Short video/transcript by Chad Silverstein exploring the idea of identity and self-labeling. The speaker encourages revisiting ‘I am’ statements, peeling back surface labels (job titles, roles) to find underlying personal qualities, and treating labels as partial, changeable descriptors rather than core identity.
Chapters
Labels. We're back at the identity piece. Your I Ams. You're going to revisit your I Ams, the long list that you made these again. You're just stating out, I am this, I am that. Right. Remember, we're not defining ourselves by what we do, but they are part of our identity. And one of the cool things that I learned from one of the other builders, David Deck, was that when he hears people saying that I am an athlete or I am a salesman or I am a father, he. He kind of just knows that's the 1.0 version. And then he just kind of digs deep. He builds into that, that he goes under the covers, right? He peels back a layer, you know, tell me more about that. And so you don't have a builder if you're not working with us as a client, and you're going to have to ask yourself those questions. So, you know, think of me as your coach right now and just hear me asking you, you know, what's behind that I am statement. How would you describe that I am statement? Because a lot of times that label is not who you are, and it's not your identity. And so I like to use, like, your job is a good example. If I'm an architect and I identify myself as an architect, but let's just say I'm not in love with being an architect, and I change jobs, you know, I think everyone would agree I'm not an architect anymore. It's not my identity, you know, but I could be a very, you know, crazy cool designer, you know, eccentric architect. When I was working as an architect. And those words describe me much better than the work architect more than the label. And so you have to be really careful that you. You. You don't look at your IM statements, your ver version of it, and think that that's your identity. You really need to kind of, again, rinse this and play with it and start to put some words behind it and describe it and really start to dig out, you know, who you are within that label. And I think that's. That's the best way I could try to describe it is you have a label and you're trying to get underneath the label to see, like, what's behind the label that is more who you are than the label itself. And you're gonna see Chet's example in this day. I'm gonna share my example. You'll hopefully see some others, and hopefully we'll see yours. And again, it's a work in progress. So you don't wanna try to just get this down so you can move on. I used to have a joke in my office. People. I would ask people to write down their goals. And I've said this a lot of times, but it's funny. People would turn them in and some people would turn them in on a little half piece of paper. I used to get em in napkins and I used to hold em up in front of the company. Really? This is how meaningful it is to you in this napkin. Have fun with your opus. Have fun with your core. Like, I used to really get really cool and creative with the way I would like work through Build to Leads framework. And again, you don't have to, but it makes it more personal, it makes it more meaningful. And there's lots of different cool ways to do it and we'll share some of those as we keep moving forward. But you know, hopefully if you're creative and you want to play with that, that shows your identity by doing stuff like that. So I'll give you some examples and if you have any questions, make sure you ask. But just know that those labels that you're defining yourself are not who you are, they're a piece of it. But what's behind it is more going to define who you are.
