Identity Is Best: Rewiring the False Beliefs Behind Every Behavior You're Trying to Change

Willpower is good, but often incomplete, or at least it runs outta gas pretty quickly. Discipline seems to be better, especially according to people like Jocko Willink, but also seems to fall flat for some people. But today I wanna talk about how identity is best, and depending on how you use it, it can either help you or hurt you. There are so many beliefs that we all have that tie into our identity. They can be core beliefs that are true or false beliefs that will poison our perceptions for decades to come unless recognized, worked on, and eventually eliminated. But many of these things can follow us decades into adulthood and potentially color all aspects of our lives and perceptions, affecting our jobs, our marriages, our families, our broader relationships, and really anything else you can think of. So today, I'd like to talk about how willpower, discipline, and identity aren't different ways of accomplishing a goal, but rather different stages of building layered growth, and that they can work together to establish meaningful change. Let's get into it. Welcome to the Optimizing Beyond podcast. I'm Josh Negron, and this show is all about sharing lessons, ideas, and strategies that sharpen your thinking, strengthen your habits, and push you to grow beyond comfort zones. Let's dive in. All right, welcome back to the show. I'd like to talk about applying the Good, Better, Best framework for from episode 43 to some things we've discussed previously about discipline, habit formation, and finally identity. And I think the identity piece can sometimes leave people a little confused because when you talk about willpower and discipline, they kind of know what that means. You use both of those to build habits, to try to create some sort of meaningful change in people's lives. And when you talk about identity, that doesn't always get associated in the same lines. My point that I'm making is that identity is that final piece of that puzzle that can create the most meaningful change. Because I hear people talking about how they're frustrated that their willpower, sometimes motivation is used in its place. Motivation runs out, discipline isn't always enough. Now, people like Jocko will say that discipline is for when your willpower fails you. And the way he's using that description of discipline Is that you get in the discipline or in the habit of doing something regularly. So it's easier, like Glenn Lundy said in our episode, it's easier to do than to not do, or the inverse. And so when you've established that habit over a significant period of time, which he says is 67 days, then the discipline itself overcomes lack of willpower, lack of motivation. And that is definitely true. And that's why I think it is better than sheer motivation or willpower. But have you ever ran outta steam on a discipline as well? I know I have. And so that's where I believe the identity piece comes into play, 'cause it fits like a puzzle piece as to why you are the person that does certain things. So I wanna make this very fundamentally clear that I don't think these have to compete against one another. Sometimes I think people get the message that willpower and motivation are useless and that discipline is all you need, or that an identity change in who you believe yourself to be or how you view yourself, that that is all you need. And I don't think that is the best view of those things. Going to a conference and getting amped and pumped up has value. It typically creates the moment where people can recognize as a potential opportunity for an impetus for change. And so they can use those moments to change their habits, to start new things, and then those habits can create a potential discipline. If you're also recognizing that that might plug into a certain false belief or a view of yourself that you may have that may not be the healthiest, then it's those sources of fuel that we're looking at to change with the goal of creating meaningful, lasting change in that ever slow-growing optimization of getting better every day. Now, why do I think that motivation or willpower gets sold as the main currency of the day? There's so many rah-rah videos out there and channels built around just motivation. And I think that's because it does have It gets people pumped up. It gets people to that point of wanting the change, wanting that desire of change the most and the fastest. And so, like I said, those moments can be a helpful spark to start something in someone's desire for change, in finding a new direction or finding enough energy to start digging into like the things we're gonna talk about today. And that's why I think it's layered growth rather than just Giving up motivation and willpower for discipline or for a change in identity. And then as far as discipline is concerned, I feel like we all know what it's like to try to be disciplined. Even that sentence should feel unsettling in a certain respect. And that's why some gurus or advisors, they hate the word try because it implies that you aren't gonna follow through. And while I'm a recovering perfectionist and I know that I can't do everything perfect, Sometimes words matter. And so the word try has this connotation to it. We all know