Have you ever thought to yourself, or even said out loud, “this is just who I am?”

Maybe it’s, “I’m not a morning person”, “I’ve never been good in social situations, I’m just a naturally shy person”, or “I’m not the kind of person who takes big risks”. These kind of things feel like a fixed truth, right? Like something that is built into your personality DNA.

But what if that’s not actually the case? What if who you are isn’t a permanent, unchangeable fact, but a habit? Something you’ve been practicing for so long, you’ve mistaken it for being a set in stone part of your identity.

Here’s the truth. The way you think and the way you show up in the world isn’t set in stone. It’s a pattern, an identity script, you wrote probably as far back as your childhood, and you’ve been acting it out on repeat ever since. And not because it’s the only way to be, but because it’s the way you’ve practiced being.

The good news is this. Like any habit, the habit of being you can be changed. Today, I want to talk about how to do exactly that.

Welcome to The Self-Creation School podcast, for women who are ready to ditch mediocrity, step up and get more of what they want, and finally say YES! to a life that sets their soul on fire. I’m your host Leanne Letica, Self-Creation Coach, founder of The Self-Creation School AND Queen of YES!. If you’re ready to play life by your own personal rule book, and give yourself permission to say YES! to yourself and your wildest dreams, this podcast is the place for you.

Hello from my snow-covered corner of the world. It may be spring in the northern hemisphere, but it’s still very much winter where I live. And if you’ve been hanging out with me for any length of time, you’ll know I just love the magic of fresh snowfall.

Waking up to a landscape of fresh white snow is something I could never have imagined experiencing growing up in a small country town in Australia. But everything is possible when you decide that it is, and when you decide to stop existing in your habitual way of being.

Which is what we are talking about in today’s episode. Breaking free from the habit of being you. Or at least the version of you that is holding you back from experiencing the magic of life you dream of that is possible when you allow yourself to be someone for whom it is possible.

If you think things like, I’m just not a confident person, I could never do something like that. Or I’ve never been good with money, or relationships, or losing weight. Or I’m not someone who likes change. Or even, it’s possible for others, but not for me. These thoughts don’t just describe you, they define you. Because who you see yourself as, who it is you believe yourself to be, is exactly who you show up in your world being.

And my hope is by the end of today’s conversation, you’ll see that who you are isn’t fixed unless you choose it to be fixed. Just like who you can be isn’t set in stone either.

That’s the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset, by the way. A fixed mindset says “this is just the way I am”. A growth mindset says, “this is who I’ve been, but it’s not the only way to be, or the only way I can be.”

A fixed mindset is one that allows you and your life to run on autopilot, on default, or by habit. Things are just how they are. It’s how they’ve always been. Which is exactly why things never change. But with a growth mindset, you start to see that nothing about you or your life is truly fixed, unless you decide that it is.

And that goes for both the way things are, and the way you want things to be. When you decide the way you experience life right now is fixed, you will prove that to be true. When you decide how you want to live is fixed, it is a definite for you and there is no other life for you, you will also go about proving that to be true.

Because when you see something different for yourself and you believe you are the woman who has created and is living that something different, you change the way you habitually show up in your world. You change the way you take action. And in turn, you change your reality.

So much of who you believe yourself to be isn’t a deep truth. It’s just a habit. A pattern of thinking, reacting and showing up for life that you’ve repeated so often, it feels like an absoluteness. But it’s not. It’s just what’s familiar. It’s just what you’ve practiced thinking, believing, being, and then doing habitually without ever thinking about it or challenging it.

Your personality, your confidence, whether you like the woman you see in the mirror, the way you navigate the world, it’s all built on repetition. Every time you think a thought about who you are and what’s possible for you, it strengthens a belief you hold about yourself. A belief that informs your identity. It tells you who you are and who you are not.

Then every time you take action from this belief that you hold about yourself, it reinforces that identity. Until you’ve repeated it for so long, it feels like an unchangeable part of you.

Take shyness, for example. If you’ve always seen yourself as the shy one, it’s not because you were born that way, it’s likely because something happened in your childhood that made you shrink into the shadows and feel shy about being the center of attention.

