When Your Life Changes Before Your Identity Does

On gyms, cities, careers and the moments that make us who we are.

I’m sure you’ve heard some of these before.

“The workplace was toxic.” “Other people didn’t support me.” “My family didn’t understand.” “The timing was wrong.” “I lost motivation.”

Sometimes those explanations are completely justified. But I’ve become interested in a more uncomfortable possibility: what if, occasionally, the person quietly resisting the change is us? Not because we don’t want it, but because part of us is still organised around the person we were before the change began.

We can change jobs, move cities, start businesses, transform our bodies and completely restructure our lives while our understanding of who we are remains remarkably unchanged. A new life can end up being operated by an old identity.

There is a more hopeful side to this, though. Sometimes, if we keep moving towards the life we have chosen, our identity catches up. Occasionally it happens so suddenly that we can almost feel it. I’ve come to think of those as moments of becoming.

Deciding who you — and your identity — are becoming

My own experience of this became particularly obvious at the gym. For a long time, bodybuilding didn’t feel particularly accessible to me. Bodybuilders looked like bodybuilders, and I didn’t. Even walking into a gym could sometimes make me feel slightly fraudulent, surrounded by people who, in my mind at least, belonged there in a way I didn’t.

The breakthrough wasn’t suddenly looking like a bodybuilder. It happened much earlier. First, I decided that I wanted to become one. Then I started taking the actions of someone pursuing bodybuilding seriously: training consistently, making it a priority and organising parts of my life around improving my physique. I did that before I felt entirely comfortable claiming the identity that went with it.

Over time, training stopped being something I was merely trying and became part of how I organised my life. Then one day, after months of training, I caught sight of myself in the mirror and, for perhaps the first time, saw a bodybuilder looking back at me. The evidence had begun to catch up.

There is research consistent with that relationship. A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis covering 19 studies and 13,340 participants found a substantial positive relationship between identity and established health-related habits. It doesn’t mean that simply declaring an identity changes behaviour, but it does support the idea that repeated behaviour and identity can reinforce one another.

It made me wonder how often we insist on doing this in reverse. I’ll call myself a writer when I’ve published something. I’ll call myself entrepreneurial when the business succeeds. I’ll take myself seriously in the gym once I look sufficiently impressive.

The problem is that the evidence we’re waiting for may only be produced by behaving like the person we haven’t yet permitted ourselves to become.

Sometimes identity arrives afterwards

I have experienced this outside the gym too. When I moved from Australia to London, there was obviously a date on which I technically became a London resident. But that wasn’t when I felt like one.

That came later, walking across London Bridge on a brisk spring morning on my way to work, shoulder to shoulder with Londoners and looking out towards Tower Bridge and the city around me. I remember a small shiver of realisation:

I’m a Londoner.

Nothing externally had changed in that instant. Something internal had simply caught up.

I felt something similar when my parents visited from Australia and we went to Paris together. Seeing the Eiffel Tower sparkling in the evening and the Arc de Triomphe, there was another thought underneath the spectacle:

I was someone who could visit Paris with my parents.

Years later, on my first work trip to New York, I remember standing very high — New York style! — above Hudson Yards, looking towards the Empire State Building on a glorious autumn day and thinking:

I was someone whose work had brought him here.

On that same trip, I got up early and walked across Brooklyn Bridge around sunrise. New York appeared determined to provide the full experience: a couple having wedding photographs taken, running groups, TikTokers hanging off barriers and cyclists shouting at pedestrians to get out of the way. I was there alone, simply taking it in.

Those little solo expeditions have become part of my identity too. I’ve become comfortable exploring on my own rather than missing an opportunity because nobody else is available, interested or awake yet. I’ve become someone who takes advantage of opportunities.

These moments matter because they are points at which I notice my identity expanding. A possibility becomes an action, the action becomes an experience, and eventually something inside says: Oh. This is me now.

When transformation threatens something

Leaving corporate life brought up a more complicated version of the same process. Importantly, I wasn’t leaving because I couldn’t succeed there. I was good at corporate life. I had spent around 25 years working in corporate environments, including periods in transformation, strategy, business analysis and organisational change. I knew how to operate in that world and had built a career that was established, well paid and recognisably successful.

That almost made leaving harder. I was stepping away from something I knew I could do well in to pursue something far less certain. There were legitimate questions about security. People around me worried about the financial risks. Others may not have seen what I saw in the business I wanted to create.

Then there were my own doubts.

What if it failed?