what it feels like. And so when you try to white-knuckle discipline, it sometimes falls short. And I would say that's where in the Good, Better, Best framework, the identity piece is the best part and the most powerful part, 'cause it works both ways for the good and for the bad. So why wouldn't you wanna learn how to leverage it to your advantage? Or at least undoing the bad things that are bringing you down. So how do you find out what these underlying scripts are, these core beliefs that you may have of yourself? Now, you may have some very obvious ones, which means you may not have to dig very far. So depending on how negative or dark your self-talk is, a lot of your core beliefs will likely be pretty evident if you have an aggressive self-dialogue like that. So I'm not enough, I'm not worthy, people are just gonna leave me, nothing I ever do is good enough, I'll never succeed, I shouldn't even try, I don't wanna look stupid. Or like we talked about in the last episode, certain promises that you make to yourself that I will never put myself in this situation again, insert scenario that was traumatic, and then completely limit yourself from experiencing the bad and the good that are possible in a particular scenario, relationship, et cetera. So in the last episode, I talked about an exercise that my therapist had me do a couple years ago of going through my top 10 earliest memories. Don't have to be bad, don't have to be good. Most of them ended up being bad or just not positive. When you're young, sometimes they seem pretty trivial, but they were impactful. That's why you remember them. That's kind of the point. And one of the ones that I mentioned is feeling embarrassment and shame for the first time. Now, it was a completely silly thing when you look at it from an adult perspective, but it was a birthday party at one of the old school Pizza Huts. That's right, with the whole like red roof thing, you know. Miss those. And, uh, we went in. I was super excited to give my friend an awesome birthday gift. It was an RC car. I didn't have an RC car, and I thought that was the coolest thing in the world. So, uh, it was kind of neat to get the opportunity to give someone that I cared about such an awesome gift that I would want myself. And I walked up, and I didn't have any sort of social awareness of anything that was around me. And I walked that gift straight up. I didn't notice the gift table that they had to the side, and I walked straight up to the main table. There were tons of kids there, and I And I had this kind of mental expectation, just walk, what do you do? You walk the gift up to the person, give it to them, and watch 'em open it, and it's awesome. And it was quickly stopped by a, I'm assuming his parent, and she said, no, that's not where the gifts go. They go over on the table. And it was a moment, I don't remember how old I was, but it was pretty young. And I remember just feeling like everyone was looking at me 'cause she made it kind of a big deal. I remember being very self-conscious for the first time that I could remember and felt silly, stupid, embarrassed, like I somehow should have known. That's kind of how she was talking to me. And so that created a natural script of hesitation, of anxiety when I'm not sure what to do, where to go, entering a new building, for example. All of those things carried through multiple decades past, wanting to be overly prepared. Because clearly I should have known something. I should have gotten some sort of memo way back then before cell phones, email, any of that sort of thing. Maybe my parents didn't relay to me the postcard that they received on the proper instructions of the birthday party. I don't even know if that was a thing. It probably wasn't. But I carried with me the expectation that I somehow missed something, and if I hadn't, I would've potentially avoided that scenario and I could avoid those kinds of scenarios in the future. That's a seemingly silly, lighthearted example, and it's something I can laugh about now because I have looked back and recognized that moment as the root of what caused that experience, and then that hesitation, that anxiety, and all those things attached to it at that point. But that created a very core definition and a mode of operating that until I recognized it and then started dissecting it, I was really powerless to its effects that were holding me back in multiple ways. And this is naturally one main reason why so many therapists go back to when you were young. Because a lot of these things, these things that we learned, whether we learned them correctly or incorrectly, shape how we view the world and how we operate within it. And so they do a lot of that work to try to find out those earliest experiences, those earliest memories, again, because they were probably formative. And you might be blessed and have a list of a lot of great things that you remember that taught you really good foundational, secure lessons that shaped A lot of positive beliefs of yourself. That's awesome. For the rest of us, like I said, most of the 10 are not very positive, and that's okay. So we can go back, we can look, and we could start to dig and find some threads that have some consistency and fit inside of our negative self-talk or the things that we believe