Over time, you practiced being this way until it seemed like an unchangeable part of who you are. And that’s exactly why people get stuck in the, “this is just who I am”, loop. What I know is you will act in alignment with who you choose to habitually think you are.

Last week I talked about the concept of acting as if you are your future self to create the life you want. If you haven’t listened in to that episode, I highly recommend it by the way, I received a lot of very positive feedback on it and it really is an episode that shares something I believe is fundamental to you changing the life you experience.

Now, acting as if is something that can run on autopilot. You can act as if you are shy, and this is just who you are. Or you can act as if you aren’t. You can choose to see yourself as someone with an outgoing, vibrant personality that people love to be around—which I don’t know you, but I can almost guarantee there are people in your life who already see you in that way. And you can intentionally start to act as if that’s who you are. It’s who you are now practicing being.

What you practice, you will make habit. And acting as if can be habitual in a way that doesn’t serve you, and in a way that holds you back from experiencing the magic of life you dream of. Or it can be habitually intentional. You can make it a habit to intentionally choose who you be in every moment.

I know that sounds exhausting, right? It maybe sounds impossible to choose who you be in every moment. Maybe it is. But maybe it’s also a whole lot easier than you think. Because what tends to happen is when you focus on habitually choosing just one new way of being, it tends to have a flow on effect into other areas of who you be.

For example, if you were to focus on changing your habit of sleeping late, because you’re just not a morning person, to someone who sets her alarm for 7am and wakes up excited because you have purpose in your day that fulfills you, you are a woman on a mission to make her days matter. If you change from being not a morning person to somebody who wakes up excited for her day, you are going to start your day with a completely different mindset.

A mindset that is going to encourage you to make things happen in your day, as opposed to dragging your feet out of bed and feeling like you were dragging the rest of your day along with you.

Listen, I used to tell myself that I’m not a morning person and every day I struggled to hit the ground running. It really ate into a whole lot of my day. This dragging my feet vibe, this resistant mindset to facing the day would linger right throughout my entire day. And I probably don’t have to tell you how my day’s panned out.

But what I also know about me is that if there’s a 3am plane ticket involved, I am absolutely a morning person. Sign me up. And so eventually I had to have a conversation with myself about this habitual way of thinking about who I am.

Because if I can get up at 3am and hit the ground running with excitement after just three or four hours sleep, then it simply isn’t true that I cannot be a morning person even after a full eight hours sleep. I’d just practiced not being a morning person for many years, and the reason for that came down to me wanting to avoid what waited for me in my every day. A life I didn’t love living.

Now that conversation made me realize that the problem with getting out of bed in the morning wasn’t because I am genetically wired not to be a morning person. But because I was habitually choosing to be that way to protect myself from feeling the disappointment, the dissatisfaction, the disillusionment with myself and my life that I knew I would feel every single day.

These days, I am a morning person. I get my best work done in the mornings and I don’t get up early. No longer because I am avoiding my days or because I tell myself I’m not a morning person. But because I choose to be a late-night person, and I choose to still get a restful eight hours sleep each night.

And when I do wake up, I’m ready to go. It’s quite a different mindset. I redefined what being a morning person means to me.

My past self believed she wasn’t a morning person, and that belief fed a mindset that getting out of bed to start each day was a fight. A mindset that meant every day started as a challenge, as an uphill battle, which became a pattern I repeated habitually every day for years on end.

My now self believes she can be a morning person, and she chooses to balance her preference for later nights with 8 hours of sleep and still makes her morning hours count.

Here’s the thing, our brains love patterns. The thoughts you think, the beliefs you hold, the way you respond to situations, it’s all part of a well-rehearsed script running in the background of our mind. Repeating the same thoughts and actions takes far less energy than changing them.

That’s why who you are can feel so fixed. Not because it truly is, but because your brain is wired for efficiency. It takes what you repeatedly do and turns it into a shortcut, a habit, so you don’t have to think about it. But this also means that even when you want to change, your brain will push you back towards what feels familiar, even if it’s keeping you stuck.

And this is why your identity, even when it’s limiting, can feel like a comfortable place to stay. It’s why people stay in jobs they’ve outgrown, relationships that no longer serve them, and ways of being that don’t reflect who they could be.

