There are moments in life when change is obvious. You move somewhere new, change jobs, have children, start a relationship or take on a responsibility you never expected to have. Looking back, you can usually point to those moments and say, that’s when things changed.
But I think some of the biggest changes happen much more quietly.
You become a little more cautious or you stop doing something you used to enjoy because there never seems to be enough time. You get used to working late, saying yes, putting other people first or always being the person who sorts things out. None of these decisions feels particularly significant at the time, they’re simply responses to whatever life is asking of you.
Then, years later, you might catch yourself doing something and wonder:
When did I become this version of myself?
I’ve had a few moments like this myself. Moving countries, changing careers and suddenly finding myself in a completely different working environment has made me realise how much of my identity had become tied to what I did for a living. For a long time, I didn’t really question it because it was simply who I thought I was. It was only when some of those things changed that I started noticing how much of the old version of me was still making decisions.
The person you became probably made sense at the time
It’s easy to look back at certain parts of ourselves and wonder why we’ve become the way we are. Why am I always working? Why don’t I take more risks? Why do I find it so difficult to say no? Why have I stopped doing the things I used to enjoy?
But perhaps that’s the wrong question.
The person you are today didn’t appear by accident. Your personal identity has been shaped over many years by your experiences, responsibilities, relationships and the decisions you’ve made along the way. More importantly, many of the behaviours you’ve developed probably made perfect sense at the time.
Perhaps you became highly organised because life demanded it, perhaps you became cautious because taking risks stopped feeling sensible, perhaps you worked harder because you were building a career and providing for your family or perhaps you became the reliable one because other people genuinely needed someone they could depend on.
Those behaviours weren’t necessarily bad decisions, in many cases, they helped you build the life you have today.
I can see that in my own working life. Spending years in a target-driven pharmaceutical environment taught me to be organised, prepared and persistent. Those qualities served me well for a long time. But there were times when I carried that same mindset into parts of life where everything didn’t need to have a target, a deadline or an outcome. What had been useful professionally could become unnecessary friction elsewhere.
The problem is that circumstances change and sometimes the behaviours that helped us cope with one stage of life continue long after that stage has passed.
When behaviour becomes part of your identity
Something interesting happens when we repeat a behaviour for long enough. We can stop seeing it as something we do and start seeing it as part of our personal identity.
“I’m not adventurous.”
“I’m terrible with money.”
“I’m a workaholic.”
“I’m just not a morning person.”
“I’m not very good at talking about things like that.”
“I’m the sort of person who…”
We all use these descriptions, they make it easier to explain ourselves, and often they’re perfectly harmless. But sometimes there is a difference between describing a behaviour and defining ourselves by it.
If you’ve avoided something for twenty years, it’s understandable to think you’re simply not the sort of person who does it. But perhaps you’ve become someone who avoids it …. That distinction matters.
Because behaviours can change, personal identity feels much harder to change.
Once we start believing “that’s just who I am,” we can stop questioning the behaviour altogether. What began as something we repeatedly did becomes part of the story we tell ourselves about who we are and that story can become surprisingly powerful.
Familiar doesn’t necessarily mean right
By midlife, most of us have accumulated quite a lot of life. There are careers, relationships, children, financial commitments, friendships, routines and responsibilities. We have history, and that history quietly influences the decisions we make today.
The difficulty is that we don’t always notice it.
We don’t necessarily question why we work the way we do, why we spend our weekends the way we do, why we never seem to have time for certain things or why we continue saying yes to requests we’d probably rather decline. We’ve been doing these things for so long that they simply feel normal.
But normal isn’t necessarily the same as necessary.
Something can remain in your life simply because you’ve never stopped to question whether it still belongs there.
This is where personal identity becomes interesting. We tend to think of identity as something fairly fixed: this is who I am. But perhaps some parts of our identity are simply the result of years of repetition.
And if that is true, then getting older doesn’t necessarily mean becoming more set in your ways.