about ourselves or others and the perception that we have in our relationships, for example. These kinds of things are very, very common and typical, which is again why therapists get a lot of mileage of helping you in looking at those things. And what's really cool when you recognize these scripts, I remember going through that exercise, recognizing that memory, realizing how it potentially shaped certain ways I viewed the world and how I engaged with it. And ultimately, I would say likely robbed me of opportunity or experiencing certain things because I was too anxious or uncertain about said experience or interaction or location. And so the decision was often not to participate or to find an excuse and eventually miss out. And so I started recognizing that that was a pattern that had followed me all the way into my 30s. And after you recognize a certain false belief, you can really start to reverse engineer it. You can recognize it when it's happening and you can say, no, it's all good. It's a new building. I don't know where to go. I'll just ask somebody. And you can really take away a lot of the power that those scripts actually have. When even you just recognize them. Like, that is step one. It's a cliché for a reason. Recognizing you have a problem is the first step. And I would say it's similar to the phenomenon when you buy a certain make and model of a car, you start seeing those things everywhere. So when you recognize a pattern like this, a false belief like this, a thing that you think often that colors your perceptions and reality, you start to realize, oh, there it is again. There it is again. Oh my gosh. And that can start to really help you in combating it. Now, sometimes I get asked, how do I know this is something I need to fix? What if it's something that is true? Well, it could be. And this is sometimes where the help of another person is useful. I said at the end of the last episode, this is where a professional sometimes comes in handy because some of the lessons that we've learned through our pasts come out of very real experiences that happened. And sometimes we need the help of a professional to help us understand what pieces of truth need to apply broadly to everything versus Yes, this is a true thing that you need to be careful of or be aware of in your adult life in these circumstances. And here's why it doesn't apply to everything. This also applies to these vows or promises that we make of ourselves to never allow ourselves to be in these situations ever again. If that limits you from having any meaningful relationship, that's too broad of an application. See where I'm going with that? So sometimes a professional can come alongside because maybe we don't feel— in step 1 or 2, we don't feel like we can make that judgment call. Like, how do I know where this rule stops, where this vow is appropriate and where it's too far? And sometimes a professional can come alongside who has experience with those kinds of things and can, can kind of really define where the safety needs to be and where it's okay to let those promises or those standards go because they don't belong there. So at this point, you probably have some things rattling around in your brain. If you don't, some common ones that I wrote down were For some people, they have words that were spoken over them by a coach, a parent, a teacher. Now, sometimes those— you can hear those entrepreneurs tell like their— a teacher said something really encouraging or powerful, and it just kind of was the impetus for everything. Nice. For others, it's the opposite. You'll never amount to anything. You'll never become anything. Whatever those things that those people taught us and those words that were spoken over us. And like the episode I had with Greg Hull with the power of words, those kinds of things fuel people in certain ways and to have certain beliefs about themselves. Sometimes it can cause people to work really hard, but other times it can cause people to never try hard, not feel like they're qualified, always count themselves out, and all these other things. Maybe it's an early failure, something in business or a relationship or a trauma that occurred that Got filed away and tied into that person's identity. I'm a failure because this failed, because I couldn't accomplish X. And so in that, rather than failing forward, that failure defined them and became a part of their identity. Sometimes it can be a simple philosophy, like the idea of scarcity versus growth mindset, where scarcity says there's limited resources of anything out there. And because of that, in order to gain something, you have to take it away from someone else. Or vice versa, if someone has something, that they took it away from someone else. And so that can really affect you in the way you view success, in the way you view even attention or love, that these transactions are limited and they're scarce and can really start to distort some perceptions. And this is really where I wanna bring in Glenn Lundy's philosophy of controlling the second thought is how he's coined it. And the basic premise is that you cannot control most of the time your first thought. And we all know we think some mean things about ourselves and others. And so with those first thoughts, they can sometimes make us feel pretty