It’s not that change isn’t possible, it’s that their identity habits have convinced them that this is just who they are. And as long as that identity stays unchallenged, they’ll keep living the same reality on repeat.

But if you want a different experience of life, you have to start breaking the habit of being this version of you. You cannot experience something different when you stay the same.

And one very simple way you can begin to change the habit of being you, is to start shifting the thought or belief that “this is just who I am”, to “this is who I’ve been in the past and I’m open to a new way of being.”

Or even better, “I’m experimenting with being someone different. I’m trying a new me on for size. I’m open to discovering who else I can be.” It’s an open, more expansive way of seeing yourself. It says there are no fixed rules, and that paves the way for all kinds of possibilities.

But importantly, it doesn’t suggest finality. It doesn’t yet suggest that this new way of being is absolute, that it’s concrete.

Because what will happen when you start to shift your habitual thoughts about who you are, if you shift too far, too fast, your brain is not going to be on board with that. It’s going to counteract your new thoughts because it doesn’t fit the patterns it has established for operating efficiently.

So if you go from I’m not this person to I am, likely it’s going to be something that is just too far removed from the pattern your brain is used to operating from on repeat. So baby steps, when you are shifting any belief about yourself, is always key to getting your brain to come along for the ride and not make change more difficult than it needs to be.

I love having conversations with myself. If you could hear some of the exchanges that go on inside my head every day, you’d probably think I’m kind of crazy. But we all have these conversations happening. We just don’t all tune in and participate consciously in them.

But the more aware you train yourself to be at the thoughts that are running about inside your head on autopilot, the more you will find yourself actively engaging in conversation with yourself to challenge and change those thoughts.

I love being aware of my internal conversations because I love being the boss. I love being in control. And so when my storyteller, Mrs. X as I love to call her, when she pops in on behalf of my brain to tell me, “listen, that’s not how we do things around here. This is not who you are. So let’s just drop this and go back to the way things have always been.” I love to tell my storyteller to remind my brain that wasn’t the way we did me before either. Who I am right now is just one way of being that became a habit.

And as we’ve been discussing today, habits can be changed. But the key isn’t to overhaul everything overnight. You want to start small and disrupt the pattern of who you believe yourself to be without shocking your brain into resistance.

So remember, instead of saying, “this is just who I am”, try, “this is who I’ve been, but I’m open to being different. I’m trying on a new way of being for size. I’m living in the question of who I can be.” And then, do just that, no pressure, just curiosity. It’s not about forcing yourself into a new identity overnight. It’s about making space for possibility.

And the more you do this, the more you’ll notice something interesting. Your brain starts to get on board and take over making this your new way of being, so you don’t have to practice quite so hard. Your new way of being will simply become who you habitually are. Just like every version of you you’ve ever been became a habit up to now.

Here’s what I’d like to leave you with today before I close this episode out.

You are not set in stone. When you stop seeing yourself as fixed, you start to see what else is available to you. And that’s when real change happens, that’s when you stop simply existing and start exploring the magic in life that is waiting for you to try it on for size.

So start today, choose just one habitual way of being to shift, whether it’s how you think, how you speak, or maybe how you act, and see what happens. Remember who you are is just who you’ve been practicing being. If you want to be someone different, say YES! to practicing something different.

And with that, I’m bringing this episode to a close.

Thanks so much for listening in today. It’s been great to have your company. If you are enjoying this podcast, do make sure you hit the subscribe button so new episodes are ready for listening each week inside your favorite podcast library. And please do take a moment to rate the show. It helps other women find me so they can start creating a life they love too.

I do hope you’ll join me next Wednesday for more of my Self-Creation secrets to help you create a life you wildly love.

Until then, be the woman who says YES!

Hey, want to know what’s stopping you from saying YES! to you and a life you love?

Head over to https://selfcreationschool.com/yesblock and take my FREE 60 second quiz to find out what’s standing in your way today and I’ll send you my Self-Creation Shift process for shifting it.

That’s https://selfcreationschool.com/yesblock. I’ll see you there.

