The Theme for this month’s blog is about the person you are versus the person you believe you are. In November, we will talk about identity, doubt, and the stories we tell ourselves.
I continue to return to the difference of opinion between how I see myself and how others see me. I have to ask myself: am I old? And the quick answer is NO! Who I am inside does not tell me that I have anything to do with age, because I feel the same as always. However, my appearance tells others another story, that of a person who has traveled Earth for quite a while. That is what they see. That is not who I am.
It’s now time to look into the distance between the picture you have of yourself and the person you are, and why we need to be rewriting our stories.
What is the identity gap?
The identity gap arises when you experience a lack of alignment between your experience of yourself, your internal reality (who you feel you are), and your external reality (how others experience and perceive you). Psychologists describe it as a discrepancy between your self-concept and your social perception.
This month, we’ll explore the two sides of our soul. The internal self is our personal story, values, and ideals that we have about ourselves. The external self is the self that people see based on our actions, our style, and our image.
So, what causes this disconnect? Our internal purpose often results in us reverting back to our old life identities. Society, friends, and peers judge you and place you in categories based on your outward appearance and behavior.
This effort to reconcile who you are with what others expect from you wears you down physically and emotionally.
Why the identity gap exists
The identity gap is not an accident; it is created and sustained by multiple cognitive and social processes. As for our internal story, we hold onto the old self-stories.
We live in our heads instead of the world. Our minds often favor familiarity and predictability, even when growth would better serve us. In fact, a life of progress is manufactured by the society in which we live; it is not something that occurs naturally.
When a self-image is painful and destructive or just obsolete, it continues to be known and handled, lagging a step behind your life, maturity, and circumstances, because your mind is loyally attached to the conditions in which it was created to survive.
We don’t see how we’ve changed. Our growth is often incremental and so subjective that we may not realize our growth without a keen insider’s lens. We have a tendency to use our current intelligence to characterize who we were in the past and often have lost sight of the fact that our earlier selves lacked that very knowledge and could not have acted on it. We rarely see the subtle changes, so we keep thinking and living as our former selves.
This ancient struggle is rooted in a cognitive imbalance. We believe we are good because of our intentions. Others, on the other hand, judge us according to the results of our actions.
Because we’re the ones judging ourselves, we hold a great deal of internal context. You know what your motives are, what your principles are, what you are trying to do. If it fails, you blame it on the situation.
When you judge others, you do not see their interior world. You see only what they do, which you instantly interpret as who they are.
So, always let your inner world pass through unjudged, while the outer world will judge you solely by what you do.
Memory doesn’t always tell the truth; it’s a creative storyteller. Whenever you remember something, your brain is reconstructing the memory. Each recollection is partly reconstructed through the lens of current knowledge, beliefs, and emotional states.
You can consider your head like a computer: When you’re down or feeling anxious, your brain is a filtering system, diving right into your history to recover memories that support that state of mind. Your brain holds a large database.
In many ways, you are your own worst enemy. If your mind is telling you that you’re missing a skill, you see the one flaw in the mirror or in a meeting and ignore all the other signs of your growth; this is confirmation bias.
Basically, your inner identity is built on a highly selected, emotionally biased set of memories rather than objective reality.
How the identity gap shows up
When our story inside doesn’t fit the story outside, it creates a subdued but constant irritation in daily life.
This identity mismatch shows up in your behavior, thoughts, and choices.
It might manifest as feeling belittled or inferior about what you actually have to offer. Or perhaps you are minimizing your own strengths, but they are clearly visible to others. We also tend to cling to our old labels, which are no longer relevant, challenging to redefine, and resistant to change.
A type of imposter phenomenon occurs where you don’t allow external achievements to be filed away as wins. When you accomplish a milestone, land a promotion, or finish a project, the first thing you do is search for an alternative. Sometimes you’ll blame it on luck, timing, or a fluke.
You assume the bar was set incredibly low. But on the other hand, you just live with this steady, anxious fear that you are a phony who is just waiting for a moment when someone catches you, even though your life is a track record of effective performance.
This leads to a huge blind spot: you are totally out of alignment with consensus about your strengths. When others at work, in the community, or in your family praise your skills or leadership, you instantly devalue or ignore it.