bad. Like, man, I'm a terrible person. If only people knew the things I was thinking, the judgy things I was thinking when I saw people, you know, like when you go to Walmart or whatever. And so he said, don't feel guilty about the first thought. We all have crazy first thoughts. Instead, just put the effort in controlling the second thought, which arguably could be labeled as the response, not a reaction, but the response. You choosing how you want to respond and how you want to think. So a lighthearted example, you see someone at Walmart who's comfortable wearing their pajamas to the store. Your first thought may be a very judgy one that we won't say right now. And instead of being harsh with yourself and thinking, shame on me, you don't waste any of that effort and you just have a second thought of giving them the benefit of the doubt or just not caring enough to be judgy. This can function on its own without applying to a broader core belief. But I love it 'cause it can also plug into this. So you can take the first thought, second thought principle and apply it to pretty much anything in isolated thoughts that you may have that you may wanna change, which is super useful. But specifically in this conversation, you can use it as you're starting to recognize that car that you just bought, per se, in the false belief that we're trying to address. The goal isn't to focus on eliminating that false belief at first. It's more of, is there a way we can reforge it and control the second thought? To that first thought. And in scenarios like this, a lot of times the first thought is part of the limbic response. And if you're like, I don't know what that is, that's the system responsible for fight or flight. And so in those instances, that's exactly a reaction, not a response. And a lot of times it's not the best, especially when it's connected to the things we talked about earlier. So this is where taking a pause, breathwork is super helpful. Deep breaths and pattern breathing is the easiest way to lower your heart rate. And to get you out of a limbic response, get you out of fight or flight so that you can actually use the front part of your brain, your prefrontal cortex, which is very useful in more rational decision-making and allows you to choose a response, a second thought to whatever you're facing. Now, like most of the things we talk about on this show, a lot of this is progressive and learned. When I was working on things like negative self-talk and attacking my false beliefs that I was identifying, A lot of times the number, the total count of first thoughts that I wanted to change were numerous and seemingly overwhelming. Like, how am I ever going to tackle all of these things? This is crazy. And so the distance sometimes between the first and second thought were huge. And my second thoughts weren't always much better than the first thoughts, at least initially. And so this is kind of a habitual daily progression into recognizing those things, starting to see what maybe we would like to think, or our responses would like to be, and what our second thoughts need to be in those progressions. So as you're going through that, that is the next step in trying to identify the future paths that you would like to go. Now, some people might ask, what cue do you use to, uh, to, to do this? And I think really that illustration of recognizing the cars everywhere is really what is useful in this scenario. I try to find one or two things that I'm working on actively. It's a little overwhelming to try to tackle everything all at once. So there is usually only 1 or 2 of them that I'm working on at a time. And when I do that, it starts to become the car that I see everywhere. And then the recognition is the number 1 critical part, which is why we talked about it first, seeing it, recognizing it. And then once you start seeing it everywhere, start to realize, okay, given this specific circumstance, 'cause it's all unique to everyone, what is my preferred response? What is my preferred thought instead of this? And so that sounds a little bit like up in the sky. You're like, how do I get practical about this? Or do you have specific examples? What does this look like? And it is all dependent on what that first thought is, what the root false belief potentially is. And so it can be something as simple as the first thought. You see someone walking in late to a meeting and you assume, maybe you're their boss or their colleague, and you assume your initial first thought is like, man, they don't really care about Being punctual at all. Like, what in the world? And the second thought might incorporate some things like the law of positive intent that we've talked about before, where you give people the benefit of the doubt, where you say, well, hang on, I don't know if they were caught up by a customer on the way to the meeting. And I would rather them take care of that guest rather than say, hey, I don't wanna be late to a meeting. I can't help you right now. That's crazy. And so using the law of positive intent, being curious, not judgmental, to borrow a Ted Lasso phrase, which I just need to insert a Ted Lasso quote into every, every episode. That'd be great. So, so important to be curious, ask questions before making assumptions. The appropriate response