Why Your Identity Is the Last Thing You Upgrade (And Why That's the Real Ceiling) - ep 227

If you've been listening for a while, you may have already noticed something shifting in this space. I'm more intentional, more precise, more focused on actually leading you somewhere than just giving you content. That evolution is directly connected to what we're talking about today.

This episode is the missing piece between Episode 224 (the identity that built your success may be limiting your life) and Episode 205 (the energetic gap between who you've been and who you're becoming).

Today we get into the mechanics, why identity always shifts last, why top-down personal development work eventually hits a wall, and what actually changes the equation.

If you've done the work, read the books, tried the frameworks, and still keep bumping up against the same ceiling, this one is for you.

What we cover:

• Why behavior and belief work only takes you so far
• How identity gets wired into the nervous system before you have any conscious say in it
• Why affirmations and logic can't reach the layer where identity actually lives
• How your own design works as a diagnostic tool, and what it reveals about your ceiling
• The difference between understanding a pattern and actually updating it

Links mentioned:

• Book a free 30-minute Subconscious Strategy Call → BOOK YOUR SESSION
• Join me on Substack → SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE OR UPGRADE 
• Lets get social → INSTAGRAM

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Welcome back to the Limitless Life Podcast. Welcome if you're new here. I'm your host, Brenda Johnston. And before we get into today's topic, two things I want to say. One, my dog is very hyper today, and she just keeps randomly barking at people who walk by on the street. So if you hear her barking, that is why. And two, and this feels important for me to say because if you've been listening to me for a while, hanging out here for a while, you've probably already picked up on it. But something is shifting for me. Not in like a dramatic, everything is different way, not like that. It's more like a very deliberate evolution of what has been happening underneath the surface for me for a while. And I feel like it's starting to show up in how I speak and what I'm talking about. And honestly, what I'm no longer willing to tolerate. So if you've been here recently, you might have noticed that I'm less focused on just giving you content and I'm more focused on actually leading you somewhere. And that is very intentional. I have been doing a lot of my own work around what I actually want to build, and I've been getting really, really honest about the difference between what's mine and what I absorbed from the world around me, coaches, whatever. Because here's what I've realized. For many, many years, like probably since I started my business, I had been chasing a version of success that wasn't really ever mine. I thought it was mine, but it wasn't. Like the eight-figure business, the massive visibility, the traveling all over the world, the idea of what like making it is supposed to look like. And you know, that's society, the culture we're we're in, the era we're leaving, it was very good at making borrowed dreams feel like your own ambitions. And listen, I'm human. I bought into that for a really long time, longer than I actually want to admit. So the work of untangling that and really leaning into the depth of my design and my true purpose, especially as it really unfolds in this 50s cycle of my life, it's been really about getting to know myself and all of the layers of myself and getting really honest about what I actually want versus what I was told to want. And to be honest, it has been some of the most confronting work that I've ever done. And I'm not going to blow smoke up your butt about that. But you know what? It's also been some of the most interesting work, and it's brought me new levels of clarity that I've never had. Because on the other side of all of the honesty, like getting really honest about what I want, is something that finally feels like mine. Like my business finally feels like mine. And it's only getting better. And I'm telling you this because it's directly connected to what I'm going to be talking about today. And because I think a lot of you are also in the middle of exactly the same thing. You're you're doing the work, you're evolving, you're getting more honest. And so I want this to be a space where that's not just allowed, but it's the whole point of things. So this episode is about identity. And yes, I've talked about identity before, but we're going deeper than I've gone before because I want to get into the mechanics of it, not just what's happening, but why it's so persistently hard to shift and what actually changes that. So if you've been in this space for a while, you know identity is a thread that I come back to a lot. Episode 224, I believe it was, we talked about the identity that built your success, potentially being the same one that's limiting your life. Episode 205 was about the energetic gap between who you've been and who you're becoming. And I want this episode to be the missing piece between those two conversations. So the question I want to answer and talk about and explore is why is it that it's your identity that always is the last thing to shift? You can shift beliefs and habits and behaviors, but identity always shifts last. Like you can seriously change everything on the outside, your strategy, your habits, your environment, your revenue, and still feel like you're hitting the same ceilings. So that's what I want to get into today. So let's start here. When you decide you want to grow into a bigger version of your business or a different kind of relationship or a life that really does feel like yours and lights you up, the first thing you typically do is change your behavior. And we talked a lot about