Culmination event

I'm obviously going through some breakthrough in personal development right now. Looking at the latest WIP articles, including the one from yesterday, makes it almost painfully obvious. And I mean painfully in a good way, like ripping off a bandage.

It escalated to the point of me standing on the balcony of our hotel room this morning, looking over the city, and feeling like a king. (Hotel room balconies usually do this to me, though.) I felt like a cognitive dissonance had been resolved in my mind: that if I was really standing here, on the top of the world, with endless possibilities available in every direction, then I had to be valuable. It wasn't a matter of trying to be valuable anymore. If I was there, I had to be valuable.

It clicked. A new identity was switched on in my mind. I was value.

The idea of identity driven behavioral change is something I've known about for ages. It's not at all a novel idea to me. I knew that change is easy when you identify with the change.

But still, it felt like there was nothing I could do to induce the identity change - that I was just to wait for the circumstances to align into the perfect setting. It was as if Newport's words, DeMarco's new book announcement, having dinner in the most prestigious restaurant in the city, and standing on the balcony in a bathrobe, all converged into this one moment - point zero - the starting point in a new timeline that the new identity would define.

You can give yourself any title, any name, if that helps you click on your new identity. However, what matters is action. Act like the new you. Think like the new you. Treat yourself like the new you does.

If the culmination event was strong enough, all this will come automatically. And if you haven't had your culmination event yet, you can wait, and let yourself be influenced by inspiring people in the meantime.

Those can be the catalyst you need to start a new life.