serving others. Let's talk about that best version part now, specifically how you can identify with great clarity how to achieve it. First, you need to identify what's holding you back. What is holding you back? So bear with me here because I'm going to take a quick circuitous route before coming back full circle on how to be your best version. Bear with me here. So you're no doubt familiar with the phrase, how we live our days is how we live our lives. In his book, Outwitting the Devil, Napoleon Hill describes the type of hypnotic trance that I expound upon in an article that I will definitely link to underneath this video. So these two concepts of becoming our best selves and the hypnotic trance are intertwined. And here's why. We all have a tendency to fall into daily habits, rituals, routines, and habits often shaped by our desires, our environment, and our upbringing. We tend to become so comfortable with these that they gradually get drawn together to form the etch a sketch of our identity. And we need to invert that etch a scratch to redraw the identity. For example, let's say you're watching and you're a male viewer, you grew up a little skinnier than the other boys, you were always the underdog in sports, you found yourself constantly warming the bench, and you eventually discovered that fitness, exercise, hard training, and weightlifting allowed you to be able to get the respect that you craved. So you carved yourself into a man who they would finally respect. Now, years and years later, you still feel as though there is a potential threat of disrespect and loss of self-confidence. If you don't hit the weights and run the hills. So now you're a fully grown man with inner fear and anxiety about losing big muscles or your strong heart and lungs. You're not really training for anything in particular, except just to feel good about yourself. Now because a significant part of your identity and how you feel about yourself is wrapped up in your fitness, you're blinded to any sense of training for a specific challenge or sport or focusing on metrics of health and longevity like VO2 max or grip strength. And you're simply wasting hours junk training because your only objective is to feel good about yourself. As a result, you're constantly wasting valuable hours in the gym, battling injuries, hooked on energy drinks for motivation, and your biomarkers have basically gone to crap. Or let's say you're a woman who realized growing up that you can get the most praise from your parents by getting good grades, by graduating at the top of every class and being a total academic workhorse. And now fast forward 20 years. Your parents really couldn't care less how well you're managing your giant list of to-dos and your email inbox, but you continue to pride yourself on your inherent tendencies to please someone by staying on top of everything. Even if it means short sleep, rushed conversations, and skipped self-care to ensure zero inbox, with every last piece of analog and digital paper filed away properly. You're always busy. Indeed, that's actually your go-to response any time someone asks you how you're doing. Busy. How about you? Because your identity is wrapped up in being that person who doesn't let anything slip through the cracks, often to the detriment of your health and relationships. Now, if you're the man in that scenario, one of the things you may have identified as holding you back from your best version is your addiction to working out to feel good about yourself. If you're the woman in that scenario, you perhaps identified that something holding you back is the excessively strict standards that you've set for yourself. So what would be the opposite for the man in that scenario? Well, in one sentence, I want to be confident about who I am, no matter what my body looks like or how fit I am. In a word, single word, that boils down to confidence. That's the inversion word. So what's the opposite for a woman? In a sentence, let's say, I want to be known as someone who can just relax and sometimes let things go. So in a word, serene or maybe zen. You see what I did there? Let's review. So I or you identify a character, trait, tendency or habit, what you might call the hypnotic trance. You describe it in one paragraph and then you describe in one sentence the opposite of that feature. And finally, you distill that down into one single word. You invert that identity or that part of your identity. It's that simple. So you're essentially doing three things. You're identifying a conscious or unconscious identity pattern in a paragraph. You're naming the redemptive opposite in a sentence, and then you're distilling that sentence into a single word. And that's identity inversion. That's how you shake, reset and redraw the Etch A Sketch. So next week in another video, I'm gonna walk you through what the identity inversion exercise actually looks like or looked like for me.