Peter Szabo argues that understanding and redesigning your identity is the key to achieving and sustaining better life results. He explains that people act in alignment with their self-image, so changing habits and outcomes requires reshaping that internal identity. He recommends taking personality assessments (DISC, Myers-Briggs, HEXACO, Kolbe), studying how the systems work, and then using results to double down on strengths and address weaknesses to create a life you love.
Chapters
The more you understand yourself, the better your life gets. Let me explain. My name is Peter Szabel and I fundamentally believe that humans have to act inconsistency in alignment with who they think they are. Right? It's this built in mechanism since birth. We develop a sense of identity, a sense of self image, and then we have to act inconsistency with it. Even if we try to change, we try to increase our income, get in better shape, whatever it may be, if our self image doesn't match what we want to get, eventually it'll down regulate our behavior and kind of keep you stuck where you are. So you got to change that. That's why they say you got to change internally first. Because you don't necessarily get what you want, you get more of who you are. That's why the rich get richer, poor get poorer. And the only way to get what you want and actually keep it is to essentially turn your goals into your new norm, into your new minimum standards, right? When you become that person, you can get those results essentially. Now the problem with this is when people start this journey. Well, first of all, most people have no tool, have no system on changing their identity and shaping it the way they want it to be. You know, for most people, they kind of just go through life, they're popped into an environment, you know, instead of parents, primary caregivers, the school system, they go through life. And life kind of shapes them, kind of shapes who they are. But you know, there's a way we can actually change it ourselves. There's a way we can actually design who we want to become and become that version of ourselves so we can get the results we want out of life. But very few people know how to do it. That's number one. But even before that, even before knowing how to change your identity so you can change your results, most people don't even know where to start. Because a good idea is to get a baseline of who you are now. You know, your current self is essentially the sum total of your past experiences, your past memories, your past programming, if you wish. So getting clear on who that is. Now, my recommendations to take this idea into something actionable and is look at Disc Personality test. These are free by the way. Myers Briggs. You can go to 16personalities.com. And finally there's a really good one as well called Hexaco or the big five. You can go ahead and take these. Matter of fact, number four, there's a really good one called Kolbe as well. K O L B E. So I recommend you check these out. I think colby is like 50 bucks, but these are so, so, so valuable. Now, do not make the fatal mistake I made, which is just read the results and not actually read how these personality system works, because when you really understand the core idea behind them, you really get to understand your own personality test result a lot better. So that would be my first recommendation. If you choose to do it, make sure you read the instructions on how this works. And then as you go through your results, you're going to understand your discord, your Meyer spriggs, your call be your hexaco. And this will provide invaluable insight into who you are. Who is this character that you've developed over these years that's creating these results you want to create? And you know, it does take a level of open mindedness to approach this information. Look at it, because you'll see your weaknesses, your strengths, the good, bad, and essentially what you can do about it. Next, because you know, none of these tests are black or white. You know, don't take the test to now put a label on yourself and confine herself in the box. Use it as a tool. You know, I look at them as rule of thumb, or rules of thumb, if you wish, like different personality tests, and then reading all of them and then making kind of my own conclusions. But doing that really allow me to understand who I was a lot better. My strengths, weaknesses, how I think, how I process information, all these different things. And once I did that, I could really shape my habits, my life, my goals around me, at least as I was in that moment, the optimal version. I also could create a plan of exactly what areas need to be improved in my life, in my character traits, et cetera, and took action on those. When I did, my results got so much better. Because now once you really face the mirror and you really understand who it is that you are now, you can optimize based on reality. And that will yield much, much better results than optimizing what you may think is your strength or you may assume is your weakness. It helps a lot when you really take these tests. They're most of them free. It grips you an insane roi. Return on investment on your time, on your money, if you wish to spend more money on these tests. But that would be my one tip. It's such a fundamental, simple idea of personal development, knowing thyself. And the easiest probably way to do it is to take these tests, read them, understand and make conclusions about your own life. And then based on that information, you can create a plan of doubling down on your strengths, eliminating, delegating, mitigating your weaknesses, etc, etc, and that'll be one of the first steps of creating a life that you love. This is Peter Savo. Hope this was helpful and see you in the next one. Sam.