this in the Quantum Leap series. So if you haven't listened to that, you should go back. It starts in October, or it was in October, but that's when the series started. So you start to implement new habits, you might hire support, you probably invest in some new strategies, and that all works up until a point. Because behavior is the most accessible layer that we have. It's visible, it's measurable, and to be honest, it responds pretty quickly to effort and intention. And the second layer we have is belief. And this is where most personal development work actually lives. You identify the limiting belief, you reframe it, you replace it with something that serves you better, and again, that works up to a point. It's deeper than behavior, but it's still a layer that most people can access with the right tools, and honestly, having enough self-awareness. But underneath belief is something that most people never touch, and that's where the true identity actually lives. It's the deep unconscious story of who you are, how the world works according to you, and your perceptions and your beliefs, and what you believe you're allowed to have. This isn't about what you think consciously, but it's what your nervous system has decided is true based on everything that happened before you had the words to even question it. And here's what I want to spend some time on because this is the part that I feel like explains why so many smart, self-aware women and men for that matter, can do years of personal development work and still feel like something fundamental has not actually moved. Most people are trying to shift identity from the top down. And what I mean by that is they read a book, they do journaling prompts, they say generic affirmations, they set intentions. And listen, I am not dismissing any of that because those things have a place. But what they're all doing is working from the conscious mind downward. And the problem is, identity doesn't live in the conscious mind. It lives somewhere your conscious mind can't fully reach. Usually before you were seven years old, before your prefrontal cortex was even developed, you were already building a detailed internal map of the world. How safe it was to be seen, whether love was conditional or consistent, what you had to do or be in order to belong. And what happened when you took up too much space or showed too much emotion or needed too much. None of that got filed in the part of your brain that you have conscious access to. It got wired into your nervous system as survival programming, as automatic responses that fire before you've even had a single conscious thought about the situation. So when you sit down and you try to logic your way into a new identity, when you tell yourself, I am worthy, I am enough, I'm the woman who receives easily, your conscious mind hears that. And it might even believe it for a second. But your nervous system, your subconscious, the part of you that's running the show and has been for decades, it has 30 plus years of evidence that says otherwise. And it's gonna go with that evidence every single time. This isn't a willpower problem. It's not a commitment problem. This is just how your wiring works. And I know because I've lived it for years. I was doing the work, the right work, the deeper work, and still hitting walls that I could not explain. It's part of what led me to do the work that I do today, why I'm obsessed with it, and why I'm constantly refining how I work. I understood my patterns. I could trace them back to their origins, and I had real insight into why I operated the way that I did. And insight helped, but it did not shift the thing underneath. Because understanding a subconscious pattern from the conscious mind is a little bit like reading about swimming. At some point, you have to actually get in the water. Not at the level of thought, not even at the level of belief, but the level where these patterns actually live in the body, in the nervous system, in the energy. Because that's where identity is stored, and that's the only place it can truly be updated from. So the subconscious speaks a completely different language than the conscious mind. It doesn't respond to logic or intention, it responds to felt sense. And what I mean by that, the body's direct experience of something. So it responds to repetition, to imagery, to emotion, to the nervous system's lived experience of safety in a place that maybe it had an experience that it's now categorized as threatening. So when you learn to work in that language, you're not just thinking about change, you're creating the actual neurological conditions for it. And that's what I do with clients. This isn't theoretical for me. It's the work I did on myself for years before I ever did this level of stuff with anybody else. I'm not teaching concepts I read in a book or that I just got from a certification. I'm teaching from the inside of this experience, from having been the woman who had all of the insights and still couldn't move the ceiling, and from eventually figuring out why and what actually works instead. And here's why identity shifts last because your system isn't designed to prioritize your goals, it's designed to protect your survival, and the identity that you've been carrying, I'm gonna guess you're the capable one, the strong one, the one who figures it all out. That identity kept you safe at some point, or it's still keeping you safe. It earned you love and respect and stability, or maybe all of those things. And your nervous system, it filed that. It filed it under. Oh, this is this is okay. This is how we coast. I'm fine, I'm fine, it's all fine. That's what it filed it under. So when you try to grow into something that requires a different version of you, one who receives more easily or lets her armor down or trusts herself without always needing that external validation, your system doesn't experience that as expansion, it experiences it as