It might actually give you a better opportunity to decide which parts of yourself still fit.
Your circumstances may have changed without your habits catching up
One of the clearest examples for me has been the way I’ve thought about work and career. For years, my professional identity was relatively straightforward. I knew what I did, I knew what I was good at and I knew what success looked like. Changing direction has made that much less certain. There have been times when I’ve caught myself still judging myself by an old definition of success, even though I’m deliberately trying to build something different.
Something had worked for years, so I kept doing it. A particular definition of success had become familiar, so I continued measuring myself against it, a way of working had once been necessary, so I assumed it still was.
Looking back, I think some of the friction came from trying to make an older version of myself fit a newer version of my life.
Perhaps you’ve experienced something similar.
Your children may need you differently now, your career may have changed, your priorities may have shifted, you may have more freedom in some areas of your life and less in others. Yet some of the decisions you’re making may still be based on rules you created years ago.
This connects with something I wrote about previously in Your Thoughts Shape You. Your Habits Build You. Your Choices Define You. The thoughts we repeatedly have, the habits we repeatedly follow and the choices we repeatedly make don’t just influence what we do. Over time, they can influence how we see ourselves.
Which raises an interesting question:
What if some of the friction in your life is coming from an older version of you?
The invisible rules we carry
We don’t just develop habits, we develop rules about how we’re supposed to live.
Some are conscious, but many aren’t. I need to be available. I shouldn’t let people down. I need to work hard. I should be able to handle this myself. I don’t have time for that. I’ll do it when things settle down. It’s probably too late now.
One of mine has always been that if I can do something, I probably should. It sounds responsible, and sometimes it is. But that rule can quietly turn into taking on things simply because you know you are capable of doing them. I’ve had to learn that capability doesn’t automatically create obligation.
These thoughts can become so familiar that we stop recognising them as choices, they become the background rules by which we operate.
And sometimes other people have come to rely on those rules too.
If you’ve always been the person who says yes, saying no can feel selfish. If you’ve always worked late, leaving on time can feel wrong. If you’ve always put everyone else first, doing something for yourself can feel strangely indulgent.
This can create a surprising amount of mental load. Not necessarily because there is too much happening around you, but because there are so many things running quietly in your head.
I’ve written before about Why You Feel Stressed When Nothing Is Actually Happening, and I think there is a connection here. Sometimes the pressure isn’t coming from a particular event. It’s coming from the thoughts, expectations and unfinished decisions we continue carrying.
Nothing external may actually be preventing you from changing, the friction may be coming from an expectation you’ve built inside yourself.
You don’t have to reinvent yourself
This is where I think a lot of personal development advice gets things slightly wrong.
We’re constantly encouraged to reinvent ourselves, become a better version of ourselves or build an entirely new identity. But I’m not convinced that’s what most people need.
You don’t necessarily need to become someone new, you may simply need to decide which parts of your personal identity still belong in your life.
That’s a very different proposition.
You don’t have to throw away everything you’ve learned. You don’t have to abandon your responsibilities or suddenly become someone who takes unnecessary risks. Your work ethic might still be one of your strengths. Your reliability might still matter. Your family responsibilities certainly haven’t disappeared.
That distinction has mattered to me recently. Changing direction professionally hasn’t meant throwing away everything I’ve learned over the last twenty years. Quite the opposite. I’m carrying a lot of those skills with me; I’m simply trying to work out where they still belong and where I need to approach things differently.
But perhaps there are other things you’ve been carrying that no longer serve the life you’re living.
Maybe constantly being available isn’t necessary anymore, maybe saying yes to everything doesn’t reflect your priorities, maybe working every evening has become a habit rather than a requirement or maybe the belief that you’re too old to try something new was never really a fact in the first place.
The challenge isn’t to change everything, it’s to become more deliberate about what you keep.
What still belongs in the life you’re building?
