The Identity Advantage
Most people don’t have a motivation problem.
They just don’t understand how they’re motivated.
The Identity Advantage is a podcast about what actually drives human behavior — and why so many people struggle to follow through on what they say they want.
Hosted by Kindyl Keeton, this show explores the connection between identity, motivation, emotional awareness, and performance — and how those forces shape your decisions, actions, and results.
This isn’t about waiting to feel motivated.
It’s about understanding how motivation already works — and learning how to use it to become more self-accountable, consistent, and aligned in your actions.
Each episode breaks down the patterns behind:
– why we hesitate, overthink, or avoid action
– how identity and belief systems influence behavior
– the emotional drivers behind decision-making
– and what it actually takes to close the gap between knowing and doing
Through solo episodes and conversations with experts across psychology, performance, and human behavior, you’ll learn how to:
→ build self-trust through action
→ develop real self-motivation
→ make decisions with clarity and confidence
→ and follow through on what matters most
Because real change doesn’t come from more information.
It comes from becoming the version of you who takes action.
The Identity Advantage
EP #18 How To Rewire Your Brain: And What That Really Means
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Rewire your brain” is everywhere right now — but what does it actually mean? In this episode, Kindyl breaks down the phrase in a way that’s simple, practical, and a lot less mystical than most people make it sound. If you’ve ever wondered why you keep getting the same results, why you start and stop, or why discipline alone never seems to fix the pattern, this conversation is for you.
This episode explores what brain rewiring really is, why it’s connected to your beliefs, thoughts, emotions, and actions, and why real change doesn’t happen from surface-level habit hacks alone. If you’re tired of trying harder and still ending up in the same loop, you’ll hear a completely different way to think about personal growth, motivation, consistency, and identity change.
If you’ve been searching for answers around mindset, subconscious patterns, manifestation, self-sabotage, or neuroplasticity, this episode will give you a framework to start making sense of what’s really driving your results — and why changing your life always starts deeper than the action itself.
Resources mentioned:
Download the emotional guidance tool linked in the show notes.
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Visit to Submit a question, Suggest a Topic, or just let me know how this episode landed for you.
https://www.kindylkeeton.com/podcast
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Negative emotions will never motivate you to take positive actions. It's just not how you work. It's not the biology, it's not physiology, it's not how our body operates. Change doesn't start with what you do. Change starts with who you are. I'm your host, Kendall Keaton, and this is the identity advantage. Welcome back, everybody. I really want to go over this phrase that you're hearing everywhere right now. And I actually went back and looked at some of the downloads from my previous podcasts or from my previous episodes and saw that the one where I mentioned this has got a lot of traction. And it is the phrase, rewire your brain. And I want to revisit it because I didn't really go in depth in it. And I want to talk to you about kind of what that really actually means to rewire your brain, right? It sounds big, it sounds scientific, it sounds like something you probably need a course or a certification or a weekend retreat to figure out, and they have those, but it's not as complicated. Well, two things. It's not as complicated as people make it sound, but it's also not as quick. There are no quick fixes, and we really want that, but you can't take this is just my opinion, you can't take like a three-day deep dive and completely rewire your brain. Rewiring your brain is possible. It's all neuroscience, neuroplasticity. We know that our brain in adulthood is much more malleable, changeable than what we thought. But it does not happen overnight. It's a process. Just like you're not going to eat good one day and lose 30 pounds. We know now that nutrition, that fitness, it's a lifestyle, right? It's not a one and done. This is no different. So take a course, take a certification if you want to, go to a retreat. I'm not saying it's not helpful. I'm saying that you have to continue the work. And you don't have to have that in order to make it happen. It's helpful because you have someone there guiding you through it. But you can start doing a lot of things on your own if you kind of understand what it is that's actually happening. Okay, so start here first. Why do we even want to do this? Why do we want to rewire our thoughts, rewire our brain, right? We don't wake up one day and think, hey, I'd love to rewire my brain today. We've heard this and we're thinking, oh, wait, maybe this is a way that I can get this result that I'm looking for. Because at the very foundation of it, there's a result in your life that you are not getting. Or there's a result you keep getting that you don't want. And you're trying to figure out how do I change this? Why do I keep doing this? Why do I start and stop? Why can't I stay consistent? Why do I know what to do, but I'm not doing it? Or why do I feel like this all the time? I would love to feel differently. If you know that rewiring your brain is something that would be helpful, then you also know that your thoughts matter. That what you think is making an impression, that what I'm thinking is affecting what I'm getting. And you think thoughts every single day. And