In the vein of book titles offering all that needs to be read, Ben Horowitz wrote, What You Do is Who You Are. Horowitz writes, “who you are is not the values you list on the wall. It’s not what you say in a company-wide meeting. It’s not your marketing campaign. It’s not even what you believe. Who you are is what you do.” People aren’t a coin toss. We’re not an independent event with a 50/50 chance of behavior in a certain way each day. We’re weighted coins. Our past actions build to weight the coin further and further into a more predictable outcome. History may not repeat, but it rhymes. Those of us in the insurance industry know this all too well. Insurance companies specialize in making decisions based on an interpretation of our past behaviors. Actions that caused accidents in the past are likely to be repeated. They use the statistics developed from studying many of us to assume that those that exhibit actions like those that have resulted in problems are likely to represent a higher risk in the future. Again, history may not repeat, but it rhymes.
Our actions reveal. We tell the world who we are by how we behave. As TV Psychologist, Phil McGraw notes, “The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.” Our behaviors speak for themselves. In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words, “Your actions speak so loudly, I can not hear what you are saying.” It doesn’t matter what a good game we talk, if our actions don’t align with our words, our actions reveal our true beliefs and character. Our resumes are worth something, but what we do day in and day out says much more about who we are and how we are likely to behave in the future. It’s only natural to pad our resumes with the highlights. They represent the best jobs we’ve had. We detail our highest accomplishments seeking to paint a positive picture of ourselves for others. References are more valuable than resumes. Our references may have seen our good and not so good sides. They have spent more time with us. They have less motivation to sugar coat our surface. Yet even more objective, our digital footprint and independent evidence of effort says more about our capability than a resume. Some professional athletes have been trained by PR professionals to put on a good face and say the right things for the interviewers. They talk about team efforts, they wax eloquently about their responsibility to give more to the team, then they proceed to act differently away from the microphone in their personal and professional lives. Their true character is revealed as they focus their energies on themselves deeply disconnected with their public face.
Accepting that actions are the essence of everybody’s character leads us to two constructive conclusions. First, we are our choices so we can choose our character and evidence it through our actions. Second, others are who they are. We can’t change them. We must deal with them as they are. Around 100 years ago, Arnold Bennett pointed this out writing in How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day, “If we regard ourselves as free agents, and the personalities surrounding us as the puppets of determinism, we shall have arrived at the working compromise from which the finest results of living can be obtained.”
When faced with the question can you change, we should answer for ourselves, yes, absolutely. None of us are perfect. As the Canadian pop-artist from the 80s, Gowan, gave us, “I’m only human, of flesh and blood I’m made.” We have flaws, we act foolishly. None of us are the Taj Mahal. None of us are one of the seven wonders of the world. In fact, we’re more like fixer uppers. We each could use a little TLC. We each could use a little makeover. We each could use some help from Mike Holmes. A personality renovation may be in order. We can’t control others, but we can work to make better choices for ourselves.
The core component of change is confidence that you can change. Confidence is a belief in yourself. It is the power that propels you to push forward, take risks, try new things. It gives you strength when you’re struggling. In short, confidence follows competence. To build belief in your ability to change, it helps to know that you have changed in many ways over the course of your life. In The Success Principles, Jack Canfield wrote, “Research has shown over and over again that the more you acknowledge your past successes, the more confident you become in taking on and successfully accomplishing new ones.”
Seek to develop details of your competences. Canfield suggests to “Start by dividing your life into three equal time periods…then list three successes you’ve had for each time period.” An alternate suggestion is to detail 100 or more of your life successes. The younger you are, the harder this should be. However, you can still list things like learned to crawl, learned to walk, learned to feed myself, became potty trained, can read, learned multiplication, passed kindergarten, graduated from elementary school, etc. Perhaps, you’ve dieted in the past with some success. You can list what you did, when, how much you lost, how long you kept it off, and what the motivation was to get you going on the program.
Your list of successes demonstrates with objective clarity that you are capable of learning, you can change. You’ve done this before. Therefore, you can do it again.
Related to this is developing a daily discipline to reflect at the end of each day on what you’ve accomplished. Prompt yourself to list 3-5 things that you completed that day. This provides current record of your efforts, closes your current day off with a positive assessment, and fuels your forward motion.
An additional suggestion is to create your own Brilliance Book in which you write about or scrapbook on your accomplishments. It is where you consolidate your highlight reel. It can be a fun activity to introduce to your own children that becomes a meaningful keepsake. Even in your work life, listing a sentence or two of your accomplishments helps you see the contributions you’re making over time. You can take time to review and reflect on this once or twice a year to give your confidence a boost.
Checking in on what we’ve done helps us see how far we’ve come and appreciate our abilities to continue expanding our efforts. Our confidence is like a stack of poker chips. The more we have, the longer we can enjoy playing and the more risk we can take.
As Horowitz noted, we are what we do. Our character is the result of our choices. Our efforts should focus first and foremost on self-improvement. We want to aspire to making better choices. Shun your inner scorpion and embrace the idea that you’re capable of change. We would do well to seek to live by the guidance of Marcus Aurelius who encouraged himself to “Be tolerant with others and strict with yourself.” To the end of being strict with ourselves, there’s no better investment than an investment in self. Seek to identify your strengths and determine ways to further develop them. Become aware of your weaknesses and try to limit the ways in which they may lead to derailing your development. These two tasks will keep you busy enough you won’t have time to try and tell others how to behave.
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