That was the obvious question. But another one eventually appeared.

The less obvious question was: what if it worked?

Success would change how I worked, earned money and described myself. It would require me to become visible differently and attach my own name to ideas and services rather than relying on the credibility of an established corporate role.

Failure threatened the new venture. Success threatened the old identity.

We often describe self-sabotage as though some irrational force inside us is deliberately destroying what we want. I’m not sure that is always the most useful way to see it. Perhaps some resistance is simply continuity doing its job. Our existing identity knows how to operate the existing life. It knows what earns approval, what looks sensible and how other people understand us.

But not every moment of becoming is comfortable. That same New York trip also contained moments when I could feel the friction between the person I had been and the person I was becoming. At times I felt surprisingly conflicted and disconnected, as though the old and emerging identities were pulling in different directions. Perhaps that is part of significant change too. A new identity doesn’t always replace the old one neatly. For a while, both can coexist.

That matters when other people react to our change. Someone might say, “You’re getting a bit obsessed with this gym thing.” They may be joking, genuinely concerned or simply unfamiliar with why it matters so much. If I still secretly believe I’m pretending to be a bodybuilder, the comment can become evidence that perhaps I should retreat. If I have genuinely decided that training is important to me, it becomes information rather than instruction.

A stronger identity doesn’t make you immune to other people’s opinions. It gives you somewhere stable from which to evaluate them.

Organisations do this too

I spent much of my professional life around organisational transformation and saw changes with wildly different levels of success. Companies can introduce new technology, reorganise teams, redesign processes, replace leaders and launch new strategies, yet still find people quietly returning to old behaviours because the underlying assumptions have barely changed.

Some of the most successful transformations I encountered seemed to involve something more fundamental:

This is the kind of business we are now. Therefore, this is how we behave.

Of course, organisational change requires far more than an affirmation. Analysis, risk, leadership, capability and execution all matter. But research into organisational change also suggests that identification and shared identity can influence how people respond to change and whether they support it.

I increasingly believe there is a useful parallel in personal transformation. We can concentrate entirely on the external actions — resign, move, start, stop, train, travel — while leaving one important question untouched:

Who am I becoming as a result of this?

The identities we never considered

What might you want if your existing identity wasn’t quietly editing the possibilities? Perhaps you once wanted to be an architect or an astronaut. Perhaps you want to become a florist, someone who travels constantly, someone who writes, or someone who lives in Paris.

The specifics almost don’t matter. What interests me is the response that so often follows: that’s not really me. I couldn’t do that. People would think I’d lost my mind. Some objections may be entirely practical and deserve serious consideration. But buried amongst them can be something different:

People like me don’t do things like that.

Of course. This is me.

That is an identity statement. Before asking whether a change is possible, we may need to notice whether we have already decided that it is impermissible.

The hopeful part is that identity is not fixed forever by the evidence of our past. We can decide what matters, begin acting accordingly and allow new evidence to accumulate. Eventually, if we’re fortunate, another moment arrives. You look in the mirror. You cross the bridge. You stand in the unfamiliar city. You walk into the business you created.

Who are you allowed to become?

I don’t think there is a pristine, authentic version of us buried underneath decades of wrong decisions waiting to be uncovered. Identity is more complicated than that. Some is inherited, some learned, some reinforced by experience, some chosen, and some still being created.

That is why reinvention, to me, isn’t simply about discovering who you have always secretly been.

It is also about deciding who you are willing to become.

That question became important enough to me that I explored it much more personally in my book, Who Am I Allowed to Become? — particularly the tension between the life we’ve built, the identities we’ve inherited and the person we might still permit ourselves to become.

Change can be exhilarating, but it can also be destabilising. Sometimes the question isn’t whether we are capable of changing our circumstances. It is whether our identity has been invited along.

The external change matters, as do habits, resources, opportunities, relationships and practical realities. But somewhere amongst all of that sits a deceptively simple question:

Who do I believe I am now?

And perhaps an even more important one:

Who am I prepared to become?

This is the thinking behind Identity Builds Reinvention™, the approach I use at JB Reinvent™. Across five stages — Recognise, Rediscover, Rebuild, Reconnect and Reinvent — we explore who you are, what matters to you, what you are becoming and how to turn that understanding into meaningful change.

Ready to explore what comes next?

If you are considering a significant change — or have already made one and find yourself being pulled back towards an older version of your life — explore JB Reinvent™ or start with a free 15-minute conversation.

Explore JB Reinvent™Explore Who Am I Allowed to Become?