some of those thoughts are very, very automatic. And some of those thoughts have been ingrained over decades. Some of them serve you and some of them do not. And you can do the seven-day resets, right? You can do the masterminds, you can do the secret techniques. I am not above them myself. I've done many resets, breakthrough sessions. You can do those. I'm not above offering those at some point, but there's work that has to consistently be done after that. And you can be doing doing that work now. Rewiring your brain is just this. It is intentionally choosing what you believe and repeating that choice, that belief, until it becomes your default, until it becomes your identity. That's it. It's not hard to do, it's not complex, but it's consistent work that does it. You have a loop that's running, that's powering all of your beliefs. It's a cycle. It's called a lot of different things depending on who's talking to you about it. I call it the identity loop because it really does create over time your identity. It creates who you think you are. And it's a cycle. Every result that you get in your life, everything that you're creating comes from this loop, from this identity loop. It's a belief that causes a thought, that causes an emotion, that motivates you to an action, that creates a result that reinforces the belief. And I'm going to break that down a little bit. Every single belief that you have, the belief that you have about yourself, about the world around you, about other people, right? About what you think you're capable of, about what how you think somebody else is going to react, about what you think about the world. Is the world a harsh place? Is the world a forgiving place? Do you believe that you create your own luck, or do you believe that things happen to you and you either have good luck or you have bad luck? Like what are your beliefs? You have hundreds of them. They've been created over decades, over little things that have been said to you, maybe over circumstances you have found yourself in, how you reacted, a result you got when you did something, something somebody said to you when you were four could be creating a belief that you have right now. Lots of which are very, very untrue. And we're going to talk about that too. But every single belief you have, when something happens, it will trigger a thought, an immediate thought. That thought triggers immediately an emotion. We have a thought and we immediately feel like a somatic, we feel it. That emotion is what creates your motivation to take an action. Your action is either to do something or you avoid something. Both are actions. And whatever your action is will create a result. And whatever that result is will reinforce, will prove whatever that original belief was. And this loop repeats and it repeats and it repeats until that belief becomes just who you think you are. It becomes a part of your personality. And you just say, that's just, that's just how I am. And what we try to do is we try to interrupt that loop by taking a different action. This loop has like six steps to it, six phases, if you will, and we're trying to jump in at phase four and change that. Never even addressing phase one, two, and three, the belief, the thoughts, and the emotions. And really a motivation jumps in there as a little bit of a phase two. But what we try to do, and why we don't really see the result that we want, is we're trying to jump in at the action phase. I need more discipline. I need to try harder. I just need to stop doing this. But the action is not where the problem starts. We see our actions as the issue, but our actions are a symptom. They're not the cause. The action is not why you're getting the result, right? I mean, I guess it is in a way, but it's the very last symptom. There is a cause that happens way before that. If you only try to fix the action when your belief, the thoughts, the emotions behind it don't support the action you want to take, it becomes very, very hard to repeat that action. You might do it once, you might do it twice, but it your cycle doesn't support it. Your identity loop contradicts that action. You start something, but then you stop, right? You lose the weight and you gain it back. You get motivated for a couple days and you fall off. You know what to do, but you just can't follow through with it. It's not a discipline issue, it's an identity loop situation. Someone asked me the other day. Um, they were like, okay, help me out, coach. I really want this Dr. Pepper. I know I shouldn't have it. How do I not drink it? All I can think about, I know I cannot have this Dr. Pepper. How do I not drink this Dr. Pepper? And I said, stop focusing on not drinking the Dr. Pepper. Stop focusing on the action that you're trying not to take. Number one, you're telling yourself a negative action, you're saying, don't do this, don't do this, don't do this. So, number one, you have to figure out what is the action you actually want to take because you're not giving yourself a positive action here. You're just saying, don't do this, don't do this, don't do this. Focusing on what you're saying no to. What are you saying yes to? This is a completely different different conversation. But if you're trying to build a new habit, you can't just delete the habit, you have to replace it. What else are you going to do instead? That's not where this conversation is going, but I just want to throw that out there in case any of you are trying not to have a Dr. Pepper. What else are you going to have instead? Replace it. You can't just sit there in the void. But when we say, I can't do this, I shouldn't drink this, we feel deprived, we feel restricted, we feel annoyed, frustrated. What do these emotions do? These are very negative emotions. And any negative emotion is going to cause you to avoid the thing that you really want. Negative