I’ve started to find this question more useful than “How can I improve myself?”
The idea of improvement can sometimes imply that the person you are isn’t good enough, I’m not sure that’s true.
Perhaps a better question is:
What still belongs in the life I’m building now?
Your ambition might still belong, your values might still matter, your relationships, responsibilities and experience are all part of who you are.
But perhaps some of the rules you’ve been following don’t belong anymore.
You might discover that you’re still trying to prove something that no longer needs proving. You might realise that a particular definition of success came from someone else. You might notice that you’re protecting yourself from a risk that isn’t actually as significant as it once felt.
You don’t have to reject the person you’ve been, you can simply decide what comes with you into the next stage of your life and that, perhaps, is a more useful way of thinking about personal growth.
Not becoming someone else.
Becoming more conscious of who you already are, and deciding who you want to continue becoming.
A simple personal identity check
You don’t need a life-changing decision to explore any of this, start with one area of your life that feels repetitive, uncomfortable or unnecessarily difficult.
Ask yourself three questions.
What am I actually doing?
Try to answer this without judging yourself or deciding what you should be doing, just look at the behaviour.
Why am I doing it?
Is it because it genuinely matters? Because someone expects it? Because it has always been that way? Or because changing it feels more uncomfortable than continuing?
And then ask:
Would I choose this again today?
I think that last question is particularly powerful because we sometimes continue living with decisions we made years ago without ever making the decision again.
I’ve started asking myself this question about some of the things I’ve carried for years. Not because I necessarily want to change them, but because I realise I haven’t actually made the decision for a long time. I made it once, circumstances changed and then I simply kept going.
The answer doesn’t have to be yes.
And it doesn’t automatically mean you need to change anything, it simply gives you an opportunity to look at something you’ve probably stopped looking at.
You don’t have to change everything
If you’ve spent twenty or thirty years building a life, you’re unlikely to improve it by deciding that everything needs to change tomorrow.
That would simply create another source of friction.
Instead, notice one thing.
One habit, one assumption, one rule, one belief about yourself that you’ve carried for a long time.
Question it.
Maybe you’ll discover that it still serves you, that’s useful too.
But perhaps you’ll realise that it belonged to an earlier stage of your life.
If so, you don’t need to completely reinvent yourself, you can make one slightly different choice.
Then another.
Over time, those choices begin to change your behaviour, and your behaviour can begin to change the way you see yourself.
That’s how personal identity can change too. Usually not through one dramatic decision, but through enough small decisions that eventually the old description of yourself no longer feels quite right.
The person you became isn’t necessarily the person you have to remain
I find that idea quite liberating.
Perhaps that’s why this question has been sitting with me. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last year thinking about what I want the next stage of my life and work to look like, and I’m realising that it isn’t necessarily about becoming someone completely different. It’s about deciding which parts of the person I’ve already become are still worth carrying forward.
You aren’t starting again, you’re not trying to erase the person you’ve been, that person got you here, they made decisions based on the information, circumstances and responsibilities they had at the time.
Some of those decisions will still be right …. Some won’t.
That’s okay.
Growing older isn’t just about accumulating experience. It’s also about becoming more aware of what you want to carry forward and what you’re ready to leave behind.
So perhaps the question isn’t:
“How do I become a better version of myself?”
Perhaps it’s:
“Which version of me actually belongs in the life I’m living now?”
Because your personal identity has been shaped by thousands of thoughts, habits, choices and circumstances.
You don’t have to become someone else.
You might simply need to stop being someone you’ve already outgrown.
The Frictionless Check Framework
When did you become this version of yourself?
NOTICE
What am I doing simply because I’ve always done it?
QUESTION
What do I believe about myself that I’ve never really questioned?
CHOOSE
Would I choose this again today?
LET GO
What no longer belongs in the life I’m building?
You don’t have to become someone new.
You might simply need to stop being someone you’ve outgrown.
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