A Mason's Work

I want to start today's episode with some insight into the relationship between our identity

and our beliefs and our behaviors.

When we talk about identity as a concept, identity is expressed.

This is an expression or narrative of a story we tell ourselves about the way we are or

about the way we appear in the world or the way we want other people to think about us.

Identity is a constructed concept about the way that we think we work or are placed in the

world.

That identity oftentimes will get shorthanded by social tags, if you will.

The political tagging of liberal conservative or Democrat Republican or Marxist-Leninist

whatever.

It doesn't really matter.

That shorthand, that tagging that we use as identity politics is oftentimes used to

again help us identify where we fit in a crowd of people and how we like to believe we

express ourselves.

However, identity and belief have a lot of sort of challenges conceptually because we

oftentimes will express our beliefs as a function of our identity.

So we will say we believe one thing, but guess what?

When push comes to shove, we do not.

This happens quite a bit.

The result of this, the result of our beliefs and identity, not matching our behavior, creates

something called cognitive dissonance.

We'll get into that in just a second.

But the shorthand for all of this, independent of what we say our beliefs are, is to look

at behavior.

behavior is a reliable indicator of genuine belief.

So it's safe to say we express our identity, but we behave our beliefs, our true beliefs.

And so when you look at someone's behavior, including your own, it's very productive to

inquire, hey, what is my behavior?

Tell me right now about what I really believe to be true.

If I am someone who believes that we should be kind to other people, and I find that my

behavior in a lot of ways is cool to other people, I have to go and re-evaluate what that

is.

And that re-evaluation creates what I mentioned earlier was that cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance is this situation where we have conflicting evidence about the way

the world works, about the way we work as individuals, about two or more concepts that

we kind of can't hold in our minds at the same time because they are opposite.

Believing you're kind and kicking puppies is one of those things.

You could ask somebody, hey, you just told me five seconds ago you're really, really

a kind person.

And I see you kicking these puppies.

What's the deal?

That creates that sort of cognitive dissonance.

And there's a couple of standard responses that is more often than not, they will attempt

to recontextualize their behavior such that it doesn't conflict with that identity, that

story that we tell ourselves.

For you, as somebody who's trying to grow and develop, understanding that the safest

way to start to meaningfully grow and explore your sort of future potential development opportunities

is to analyze your behavior first.

And then where that behavior does not conform to your beliefs, there you've got opportunity

to grow and develop.

So how might that work?

One way to do this is to imagine someone else doing what you're doing.

So if you are kicking puppies, say, well, if someone else is kicking puppies, what would

I tell my friends about them?

Oh, they're the kind of horrible person that kicks puppies.

Now you kind of re-internally, I can go, okay, maybe I'm a horrible person because they

kick puppies, whatever the case may be.

Your situation is going to help dictate a little bit more when you start looking at these

behaviors, a little bit more about what you can do next in terms of understanding how

to modify and evolve those behaviors so that they better conform to kind of a real identity

that's organic to you or it will help you reconfigure your identity and your stated beliefs

in a way that's more aligned to your behavior.

But when you start to do this and you get into this sort of continuity or this congruity

of belief, identity, and behavior, what will happen is you will essentially start to develop

meaningfully some integrity between what you're doing, what you're saying, and how all

that shows up in the world.

That development of integrity as a concept will help you build trust and has tons and tons

of other byproducts that are awesome for you and your growth and development as you go

forward.

For now though, just remember that identity is expressed and beliefs are behaved as it

were and that should get you a whole lot further in your own personal development.