is sometimes dependent on the circumstance, the situation that you're trying to battle, or the false belief that you're trying to reverse. So that leads us to the next step, which is what I will label as the replacement principle. So often it's described that when you're trying to rewire your brain, especially patterns that have followed you around for decades, You can't just subtract. That leaves an empty void. The brain doesn't like that. You typically have a lot of issues with things you're trying to correct mentally if you're just trying to subtract and you don't put anything else in there. And that's where the replacement principle comes into play, where if you're looking to remove something or take a false belief out, what positive belief are you putting in its place? Sometimes it's as easy as replacing whatever the inverse, whatever the opposite is of the false So if you feel like you're not enough or nothing you ever do is good enough, I mean, you're really just adjusting those statements to be more truthful, to be more honest than the garbage that you're saying to yourself. An exercise that I did when I didn't like my negative self-talk was, in addition to what I've shared before, I would enlist my friends to catch me and yell at me when they heard me say things out loud. And then me committing to even myself, anytime I said anything out loud, I would verbally say, no, that's not true. And then I I would say whatever the truth was that applied to that specific statement. It kind of plugs into the difference between guilt and shame. Like guilt says, I did bad. Shame says, I am bad. So trying to remove those negative statements from being identity shame-based statements and moving them more, at least into the guilt column. Like, hey, you messed up, you made a mistake, you failed. That doesn't mean you're a bad person. So shifting it out of the shame tar pit. And at least shifting it into, you know, if you do recognize you did make a mistake, that's okay to do, but you don't need to heap on the identity statements on top of that. So there is a verbal component to this that I think has power. We talked about on the last episode how writing things down has power and has potential unlocking power to processing different things in different hemispheres. Like I said then, I don't know all the brain science about handwriting, those kinds of things, but the verbal spoken word also has tremendous power. If you're a person of faith, this probably lights you up in the brain multiple ways and you're like, yes. If you're not, that's okay. I think most people believe that the spoken word has some sort of influence and power. And so if that's true, if that even has a possibility of being true, then speaking the truth, speaking the antidote, if you will, to the false belief, to the things that we're trying to change, has a lot of power. Now you can't always do that in like, if you're having a conflict or you're in a conversation with somebody, They're gonna think you're crazy and having all these like, no, that's not true. So you're gonna have to kind of judge when those moments are appropriate. Sometimes maybe you do it in your inner voice, but catching those things out loud and saying the corrective statements for me was really helpful when I was addressing a lot of this negative dialogue that was following me around. Now I'll say this, when you first start addressing the negative self-talk and you start trying the replacement principle and trying to speak truth, Um, there's a couple ways that I've done it to add additional bullets to the magazine, if you will, to help me here. One of them was asking people that I trusted in my life to list specific ways or have them text me or write an email or send a voice memo on how they viewed me. Because my perception was, if the way I look at myself is broken, then help me see myself through your eyes. Which I also trust. And so I wanted to see more than from one person because it's easy to dismiss when one person compliments you, right? So if your spouse says, you know, you're great, I love you, you're awesome, you're like, yeah, I mean, you're kind of supposed to say that, right? So it's easy to dismiss the onesies-twosies. And so the goal was I had— I think it was— I think I messaged 20 people and 12 to 15 gave me really detailed responses that were very powerful. And then I just had like like Siri read them to me every day. It was crazy. And so that was super powerful. I got to use other people's words and speak them over me. And I, you know, even put those in AI and distilled certain themes. Like, people said similar things. And so it's like, what is the main things that they're saying? What are the main themes that are related to me and how they view me? Again, super, super powerful. And it equipped me with some horsepower to battle these negative beliefs with truth. And I was able to replace those. And I could do those verbally. I could handwrite them. And I think listening to those out loud while Siri was reading them also had an added layer of benefit there too. So this is where it gets pretty practical. I highly encourage people to just keep this up. Keep finding things that you can reverse and speak truth into, replace, say out loud, identify, and repeat. Just keep doing it. Because when you identify