You could be brushing off compliments with a joke or dismissing something you’ve done with, “Oh, it was nothing.”
Maybe your core strengths are so simple and obvious that you think they are just simple common sense that anyone can do. And then you get so caught up with the little imperfections in your life that you treat them as part of your identity while treating your big strengths as fleeting accidents.
You’re still defining yourself by an old vision, dragging out memories of the past that have no place in the present. You’re stuck in the roles you once played.
It could appear as a self-label like, she is silent. She is hurried. She is not a public speaker. But those stereotypes still drive what you use for software, in addition to how you act in a room, and even what form of obstacles you set.
You establish your childhood quirks or juvenile errors as if they were facts of your character that will never change.
When you’ve grown, your entire system can’t catch up. It stalls out in a great emotional freeze, caught between who you were and who you are turning into.
You may experience guilt and sadness when leaving behind old habits, friends, or mindsets.
You might be experiencing something called identity whiplash, where you feel confident and expansive, and then jump right back into the known and your old small habits, because the new version of you is a little too new to feel safe occupying.
You put too much energy into what other people think you should be like, instead of appreciating where you are right now.
Why this gap isn’t a flaw
Another way to think about the identity gap is that it is commonly mistaken for individual weakness or a psychological deficiency. Actually, it isn’t a bug in the system. It is a feature, a natural trait of being human.
One way to view the space is not as a defect, but as a natural part of psychological growth. This is exactly why the tension between your perception of yourself and how others perceive you serves as an important driver of equilibrium and growth.
Consciousness is to live with two identities: a world of thought and a world of action. You are a process instead of an object. Since your inner world has the capacity to change, imagine and react at the speed of thought.
The world outside of you is not foreseen; you have to act in it, wait in it, and have other people know and act in it. You can’t alter it without lags, and there will always be a structural lag. Expecting the two to always match perfectly is like expecting a map to instantly change every time a single tree grows, or a new road is added.
The space allows us to occupy ourselves. If your true story of identity was immediately and fully validated by everything you ever received in acclaim, notoriety, or success, then it would be ego inflation to the nth degree and maybe even lead to reckless arrogance.
So, the gap is what grounds it. This part of the gap is the exact spot where possibilities live! The emptiness in the gap reminds you to keep your humility intact and keep your ego, your inner voice, a bit at a distance from the rumble of people.
It is a space that ensures that your most recent definition of yourself will not be permanent. This space is the space where you are invited to critically re-explore and expand who you are. That is what makes it a vital tool for self-awareness. For example, if your thoughts and external experiences were aligned all the time without prompting you to look within, you would never pause.
It’s that helping tension; every now and then, you need to pause and reflect on life, reset your emotional burden, and be purposeful about the existing life story to be altered.
Concluding thoughts
The identity gap is not something we want to eliminate. It’s not something we need to fix. It is the gap between who you’ve been and who you’re becoming.
The challenge is not about bringing your inner story and outer reality into perfect alignment. The challenge is really about keeping your curiosity alive long enough to sustain an exploration of both. To start questioning the labels that you wear. To observe what past stories you are holding on to and ask if some versions of yourself no longer serve you.
Self-awareness concerning your identity is not necessarily asking who am I? But rather, is the story I am telling myself about who I am still true?
As we continue this month’s dive into the topics of identity, doubt, and perception of ourselves, think about where a long-held story could be influencing your actions in the present. As you reflect, you might find that the person looking back at you isn’t who you think they are. And you might find that they have been growing substantially more than you thought.
Next Friday, we will explore when the identity gap becomes fear. The Impostor Syndrome.
Recommended reading
Insight: Why We’re Not as Self-Aware as We Think, and How Seeing Ourselves Clearly Helps Us Succeed at Work and in Life, by Tasha Eurich
The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity, by Bruce Hood
The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are, by Brené Brown
Who Are You Really: Identity Exploration for Adults, by Sarah Whitfield
Citations
Image generated by Copilot for the quote by Oscar Wilde
Photo by Rodrigo Rodriguez on Unsplash
Photo by Rupert Britton on Unsplash
Image generated partially by Copilot on conformity using photo by Centre for Ageing Better on Unsplash
Photo by Aditya Saxena on Unsplash
Photo by Sixteen Miles Out on Unsplash