Have you ever thought to yourself, or even said out loud, “this is just who I am?”

Maybe it’s, “I’m not a morning person”, “I’ve never been good in social situations, I’m just a naturally shy person”, or “I’m not the kind of person who takes big risks”. These kind of things feel like a fixed truth, right? Like something that is built into your personality DNA.

But what if that’s not actually the case? What if who you are isn’t a permanent, unchangeable fact, but a habit? Something you’ve been practicing for so long, you’ve mistaken it for being a set in stone part of your identity.

Here’s the truth. The way you think and the way you show up in the world isn’t set in stone. It’s a pattern, an identity script, you wrote probably as far back as your childhood, and you’ve been acting it out on repeat ever since. And not because it’s the only way to be, but because it’s the way you’ve practiced being.

The good news is this. Like any habit, the habit of being you can be changed. Today, I want to talk about how to do exactly that.

Welcome to The Self-Creation School podcast, for women who are ready to ditch mediocrity, step up and get more of what they want, and finally say YES! to a life that sets their soul on fire. I’m your host Leanne Letica, Self-Creation Coach, founder of The Self-Creation School AND Queen of YES!. If you’re ready to play life by your own personal rule book, and give yourself permission to say YES! to yourself and your wildest dreams, this podcast is the place for you.

Hello from my snow-covered corner of the world. It may be spring in the northern hemisphere, but it’s still very much winter where I live. And if you’ve been hanging out with me for any length of time, you’ll know I just love the magic of fresh snowfall.

Waking up to a landscape of fresh white snow is something I could never have imagined experiencing growing up in a small country town in Australia. But everything is possible when you decide that it is, and when you decide to stop existing in your habitual way of being.

Which is what we are talking about in today’s episode. Breaking free from the habit of being you. Or at least the version of you that is holding you back from experiencing the magic of life you dream of that is possible when you allow yourself to be someone for whom it is possible.

If you think things like, I’m just not a confident person, I could never do something like that. Or I’ve never been good with money, or relationships, or losing weight. Or I’m not someone who likes change. Or even, it’s possible for others, but not for me. These thoughts don’t just describe you, they define you. Because who you see yourself as, who it is you believe yourself to be, is exactly who you show up in your world being.

And my hope is by the end of today’s conversation, you’ll see that who you are isn’t fixed unless you choose it to be fixed. Just like who you can be isn’t set in stone either.

That’s the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset, by the way. A fixed mindset says “this is just the way I am”. A growth mindset says, “this is who I’ve been, but it’s not the only way to be, or the only way I can be.”

A fixed mindset is one that allows you and your life to run on autopilot, on default, or by habit. Things are just how they are. It’s how they’ve always been. Which is exactly why things never change. But with a growth mindset, you start to see that nothing about you or your life is truly fixed, unless you decide that it is.

And that goes for both the way things are, and the way you want things to be. When you decide the way you experience life right now is fixed, you will prove that to be true. When you decide how you want to live is fixed, it is a definite for you and there is no other life for you, you will also go about proving that to be true.

Because when you see something different for yourself and you believe you are the woman who has created and is living that something different, you change the way you habitually show up in your world. You change the way you take action. And in turn, you change your reality.

So much of who you believe yourself to be isn’t a deep truth. It’s just a habit. A pattern of thinking, reacting and showing up for life that you’ve repeated so often, it feels like an absoluteness. But it’s not. It’s just what’s familiar. It’s just what you’ve practiced thinking, believing, being, and then doing habitually without ever thinking about it or challenging it.

Your personality, your confidence, whether you like the woman you see in the mirror, the way you navigate the world, it’s all built on repetition. Every time you think a thought about who you are and what’s possible for you, it strengthens a belief you hold about yourself. A belief that informs your identity. It tells you who you are and who you are not.

Then every time you take action from this belief that you hold about yourself, it reinforces that identity. Until you’ve repeated it for so long, it feels like an unchangeable part of you.

Take shyness, for example. If you’ve always seen yourself as the shy one, it’s not because you were born that way, it’s likely because something happened in your childhood that made you shrink into the shadows and feel shy about being the center of attention.