aspects of your identity that aren't optimal, and you can begin to reverse engineer and become the person that is fill in the That is an entirely different way of getting things done. Discipline still has its place. Willpower and motivation still have their place, but there can be a tremendous amount of freedom that you can find from many things when you start reverse engineering. And the way I know that this works is that that's how you have a lot of your false beliefs to begin with. All those things we mentioned at the beginning of the episode that are common of people believing about themselves are true today because of an identity-based pattern of thinking that has just been repeated excessively over time. So we can leverage that same mechanism to our advantage by doing the opposite of identifying things that we want to remove and replacing them with things that we do want there and getting the reps in. Now, this is just like what James Clear talks about in Atomic Habits, that people ask, how many days does it take to establish a habit? And Glenn Lundy would say, With 1 rep a day, 67 days. Sure. You may have heard 21. There's all sorts of combinations, but anything between 21 and 67, but that's 1 rep a day. James Clear also talks about in his book about how you can create meaningful change by just getting meaningful reps. So sometimes depending on the habit, this is part of that. I wouldn't recommend working out 7 times a day to get healthy. Not a good idea. This is something that you could do multiple times a How many times do you talk crap on yourself? I know for me it was a ton, so I got a bunch of reps in every single day. So by the end of 3 weeks, it was meaningful if I kept identifying, replacing, saying out loud, and repeating over and over. You will be surprised how fast that you can start to reverse engineer some of this stuff. One example is the fear of abandonment. There's plenty of people who have that false belief, and they apply that in multiple different ways in their relationships, but one way can be in avoiding conflict or even how they view it in a relationship. So they may avoid conflict, for example, because they feel like, if I engage in this conflict, then they'll leave me. For others, it could be, and we talked about this many episodes ago, but doing all the right things for the wrong reasons, overserving, overloving people because you're afraid they're gonna leave you if you don't do that. That is, all those things are extremely common. From those from experience as well. So in those things, when you have a conflict and you start to feel anxious about, oh my gosh, if I keep going with this, they're gonna whatever, you can pause, breathe, and speak truth to that. No, healthy relationships can have conflict. They can endure conflict and they can survive conflict. In fact, if iron sharpens iron, that means there has to be friction. And if sparks aren't flying, iron's not getting sharpened, to quote the Live Free podcast. Shout out, guys. So this is the exact pattern that I want you to recognize. Recognize it in the moment. You can do some breathing if that is necessary, especially in that conflict example. Fight or flight's going to be going crazy. And then speaking that truth and then continuing through rather than giving up or somehow escaping the situation. Now, sometimes those reps are going to be high effort and high yield. Other times they're gonna be micro wins, and that's okay. Remember, a lot of optimization is, is micro wins, and that's okay. That builds that foundation of growth over time, and that compound growth is so powerful. The last thing we'll say about the replacement principle is think about the concept of when someone is trying to get healthier, getting fitter, and a lot of times taking the fad diet route, or now the route of pharmaceuticals, can sometimes be tricky. Because if they don't do it the old-fashioned way, quote unquote, then sometimes what is critiqued is that they may not have learned the lifestyle skills in order to equip them to become the person that is now someone that values movement or sweating every day, as well as having their nutrition dialed into a point where their health doesn't suffer. And sometimes getting to a destination or a goal faster can sometimes hinder those things. So we've all seen those people who go on the diet, they lose the weight, and once they get off the diet, the diet didn't teach them a lifestyle of eating better. It taught them how to eat to get to their goal. Well, once they reach their goal, what now? That diet sucked. They're not going to keep doing it. And so then what happens? They gain all the weight back. Pharmaceuticals, I could say the same thing. So certain pharmaceuticals, you can take them, you can still eat whatever you want. You don't have to sweat every day. You can certainly do those things and probably get to your goal even faster. But then at that point, once that's over, if someone hasn't established those habits or better yet become the person that eats better and moves or sweats every day, then they will just regress. And it's the same thing that applies to all these things. If we're not replacing those things with something positive, with something constructive, with something better, Then it can be really challenging to push