Alessandro Sciaraffa shows how identities like "fighter" lock you into stress and narrow thinking, even when they once served you. Over three months, you uncover the stories behind the identity, practice its opposite through new language and behavior, then gather evidence the new version works. Identity shifts faster than willpower alone.
Chapters
Quite often when we explore the narratives that we've been resonating with, for example, if we resonate with being a fighter, there's nothing wrong with being a fighter, nothing wrong— right with it. However, we're called to fight in our circumstances when we're called to. But if we're in a constant state of fighting, then if that's what we resonate to, whenever we step into our arena, we are looking at things as threats or things to fight for. And if there isn't a threat or anything to fight for, because we don't resonate with that, we actually go down in our performance and we start to get into suboptimal zones of performance until we start to see or resonate that something needs to be fought for. Now, when you get into higher levels of performance, if you're only going to show up to your best abilities when you feel there's a need to fight, then you're going to give away opportunities. You're going to obviously play at subpar levels until you see there's a threat. There's nothing right or wrong with this. It might mean that you need to relate to everything as a fight. The only thing is, that's a story that goes on in your head. In reality, what's actually happening is there's nothing to fight for if your life is not under threat. No one's chasing you, your loved ones. There actually are no threats. What we're talking about is a superimposed threat about our goals. And while fighting is a really good analogy regarding to defending our Or pursuing striving. It is also a very stressful state that if we stay in for long enough, you know, our adrenal system is going to be absolutely through the roof and we're going to feel exhausted because we feel like we always need to fight. And so really with the work that we explore is the cascade that even leads to us resonating as being this fighter. And so where it really starts is in the feelings. So we only resonate with, you You know, feeling like we're in the zone or feeling like engaged when there's a fight to be had. And where does that come from? So that's the feelings that we have. That comes from a narration, a narrative, what the story of what we conclude about what's going on. And where does that story come from? That comes from an identification. I'm a fighter really deep down means that being me is not enough, so I have to fight for things so that I can, you know, have the life that I want or the performances that I want. And that's really the distinction to help people see that relating to fighting with everything in your reality is always going to come back to this deep, deeper identification of not being good enough. And when we actually reconcile where these identities come from, they normally come from a core memory or come from how we're experiencing our our circumstances, because there's a difference between what's actually happening and the story of what's actually happening. When you live in the story of what's actually happening, you're only going to resonate and receive opportunities, ideas that are related to your story, and that has a limit. And when you're seeing what is actually happening, you strip away the stories and you can actually be present to what's going on and make decisions live in the moment that are absent from any sort of And so when we, when we've got these memories about identifying with, no, I'm a fighter, or I'm not someone who's like that, or, you know, oh no, I'm not like that, I'm like this— whenever we've got these kind of identifications, they're either going to work for us up until a certain point, but when we want to break through and experience new levels of results, that same identity is not going to be the one that's going to carry us forward. And we have to say thank you and say goodbye to that identification, which people find difficult because they get attached and they get misidentified with that being only who they are. And they get this deep sense of relationship with this old identity because there's a history of evidence. But if you remove the history of evidence of being this fighter, there was, you know, no recollection of you being a fighter, it was just the circumstances you had, then you wouldn't have any evidence to base your identity off. And that feels unfamiliar for people because now they're like, well, who am I? You know, how do I perform? What's my identity? Well, this is the training that we do in our 3-month container, where the first month we reveal these blind spots where we're identifying with something that's not necessarily going to help us move forward, and we reconcile where they even come from. We challenge the validity. We start to dissociate between the story of what we perceive things happening and what's actually happening. And we also get into what we want to do versus what we should do for our goal. What we want to do is going to be based in a story. What we should do for our goal is just based on pure reality, pure objectivity of what's going to move us forward, what's going to continue us actually achieving our goal. The second month we get into practice, exploration, practice and exploration for being now the opposite to what we used to identify with. So if we were identifying with someone who's not enough, not good enough, we want to start practicing what it feels like and what it's like to To feel invaluable, to feel important, to feel like we know what we're doing, to trust ourselves. So that takes practice because we've had so much conditioning and habits to perform in the former. And we start to explore what that might look like. What might we be saying? How might we be walking around on our arenas? Who might we be talking to? Who might we not be talking to? What wouldn't we be doing? And essentially, this is to go and look at your old circumstances that you're currently in and look at them from a new lens and be performing and resonating from a new space, which is going to be the precursor to getting new results as you perform in a new way. And the 3rd month is about looking at evidence where we get evidence-based feedback for how you're performing, synchronicities, results that highlight that who you're being, this new version of you is being validated and you see progress. And we want to be able to train our new perspective, our lens to actually spot these progresses, because if we don't spot them, then we don't feed the attention there. We actually feed it back to, you know, whatever was in the way before, how we used to relate to ourselves. So really, this exploration, this work is to help you understand there's a cascade of how things work. It's really a story of how we view things. And then it's the resonance on that story, like feeling the story, feeling that we are that person, the narratives that come with that, the lens we view opportunities from, what we have access to ideas-wise. Because if we're resonating on one identity, we can't actually receive any ideas outside of that identity. And then obviously your feelings, your perspective, which is going to form beliefs about your current circumstances, is going to interfere and influence with your actions or what type of actions or the quality of actions that you have. And everybody knows actions leads to results. But as far as I'm concerned, if we only start to intervene and train you at the action part, like behavior basically, that's way too far down the line of the cascade of where we can actually impact change. Because when we only impact change at the action behavior level, we're basically ignoring all the things that are leading to us to even act the way that we're getting— that we're doing and having the results that we're doing. And so this is a much deeper process that has more lasting change. And then after we've addressed that cascade, we're looking at practicing and exploring being the version of us that's kind of the antithesis of what we used to relate to ourselves as. Even if we had lots of success having that relation to ourselves and we kind of understand that that's not going to be the way that's going to help us go forward now because we've entered a new phase, we're transitioning, we're going potentially to new levels, we'll have to adapt and change to, you know, put these different inputs that get us to different outputs.