emotions will never motivate you to take positive actions. It's just not how you work. It's not the biology, it's not physiology, it's not how our body operates. You're focusing and thinking, your thoughts are all about what you don't want, making you feel all these negative feeling emotions that don't feel good that will never motivate you to take a positive, feel-good action. It makes you crave the thing you shouldn't have even stronger. And then you drink the Dr. Pepper. And then you get the result of having drank the Dr. Pepper and it's gone. And now you're like, see, I told you I have no control, I have no willpower, I'm never going to be able to do this. Because you change, you tried to change the action, but you never went back and said, okay, what are my beliefs? What are my thoughts? What are the emotions I'm feeling that's making me want this Dr. Pepper so bad? That's making me drink it even when I don't want it or even when I know I shouldn't. What are you saying yes to when you say no to that habit that you don't want? What are you saying yes to? What do those thoughts bring up? Better energy, feeling good in your body, keeping a promise to yourself, becoming the person who follows through, creating emotions like pride, alignment with your future self, strength, confidence. Those are good feeling emotions. Those emotions are going to lead you to taking a more positive action, to doing the thing that you've replaced the Dr. Pepper with, whether that's a bottle of water, or it's a piece of gum, or it's a handful of sunflower seeds. Yes, choose an action that fits you better, but you will never take that action if you don't go back and work on those beliefs and those thoughts and those emotions that are motivating that action. This is how we rewire our brain to be able to get different results. It's not interrupting the loop where the action is, you're going back to the beginning and changing the beliefs and the thoughts so that it can create different, better feeling emotions. You will always, always be motivated according to what emotion you are feeling. If you feel good feeling emotions and you're excited about something, that's when you feel the motivation to do the thing you want to do. When you feel discouraged, when you feel frustrated, when you feel irritated, when you feel overwhelmed, that's when you're motivated to avoid the thing. That's when you go into numbing mode. And you go, I really should have done this today, but instead I just found myself scrolling on Facebook for an hour. And then we blame ourselves for not being able to take a good action. But we didn't cultivate the beliefs and the thoughts behind it. That's rewiring your brain. And you have thousands, tens of thousands of thoughts a day. So you can't do this once and expect it to work. It has to be a practice that you do every day, a couple minutes in the morning, saying what thoughts and beliefs actually might make me feel good that I could practice today. Because your brain, your brain works like this. What you repeat is what gets stronger. Your brain is constantly building neuropathways, connections. And what's interesting is that these connections get stronger when you feel emotions. The stronger the emotion, the stronger that neural pathway is. So when we are just trying to affect the action, we don't get consistent. We can't follow through. It's like, why can I do it one day and not the other day? You're not rewiring your brain just by doing different habits, just by changing the action. Because you never had, if anything, you're increasing the neural pathway that's connected with the negative emotion. You have to go back and build beliefs and thoughts that create good feeling emotions and then take that action. Go back and practice that belief again. Practice that thought, practice that good feeling emotion. And when there's an emotion connected to that thought, that's when your brain starts building those pathways. Your brain is emotionally triggered. Your emotions cause chemicals. That's scientific, that's proven. And when thoughts create really strong emotions, your brain develops neural pathways. And these are developed even when we don't want to. If you've had a situation in your life that was traumatizing, that created a very strong negative emotion, your brain also created a neural pathway. So when something similar like that happens, you immediately start feeling that emotion. This is PTSD, right? This is trauma response. You find yourself in a similar situation or in a similar environment where something negative had happened in the past and you immediately feel that emotion because your brain has been wired that way. Because a strong emotion occurred inside of you when that event happened and it created a pathway. And now you have a wiring in your brain. Neurons that fire together, wire together. Now, when you think that thought, you're always going to feel that emotion and it's going to, you know, lead to that action. It's a loop. Rewiring your brain is about creating good neural pathways. And every time you create one, like you can identify the one that you don't want. And then what do you want instead? Focus on that one, build that pathway. And the more you entertain that, the other one that you don't want loses its power. It starts to lose its connectivity because you are not focusing on the energy of that. You're not focusing on that thought and that emotion. So you're not creating that action and it's weakening that neural pathway. It's weakening that wiring. In the meantime, consistently every single day, you're working on this new belief, this new thought, this new emotion that feels really good that you know leads to this action that you actually want to take, now getting the result that you want. And every time you focus on that, focus on that, now you're building that pathway to this good