Over time, you practiced being this way until it seemed like an unchangeable part of who you are. And that’s exactly why people get stuck in the, “this is just who I am”, loop. What I know is you will act in alignment with who you choose to habitually think you are.

Last week I talked about the concept of acting as if you are your future self to create the life you want. If you haven’t listened in to that episode, I highly recommend it by the way, I received a lot of very positive feedback on it and it really is an episode that shares something I believe is fundamental to you changing the life you experience.

Now, acting as if is something that can run on autopilot. You can act as if you are shy, and this is just who you are. Or you can act as if you aren’t. You can choose to see yourself as someone with an outgoing, vibrant personality that people love to be around—which I don’t know you, but I can almost guarantee there are people in your life who already see you in that way. And you can intentionally start to act as if that’s who you are. It’s who you are now practicing being.

What you practice, you will make habit. And acting as if can be habitual in a way that doesn’t serve you, and in a way that holds you back from experiencing the magic of life you dream of. Or it can be habitually intentional. You can make it a habit to intentionally choose who you be in every moment.

I know that sounds exhausting, right? It maybe sounds impossible to choose who you be in every moment. Maybe it is. But maybe it’s also a whole lot easier than you think. Because what tends to happen is when you focus on habitually choosing just one new way of being, it tends to have a flow on effect into other areas of who you be.

For example, if you were to focus on changing your habit of sleeping late, because you’re just not a morning person, to someone who sets her alarm for 7am and wakes up excited because you have purpose in your day that fulfills you, you are a woman on a mission to make her days matter. If you change from being not a morning person to somebody who wakes up excited for her day, you are going to start your day with a completely different mindset.

A mindset that is going to encourage you to make things happen in your day, as opposed to dragging your feet out of bed and feeling like you were dragging the rest of your day along with you.

Listen, I used to tell myself that I’m not a morning person and every day I struggled to hit the ground running. It really ate into a whole lot of my day. This dragging my feet vibe, this resistant mindset to facing the day would linger right throughout my entire day. And I probably don’t have to tell you how my day’s panned out.

But what I also know about me is that if there’s a 3am plane ticket involved, I am absolutely a morning person. Sign me up. And so eventually I had to have a conversation with myself about this habitual way of thinking about who I am.

Because if I can get up at 3am and hit the ground running with excitement after just three or four hours sleep, then it simply isn’t true that I cannot be a morning person even after a full eight hours sleep. I’d just practiced not being a morning person for many years, and the reason for that came down to me wanting to avoid what waited for me in my every day. A life I didn’t love living.

Now that conversation made me realize that the problem with getting out of bed in the morning wasn’t because I am genetically wired not to be a morning person. But because I was habitually choosing to be that way to protect myself from feeling the disappointment, the dissatisfaction, the disillusionment with myself and my life that I knew I would feel every single day.

These days, I am a morning person. I get my best work done in the mornings and I don’t get up early. No longer because I am avoiding my days or because I tell myself I’m not a morning person. But because I choose to be a late-night person, and I choose to still get a restful eight hours sleep each night.

And when I do wake up, I’m ready to go. It’s quite a different mindset. I redefined what being a morning person means to me.

My past self believed she wasn’t a morning person, and that belief fed a mindset that getting out of bed to start each day was a fight. A mindset that meant every day started as a challenge, as an uphill battle, which became a pattern I repeated habitually every day for years on end.

My now self believes she can be a morning person, and she chooses to balance her preference for later nights with 8 hours of sleep and still makes her morning hours count.

Here’s the thing, our brains love patterns. The thoughts you think, the beliefs you hold, the way you respond to situations, it’s all part of a well-rehearsed script running in the background of our mind. Repeating the same thoughts and actions takes far less energy than changing them.

That’s why who you are can feel so fixed. Not because it truly is, but because your brain is wired for efficiency. It takes what you repeatedly do and turns it into a shortcut, a habit, so you don’t have to think about it. But this also means that even when you want to change, your brain will push you back towards what feels familiar, even if it’s keeping you stuck.

And this is why your identity, even when it’s limiting, can feel like a comfortable place to stay. It’s why people stay in jobs they’ve outgrown, relationships that no longer serve them, and ways of being that don’t reflect who they could be.

