Even as a child I was an inventive problem-solver. It’s simply who I was meant to be. Isn’t it funny how it seems we spend most of childhood shaping our unique identity, and then most of our adulthood trying to hide from what makes us different? In this chapter, we’ll discuss how our brain works to understand the world around us, how it makes each of us truly unique, and how to become more self-aware. We’ll tackle coping skills for accepting our uniqueness and learn why it’s not only ok, but beneficial to stand out.
How We Develop Our Identity
Our brains are like the perfect organizational expert from our favorite home and garden TV show—they love to put similar things into neatly organized boxes. This happens with just about every type of information our fantabulous little noggin collects—experiences, emotions, and more. Your brain gets the same feeling grouping people that I get thinking about a shirtless sexy man holding sheet cake and telling me, “I just want to give you a back rub and hear about your day.” When you see a person, your brain goes straight into analysis mode, making observations about their actions, appearance, demeanor, and more. Within as little as seconds, that relative stranger has been filed away by your subconscious in a pretty little box of supposedly similar things.
Our mental storage boxes are called “schema.” It’s basically a fancy science-y way of referring to a generalization about a group of people, places, situation and more. Stereotypes exist for a reason: it’s just your brain trying to keep your thoughts tidy. Think about it. Every thought you have ever had is being organized and sorted into its perfect place. Everything in its box. I often wonder how my brain can be an ultimate store of all of this information, but still cannot effectively remind me to clean my house, buy toilet paper, or do my taxes.
These schemas also help us define ourselves and how we should react to things. Schema that characterize how we view ourselves are called self-schema. When I first started researching self-schema, I had a huge identity crisis. Who am I? I don’t even know who I am. However, a few deep breaths and fifteen hours of reading Wikipedia pages with no relation to this book at all, I realized the obvious. I am who I am.
Your strongest self-schemas are always going to be the first things you use to describe yourself to a stranger. So for example, I am a beautiful, fearless, loud-mouthed woman. I care about the people around me deeply, but I am afraid of getting hurt. I am even more scared of failing. I work really hard, and I try every day to make the world happier. You will always know where you stand with me, and I value honesty more than anything else.
If we take a look at this blurb, we can see it not only defines who I am, but also helps my brain predict how I might react to certain situations and how I might engage with my community. Your brain is basically labeling a box of what you are, and on a day-to-day basis it helps you make decisions that fit neatly and comfortably in that box.
These perceptions of ourselves begin to develop as soon as we are born and are as unique as our experiences, environment, looks, and thoughts are. When people say “Speak your truth,” the truth they are talking about is this pure definition of who you are. It’s how you see your bodies, interests, personality, and behaviors.
They also often become self-perpetuating, meaning that we make choices that continue to reinforce how we have already defined ourselves. For example, if you identify as an extrovert, your mind is going to remind you that I need people to feel complete. It’s going to give you the warm fuzzies when you get invited to a party or event. In the same vein of thought, if you spend too much time alone, it might trigger emotions such as loneliness, to remind you that you need to get out of the house and see some people.
These facts and tidbits about who we are get stored in the amygdala, or the emotional parts of our brain. Which means what we believe about ourselves doesn’t have to be logical or factual. It simply has to be a pattern. When I was younger, I thought I was ugly. Not just kind of ugly—I thought I was hideous. At one point, I even gave up on grooming, because what was the point? I was a fugly teenager, I’d be a fugly adult. There was no point working on the parts of myself that couldn’t be fixed.
I developed this self-definition because I was surrounded by friends, TV shows, and random strangers who constantly reminded me that because I was fat, I was also ugly. In my brain, the words fat and ugly were stored in the same box. For a long time, the two words were completely interchangeable for me. It took mentally redefining the word “fat” to help my brain begin to accept that I could identify as both fat and beautiful. Fat was no longer synonymous with ugly.
Now, changing how we see ourselves outright can be like climbing a mountain in flip-flops—painful and nearly impossible. But have no fear: adapting a schema is something our brain does all the time. Your identity evolves, based on the situations you put yourself in, your interactions with others, and how you feel about yourself. I’ve had many women tell me that seeing my images has helped them see the beauty in who they are. At first I was like, “Lies!” How is that even possible?! They’re just photos. However once I researched how the brain works, it made perfect sense.
The brain sees things bound together. In this case we’ll use “fat and ugly,” but usually in our brains things are much more complex. Now when you see an images of a woman like me and see them as being “fat and beautiful,” your brain gets frustrated. Now the first time it happens, your brain might do just like all my ex-boyfriends, and make excuses for it. However if you continue to expose yourself to this cognitive dissonance, it will force your schema to evolve.
Our brain will be like: “Hold up. Trying to group these two things together isn’t working anymore. They need to break up.” Since these two things can no longer be fit into the same pretty little box, your mind will just have to go down to the basement (of your subconscious) and get another box. But the brain will only do this if it feels uncomfortable enough, often enough, to make that change. To change who we are, we must first challenge who we are.
How to Recognize Your Self-Schema
1.Start with the question—“Who am I?”
2.Answer honestly as you see yourself, not as you want the world to see you.
3.List the first twenty things that come to your mind, regardless of the connotation.
4.Group the list into key themes—these are most likely your core self-schema.
You Are Unique
Once you begin to understand how schemas are formed, it became apparent that each and every one of us is unique—just as our experiences, memories, emotions and bodies are unique. One of the biggest and most beneficial things you can learn in life is to embrace, rather than fear, this difference. We often over-focus on the benefits of sameness—no one gets bullied for not standing out. But by the same token, no one truly succeeds without standing out.
Let’s say you meet two people today. One of them is unlike any person you’ve ever met. That person is fascinatingly different. The other is just like someone you already know. Which do you think you will remember more? Which do you think you might tell your friends about meeting?
Since your brain likes so much to group things, it’s likely you will remember the unique person solely because they are, well, unique. Your brain had to make space in the attic for a whole new special crate just for them. You’ll probably vividly recall little details about them—silly things like the color of their shoelaces or the way they pronounce a certain word. Anything your human supercomputer has latched onto as different from the norm. And the other individual? The one with similar traits to someone you’ve already met? They’ll just get added to the same box as your existing friend. Other than that, you’ll probably forget most things about them.
I once was at a business conference where individuals were presenting on creativity and technology. There were amazing speakers from the most innovative companies in the world like Google, Facebook, and more. However, if you asked me about what any of them presented on, I couldn’t tell you. In my brain, they’ve all been lumped together into one box probably labeled something like “technology presenters who wear suits and talk about the future.”
However, toward the end of the day, I remember