belief that makes you feel good, that's making this action a lot easier. And you start to solidify this different belief that you have about yourself or about the world, about this other person. Because when you believe something that serves you, you have thoughts that create really good emotions that will create a good feeling, excited motivation to do the thing. And then you get the result that you were looking for, reinforces that belief. Yes, I can make this happen. And you keep practicing that over and over. And when you start thinking in that old pattern, you just become aware of it and say, Oh, I'm in my old thought loop. Let me switch over and go to my new belief. This is where affirmations come in. But affirmations, this is this is why I say when affirmations feel fake, it's because you're not getting an emotion to it. You have to do it over and over until you feel that emotion. Find a thought that you can create an emotion to, that you can connect to emotion, a belief that really aligns with who you want to be. And if you want to start this right now, if you want to rewire a belief that you have, you just reverse engineer this cycle. What result are you getting in your life that you don't really care for? What action is creating that? Well, what emotion are you feeling when you take that action? What thought is behind that emotion and what belief is behind that thought? You have to take it and work it back. Find the root. You got to pull this thing up by the roots, right? If you just mow over the weeds, they come back. You got to get out there and you got to get down to the root and pull it up. The action is not the root. The action is the is pretty dang close to the result, right? It's the symptom. The cause is what you believe. That's what rewiring your brain is, and that's why you can't just do it once. This is a way of life, but it makes life so much more fun and enjoyable and empowering. Like you feel like, oh, I have control over this. It takes away that victim mentality. That's where freedom and power is. Like you have the control to choose what you believe. And the belief, let me tell you, doesn't have to be true for it to cause a cycle, and that cycle to go and go and go until you think this belief that you have is just a fact of life. There are a lot of beliefs that you have that are not true. You believe things about yourself, about the world, about other people that don't have any factual base in it at all. But you've believed it for so long because of one circumstance that happened that it's just the way you think things are. Just take a moment and go back and identify what's what are some of the beliefs that you have? Do you believe that you're too old now to start anything new? Do you believe that you're too young to do something? Do you believe that you're not good enough with numbers? I'm just not an organized person. I'm not good at this, or my brain just doesn't work like that. What do you believe about yourself that might not be true? And how might that not be serving the action you actually want to take? Just pick one belief, pick one loop. And again, if you want to see this on paper, I created like a, I think it's seven or eight page mini workbook. It's the identity loop. It walks you through, it has a visual of this on there, your belief that leads to a thought that leads to an emotion, a little bit about motivation, your action result. It's a loop. You can see this. It's got the emotional guidance scale on there, all of your different emotions. And then it has some exercises. It has some questions that you can ask yourself to really walk through this. This is a this is a free resource. You can download it. It's digital. You can print it off. You can just look at it and write the questions down on your own paper, however you want to use it. But I'll put the link in the show notes. And do this work. Just take a couple minutes every day and say, what do I want to believe today that would serve me and help me take better actions and get better results? It really is that simple. And you just do it over and over again. Do it at night if you want to. Do it a couple times a week if you can't do it daily. But the work is there. If you want to work with me one-on-one, I'm absolutely available for this. You reach out via email or my website's on the bottom of the show notes also. At the very least, go download the workbook. Make this one of your priorities. And it doesn't have to take that long. A couple minutes a day. Because you're already rewiring. You are wiring your brain every single day. Your brain is going to change, is going to continue to like grab beliefs and grab thoughts. But is it going to happen on purpose because you chose the belief, or is it just going to happen on default because things are just happening to you and you're thinking and feeling on default mode, on reflexive mode? Because you can choose to take control of that pattern. To rewire your thoughts, to rewire your brain. It's not some magic solution. It's just repetition with intention. Choose what you want to believe and choose it purposely every single day. That's it. And go get the workbook so you know questions you can ask yourself and how to identify an identity loop that doesn't serve you, and then how to create one that does. I promise you it is worth your time. You will be so glad you did it. And honestly, eventually you'll really enjoy doing it. So go try it out and let me know how it goes for you. Thank you so much for listening. And if something you heard today made an impact or changed the way you think somehow, then share it with somebody you care about. Because sometimes it's that one moment, that one idea, that changes everything. And until next time, remember if you want to do something you've never done, you have to become someone you've never been. That is the identity advantage.