This is the second piece in a series on Identity.
For Part 1 – food identity – check out this link.

Back when I first started coaching, I worked with a woman I'll call Carolyn.

Carolyn was a talented web designer, who worked full-time and did freelance work on the side. "It's good work, and I love doing it," she told me, "but I need to make more money. I don't get it – I have friends who do web design, and they make twice what I make. What am I doing wrong?"

Our conversation turned to her beliefs (as it often does in coaching.)

"What are some of your beliefs around making money?" I asked.

"That I need it," she said, shrugging. "Can't get very far without it, especially in New York."

"What else?"

She thought. "That it's selfish to want to make more money. That I should make do with what I have."

There it was. I'd suspected that Carolyn was carrying around some negative beliefs around money, and now I knew for sure.

We dug deeper. I asked her where she felt it...

This is Part 1 in a series about Identity and how it affects our decisions. Stay tuned for more!

Last year, a woman named Andrea came to me for health coaching. She wanted to lose weight, so she expected that we’d spend most of our time talking about diet and exercise. But she soon learned health coaching tends to involve your whole life, not just your body.

At our first session, Andrea was shy. She felt self-conscious, and she didn’t have much faith that she could change her eating habits, since she’d tried before and failed.

“I just can’t bring myself to eat salads all the time,” she said. “I know they’re good for me, but, I don’t know. That’s not who I am.”

That’s not who I am.

“Well, who are you?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I love to bake. I have a serious sweet tooth,” she said. “And I’m Italian, so I grew up eating pasta and bread. And I love visiting my family and having a...

When I first moved to Hollywood to try my hand at acting, I went to a LOT of auditions. The rejection rate for actors is somewhere near, I don’t know, infinity? But there was one audition where I tried something different. It was for the role of Lucy Cooper on Guiding Light, and the different part was, I used my nose.

I’d already had a couple screen tests, so at the final audition, I knew what to expect. I knew my lines, I knew the setting, and I knew I’d be auditioning with another actor. It was a romantic scene, so it called for a lot of intimate emotion. That’s where my nose comes in.

Seconds before the scene started, I stood outside the door, prepping myself. The last thing I did before I stepped inside was this: I took a long, deep breath, and I imagined the cologne of the guy I had a crush on at the time.

Instantly I was transported. It was like he was there with me. Imagining his scent opened the floodgates to a whole world of memories: how he...

A few years ago, I met Dianna for the first time. She’d just moved to New York for a modeling job, and she was having trouble settling in. She missed her family and had a hard time making friends. She was lonely.

During our second session, I noticed that Dianna had a pattern: she criticized herself about everything. Her personality, her body, her teeth, her intelligence—nothing was safe from her negativity. She even said once she thought her elbows were ugly.

“It’s just how I am,” she said, shrugging, when I pointed this out to her. “I’m really critical of myself. I have high standards.”

I could tell Dianna thought that all her self-criticism wasn’t destructive. But from what I saw, it was making her hate herself, and her life.

“What do you say to yourself when you look in the mirror?” I asked her.

“You want the truth?” she said. I nodded. “Look at those bags! Those wrinkles! Is that...

Once, when my daughter Kaya was younger, we were at a restaurant that had those placemats with games and activities for kids. She was doing mazes, and when I looked over, I saw she'd gone through three of them without making a mistake. Not a single dead end.

"Wow, you're good at mazes," I said. "How did you do that?"

She just shrugged. "Easy. You start at the end, and go backwards."                 

Stephen nodded, like she'd just said something profound. "That's how those things are designed. They trip you up if you go forward, but going backwards, the path is clear." 

That's how it hit me: going backwards is a big way to move forward. 

As soon as I thought it, I started seeing examples everywhere. Stephen does it all the time, so I didn't have to look far. When he wants something, he'll imagine that it's already happened. He'll get really clear on what that looks and feels like to have...

Whenever I feel like I’ve hit a dead end, I think of my friend Lisa, and how she found an incredible new possibility in a situation that didn’t seem to have an answer.

Lisa and I worked together on the set of Guiding Light – me as Lucy, her in the production office. Years passed, and we stayed friends, and a few years ago, she met a guy in a Yankees fan chat room. As you might guess, both are huge Yankees fans. And it wasn’t long before they got married.

He was living in Maryland, where he was from, and she was living in a tiny apartment in NYC. So the question was, where should they live?

Neither of them wanted to live in the other person’s city. But in order to create a new life together, they felt, they needed to start fresh, to build a life somewhere they both felt home.

They were in a stalemate. Until one of them said, “What if we bought an RV, and traveled the country until we find somewhere we want to stay?”

So...

Recently, I stumbled upon the question: Where are you accommodating in life?

In what ways are you settling or compromising? Letting someone else get what they want, but not you?

And why?

We do that for a variety of reasons. We want to be liked or needed. We want to fit in. We want to keep the peace. Maybe we’re afraid to go the extra mile. Or maybe we don’t believe in ourselves, so we just do what works for everyone else. We people-please, we discount our own needs.

Interestingly, this came up again when a client of mine, “David,” told me about a business class he took. He went in hoping to learn about negotiating, and came out with a lesson on accommodating.

The instructor began class by asking them to pair up and negotiate a deal. Each person would be marked on various aspects, including whether or not they actually made a deal.

David went about it the way he knew how, in a way that’s worked for him in the past. He started off by asking his partner,...

Last year, I was working with a client I’ll call Lee. He was a young guy, new to New York, and working his way up the ladder in the publishing industry. He worked a ton, and he was exhausted all the time.

He knew he was going to burn out if he didn’t get more sleep. When he came to see me, he’d already resolved to go to bed earlier.

“Great,” I said. “What’s one thing you can do to make that happen?”

“Well, I’ve read that it helps if you put away electronics an hour before bed,” he said. “So I’d like to commit to doing that.”

Like many of us, Lee started off well. The first night he turned off his phone, iPad, and computer, and put them in his office. He fell asleep later than he’d hoped, but more quickly than usual.

A few weeks ago, my family took a trip down to Houston to visit my husband’s dad and stepmom. While we were there, we saw our friends Edward and Istra. They’re one of those couples who create this amazing synergy in their pursuits – which, in their case, is doing (or rather conquering) triathlons.

Edward got into them first, and he actually went professional for a while. His wife Istra started doing them soon after, and now, she’s just finished her third Ironman.

If you know me, you know that nothing fascinates me more than people performing at their best. Overcoming challenges, digging deep into their mental and physical resources to accomplish amazing things. Having a done a few sprint triathlons myself, I can appreciate how much stamina, dedication, and strength it takes.