Jake Burhans argues that staying calm under pressure rewires your identity. Each time you respond calmly to stress instead of panicking, you're adding a drop to the bucket, gradually replacing your old panic-driven self until calmness becomes your default.
Say you're at work and you're constantly panicking when a problem arises, and you're just known as a person who panics when a problem arises. You need to start— first of all, you need to see yourself as a person who doesn't panic when a problem arises. And then, in order to reinforce that identity in your subconscious mind, in the moment when you would typically respond with stress and anxiety, you need to be the one who responds in a calm, grounded way, and you need to behave in accordance with that enough times so that you literally reprogram your own identity, and then people will start to recognize you as that type of person. But it doesn't happen overnight. It's the identity gap in your head. Okay, I am this person. I respond to challenges as opportunities. But people aren't going to see you as that person right away. You have to behave consistently in that manner, and then over time, not only do you convince yourself of it— because you might not truly believe, maybe you can conceptualize that you're this, this type of person you want to be, but you don't truly believe it— but over time Every time that you act in accordance with the new version of yourself, it's a drop in the bucket of the new identity. And that analogy is key because it's a drop in the bucket. Okay, so you got to fill the bucket up. Every action, every thought that's in accordance with this new version of yourself that doesn't freak out when there's a problem is rebuilding this new identity. And once it becomes fully downloaded, this new identity of, hey, I approach challenges and I am calm, cool, and collected, It's gonna be your default state, okay? So automatically when a challenge comes up, you're naturally just going to respond calm, cool, and collected because that's who you truly see yourself as, and that's what your subconscious program has recognized as familiar.