those things out because you're not pushing it out with something to take its place. So I know it's cheesy, as people say, it's the journey, not the destination, but in certain aspects, that's kind of what we're talking about. So what kind of people is this really for? I would say this is for anyone who's looking to change who they are in relation to what they do. If you don't like what you do, you can certainly stop doing or start doing different things, but oftentimes identity is what feeds beliefs and behaviors. And so if you're just doing behavior management, that's not enough. Ask any group counselor or go to any addiction program and they will discuss this on purpose because those kinds of behaviors are ones that are fed by more underlying things. Typically, think of the identity piece as the iceberg. Those false beliefs, those things that come from usually trauma, those define people and cause those behaviors. So behavior management really falls short in even Willpower and discipline are just not enough to overcome. You really have to engage in transformation in order to see lasting results. And that's what we're after when we're optimizing. So step 1 is recognizing that, trying to find that automobile that you're going to start to spot everywhere. The 2nd step is to find a way that you can, once you see that first thought that you don't want, how can you replace it with the 2nd thought, one that is more constructive, one of those more powerful And that's leveraging the replacement principle. And sometimes it's as simple as an opposite thought or one that's a better thought, like giving someone the benefit of the doubt or things like that. Other times it really digs into who you are and in your identity. And so when the fear of abandonment wants to influence how you engage in a hard conversation with somebody, you can take a pause, take a moment, replace that with truth and recognize that, no, that's not what this is. This relationship can stand this. This disagreement, this conflict, and I can see it through. And in fact, it's arguable it will be stronger because you engaged in it. And you just start doing those things on a loop, on repeat, and you can start to see those false beliefs lose power. Because when you follow through with actually, for example, having that conflict and having those disagreements or hard conversations and your relationships don't fall apart, people don't leave you, And the lie doesn't come true, then you're like, oh man, this is something. It reinforces it in the other way. Again, we're leveraging that same principle with time on that end. So trying to get those reps in, trying to accelerate that path the other way has a tremendous amount of power in the inverse. So you're like, okay, I've got the thing. I know what I want to do. Now what? It's like, well, now we're going to want to recognize it. So first step is that automobile, right? What's the car we're going to spot everywhere? Pick it, find it, and leverage those different tools. Write it down, say it out loud, and know what you want to attack. And then find out what the truth is. If it's not very obvious to you, depending on what it is, maybe get with someone you trust or even with a licensed professional and say, okay, this is kind of what I'm thinking. I have no idea what a good replacement would be for this. What do you think? What's a better thought? What's a What's a second thought for this? And then whatever that is, write it down, say it out loud. And then anytime you see that car, you're writing and/or saying in your mind, preferably out loud if you can, just trying to leverage as many avenues as you can to make the reps as effective as possible. The more effective the rep and the more reps compounds the most growth. So why wouldn't you try to leverage as much as you can? Of course. So essentially we're looking for the highest quality reps. Now reps matter, I'd rather you get reps no matter what, but anything you can do to make those reps more high quality as much as you can just helps you get to your goal faster. And one example might be that I used to say I'm bad with money. Now when I catch it, I say I'm someone who's learning how to manage money well. And then you actually have the energy to look at your budget because you're looking at yourself differently and you're not ignoring your finances because you're like, well, I'm bad at money anyway, so why do I even look at it? Why am I going to try a budget? I can't do that. So when you start changing your identity, you also start opening possibilities of like, well, I'm learning, so I'm going to try. I'm going to try. I'm going to give it a fair shot. I am learning, and learning allows for not being perfect and to get those reps in, that safety to get better. So good luck catching those things. If there's certain things that you want to share about the false beliefs that you're battling with or the true things that you've established, let me know in the comments. I'd love to know. And start getting those reps in. Listen, you've got this. Thanks for listening to the Optimizing Beyond podcast. Remember, growth happens when you take action. So subscribe, share this with a friend, and most importantly, put what you learned into practice, because as we know, daily anything changes everything.