a threat. Not consciously, you're not sitting there going, oh, I refuse to grow. But underneath the pattern that is running is, oh, this isn't safe. This isn't me. I don't know who I am without this. And that's the ceiling. It's not your strategy. I mean, it might be, but not usually, it's not usually your mindset. The identity that doesn't yet believe it's safe to be anything other than what has already been a bugger. And this is where it gets really interesting. And this is the piece that changed everything about how I work with clients. Because what I've learned to do is read the identity layer directly. And to do this, I'm using people's human design as a diagnostic or discovery tool. So we can look at the specific way they're wired, the patterns rendered underneath their decisions, the places where their energy contracts versus expands. And from that, we are able to get a very clear picture of what is actually running the show. And what I find almost every single time is this the ceiling is not random. It's completely logical. And once you can see the pattern underneath it, things like this start to happen. The woman who can't stop overcomplicating her strategy realizes she isn't bad at simplicity. She's running an identity that only feels safe when she is indispensable. The woman who keeps attracting the same dynamic in relationships realizes she's not just unlucky. She's operating from a subconscious blueprint that says love needs to look a certain way. The woman who builds her business or her life, for that matter, to a certain level, and then all of a sudden, for no reason, self-sabotage, she realizes she isn't weak. She's hitting the edge of what her current identity believes she is allowed to have. This is also why I am so skeptical of identity work that stays purely conceptual. You can have incredible insight into your patterns. You can name them, you can trace them back to their origin, you can understand them intellectually, and still not shift them. Because understanding is not the same as updating. The subconscious doesn't respond to insight. It responds to a completely different language, which we've already talked about. Felt sense, repetition, embodied experiences. The body's direct experience of something being safe that it previously considered a threat. That's the work that actually moves the ceiling. Not just understanding why a pattern is there. Although that does matter, but creating the conditions for your nervous system to experience something different. For the identity to have enough new evidence that it starts to recognize that it's safe and it starts to reorganize around a different story. And I want to be honest about something here. This work is not a straight line, and it is not always quick. I spent years doing it on myself before I ever did this with anybody else. And I continue to do work on myself. My own unraveling, figuring out what was actually mine versus what I'd absorbed, learned, performed. That was a decade of like real work. It wasn't a weekend retreat. It wasn't a three-month program that just fixed everything. It was real layered ongoing work. And as I grow and evolve, so does the work that I have to do on myself so that I can keep expanding, so that I can make what I do with clients even more precise. Because just because it took me that long doesn't mean I want it to take that long for anybody else. But here's what I can tell you on the other side of it. When your identity actually does shift, and this is going to happen more than once in your life, by the way. And I'm not just talking about your behavior, I'm not just talking about your beliefs, but when the deep layer actually shifts, things stop feeling like you are walking through mud. That's how I would explain that. Decisions that used to take three weeks of agonizing start to feel a lot easier. The version of success that you've been trying to force starts to feel inevitable. And you stop white-knuckling your own life because you're finally building from something that's actually yours, and you have the subconscious beliefs that support your growth. So here are the questions I want to leave you with today. And these are not comfortable questions, but they are worth sitting with. Start with that. And it's the most important work because it helps you see what's going on. And if you want to actually look at what's running underneath your own ceiling in your business, your decisions, your patterns, that's what my free 30-minute subconscious strategy session is for. It's a real conversation. I'm going to ask you some direct questions about what you say you want and what is actually in the way. And if it makes sense to go deeper together after that, then I'll tell you what that can look like. But either way, you are going to leave with clarity. So the link for that is in the show notes. And if you're not ready for a call yet, but you want to keep thinking at this depth, come find me on Substack. It's where I'm going to be writing the things that don't fit anywhere else. They're going to be longer, less polished, probably more confronting. That space is really for the women or men who actually wants to take a deeper look at themselves, not just collect inspiration. And you can come over for free, or there's a yearly membership, which is $87 for the entire year. And when you join that, you're going to get instant access to some awesome free tools. And that is a space where not only am I going to be writing articles, but you're going to have audio clips or audio exercises or audio trainings. Sometimes to go with the articles, sometimes on their own. And it's going to continue to grow. And I might do some actual trainings over on Substack to help you understand your energy and all sorts of cool things. But like I said, it's $87 for the entire year. So go get yourself in there. And the link for that is in the show note, too. And until next time, here's to creating your limitless life.