Become Your Ideal Self Through Habits

A few weekends ago, I did something very cool for myself. I completed a half marathon. It was on a sunny Saturday morning out here in Arizona. The most challenging part by far was there was a certain hill going into the mountain range where I climbed over a thousand feet of elevation. But the most rewarding part was proving to myself I can do hard things and accomplishing a goal that I'd had for years. This wasn't my first attempt at signing up for and training for a half marathon. About three years ago, I tried it and I was very dejected.

The training was very challenging, and I didn't think of myself as a runner. I grew up, just bluntly being a very large boy and a large man all the way through college. As a college football player, I was an offensive lineman who peaked at about 280 pounds. That's where I was my heaviest. And I never thought that I could ever consider myself a runner. And eventually I dropped out of that race that I had signed up for about three years ago. And I thought, well, that was overly ambitious and I'm not a runner anyway, so it makes sense that I'll probably never do it in my lifetime.

I want to use my journey with the half marathon not just to share my accomplishment and pat myself on the back, but to reframe how you consider your goals and to leverage this idea of the person you want to become. This is important because changing our habits is freaking hard. Sometimes. It's not our fault though, because even with good intentions, sometimes we try to change the wrong thing about our goals and our behavior. My story pairs up well with some ideas in the book Atomic Habits by James Clear, and in this book, chapter two.

Specifically, he talks about the three layers of behavior. Change these layers, and with the picture here for reference, start with the first layer being changing your outcomes. This level is concerned with changing your results, whether it be losing weight, winning a championship, or getting a promotion, for example. The second layer is all about changing your process. This is about changing your habits and your systems. Whether you implement a new routine at the gym, develop meditation practice, they're focused on the systems in place along the way.

Third layer is the deepest one because it's all about changing your identity. This is concerned with changing your beliefs, whether it be your self image, your judgment about yourselves and others, or your worldview as a whole. As you can see, this one's pretty tough to change, but it also might be the most important one. Most people begin the process of changing their habits, setting goals by focusing on what they want to achieve and this leads to an outcome based focus on habits. On the flip side, the alternative is to build identity based habits.

With this approach, we start by focusing on who we want to become rather than the what of what we want to accomplish. With my goal of running a half marathon that I had for years, I initially was just thinking about the outcome in the process. I never thought of myself as a runner. I thought I needed to do the race completed or do the training to become a runner and this was a neglected part of my previous plan. For me, I had to change how I framed my goals. The goal is not to run a half marathon, it's to become a runner.

Other examples are the goal is not to read a book, it's to become a reader. The goal is not to learn an instrument, it's to become a musician. The most simple way I can describe this, based on what James Clear has said and an easy two step process for you to incorporate as you start setting goals or thinking about behavior change is Number one, decide the person you want to be and number two prove it to yourself with small wins. Each time you do something that gets you closer or resembles that identity, it's another vote towards becoming that person.

Rather than starting with what you want to accomplish, start with who you want to be and the rest will follow.