It’s not that change isn’t possible, it’s that their identity habits have convinced them that this is just who they are. And as long as that identity stays unchallenged, they’ll keep living the same reality on repeat.

But if you want a different experience of life, you have to start breaking the habit of being this version of you. You cannot experience something different when you stay the same.

And one very simple way you can begin to change the habit of being you, is to start shifting the thought or belief that “this is just who I am”, to “this is who I’ve been in the past and I’m open to a new way of being.”

Or even better, “I’m experimenting with being someone different. I’m trying a new me on for size. I’m open to discovering who else I can be.” It’s an open, more expansive way of seeing yourself. It says there are no fixed rules, and that paves the way for all kinds of possibilities.

But importantly, it doesn’t suggest finality. It doesn’t yet suggest that this new way of being is absolute, that it’s concrete.

Because what will happen when you start to shift your habitual thoughts about who you are, if you shift too far, too fast, your brain is not going to be on board with that. It’s going to counteract your new thoughts because it doesn’t fit the patterns it has established for operating efficiently.

So if you go from I’m not this person to I am, likely it’s going to be something that is just too far removed from the pattern your brain is used to operating from on repeat. So baby steps, when you are shifting any belief about yourself, is always key to getting your brain to come along for the ride and not make change more difficult than it needs to be.

I love having conversations with myself. If you could hear some of the exchanges that go on inside my head every day, you’d probably think I’m kind of crazy. But we all have these conversations happening. We just don’t all tune in and participate consciously in them.

But the more aware you train yourself to be at the thoughts that are running about inside your head on autopilot, the more you will find yourself actively engaging in conversation with yourself to challenge and change those thoughts.

I love being aware of my internal conversations because I love being the boss. I love being in control. And so when my storyteller, Mrs. X as I love to call her, when she pops in on behalf of my brain to tell me, “listen, that’s not how we do things around here. This is not who you are. So let’s just drop this and go back to the way things have always been.” I love to tell my storyteller to remind my brain that wasn’t the way we did me before either. Who I am right now is just one way of being that became a habit.

And as we’ve been discussing today, habits can be changed. But the key isn’t to overhaul everything overnight. You want to start small and disrupt the pattern of who you believe yourself to be without shocking your brain into resistance.

So remember, instead of saying, “this is just who I am”, try, “this is who I’ve been, but I’m open to being different. I’m trying on a new way of being for size. I’m living in the question of who I can be.” And then, do just that, no pressure, just curiosity. It’s not about forcing yourself into a new identity overnight. It’s about making space for possibility.

And the more you do this, the more you’ll notice something interesting. Your brain starts to get on board and take over making this your new way of being, so you don’t have to practice quite so hard. Your new way of being will simply become who you habitually are. Just like every version of you you’ve ever been became a habit up to now.

Here’s what I’d like to leave you with today before I close this episode out.

You are not set in stone. When you stop seeing yourself as fixed, you start to see what else is available to you. And that’s when real change happens, that’s when you stop simply existing and start exploring the magic in life that is waiting for you to try it on for size.

So start today, choose just one habitual way of being to shift, whether it’s how you think, how you speak, or maybe how you act, and see what happens. Remember who you are is just who you’ve been practicing being. If you want to be someone different, say YES! to practicing something different.

And with that, I’m bringing this episode to a close.

Thanks so much for listening in today. It’s been great to have your company. If you are enjoying this podcast, do make sure you hit the subscribe button so new episodes are ready for listening each week inside your favorite podcast library. And please do take a moment to rate the show. It helps other women find me so they can start creating a life they love too.

I do hope you’ll join me next Wednesday for more of my Self-Creation secrets to help you create a life you wildly love.

Until then, be the woman who says YES!

Hey, want to know what’s stopping you from saying YES! to you and a life you love?

Head over to https://selfcreationschool.com/yesblock and take my FREE 60 second quiz to find out what’s standing in your way today and I’ll send you my Self-Creation Shift process for shifting it.

That’s https://selfcreationschool.com/yesblock. I’ll see you there.