You can change your income, grow the business, become a stronger leader and build an entirely different life and still carry an old idea of who you are into every room.
I think this is particularly important to understand when you’re already successful because success doesn’t automatically change your self-image.
You can have plenty of evidence that you’re capable and still second-guess yourself. You can lead a successful business and still experience moments of inadequacy. You can be respected by the people around you and privately wonder whether you’re really ready for the next level.
This was at the heart of a conversation I had in 2024 with my longtime friend Doug Dane, author and mentor, during the ELEVATE Your Success Summit.
Doug and I have known each other for many years. We first connected in Canada during my early days working with Bob Proctor and PGI, and we’ve remained connected ever since. Our work has taken different forms, but there is a principle we both understand deeply:
The way you see yourself has an enormous influence on the results you create.
The identity you didn’t consciously choose
Doug uses the term “mistaken identity” to describe the beliefs we can unknowingly form about ourselves.
From a very young age, we’re absorbing information from the world around us; rules, values, beliefs, judgements, expectations and ideas about who we are and how life works.
We don’t consciously sit down and decide which of those ideas we’re going to accept.
We simply absorb them.
Over time, some become so familiar that we stop recognising them as beliefs at all. They become part of how we see ourselves. Doug explains that we can learn very early to judge ourselves and second-guess ourselves, carrying those patterns forward into different areas of our lives.
This is very similar to what I teach about paradigms and self-image.
Your self-image is the internal picture you hold of yourself and you will continually act, react and make decisions in accordance with that picture – often without consciously realising you’re doing it.
That’s why simply wanting a different result isn’t always enough.
You may consciously want greater income, a different business, more freedom, greater visibility or another level of leadership, while unconsciously holding an idea of yourself that contradicts it.
And when the two collide, the old self-image is incredibly powerful.
Stop asking, “What’s wrong with me?”
One of my favourite moments in this conversation was when Doug talked about the question so many people ask themselves when they aren’t getting the result they want:
Why can’t I figure this out?
Why can’t I do what somebody else is doing?
Why can’t I get there?
Or perhaps the most damaging version:
What’s wrong with me?
Doug’s response was beautifully simple:
“The key is stop trying to fix yourself. The key is to be yourself.”
There’s an important distinction here.
Personal development is not about spending your life looking for everything that’s wrong with you and trying to repair it.
There is nothing empowering about becoming a full-time renovation project.
The work is becoming increasingly aware of the ideas you’ve accepted about yourself, deciding whether they’re actually true and deliberately developing an image of yourself that is aligned with the life you want to create.
This matters at every level of success.
In fact, I would argue that the more you’re growing, the more important this work becomes.
Every new level asks something different of you. Greater leadership, wealth, impact or freedom can expose beliefs that were perfectly comfortable at your previous level but become very obvious when you attempt to move beyond it.
The question isn’t whether you have beliefs.
The question is whether the beliefs you’re carrying support where you’re going.
Give yourself a “blameless autopsy”
Doug shared an expression in our conversation that I love: A blameless autopsy.
Rather than criticising yourself or blaming other people for where you are, stop and take an honest inventory.
What do you believe?
How do you see yourself?
What are your strengths?
What do you really want?
And then ask: What do I believe that contradicts what I say I want?
Doug makes the point that you cannot change your beliefs unless you’re prepared to evaluate them. This is something worth doing at every level.
Imagine someone who says:
“I want to double the business.”, but underneath that desire sits:
“If the business gets any bigger, I’ll have no life.” or “I want to become much more visible.”
Those beliefs don’t make you weak or incapable.
But they do matter because your behaviour will naturally follow the ideas you repeatedly hold about yourself and your world.
You can’t create a genuinely new result while continually returning to an identity designed to reproduce the old one.
Your next level may require a new picture of you
There was another part of the conversation I thought was particularly relevant to leaders.
Doug spoke about how habitual we can become; moving through life, following established patterns and rarely stopping long enough to question them. His invitation was to become more earnest and inquisitive about what we believe and why.
That’s a practice worth developing because there is always more of you available to express.
The business you’ve built, the results you’ve created and the person you’ve become are evidence of your growth.
But they don’t represent the boundary of your potential.
So perhaps this weekend, give yourself some space and conduct your own blameless autopsy.
Ask yourself:
What do I really want next?
Who would I need to become to create it?
What do I currently believe about myself that supports that person?
And perhaps most importantly:
What am I still believing that belongs to an earlier version of me?
Don’t judge what comes up, become aware of it.
Once you can see an idea for what it is – a belief, rather than an absolute truth – you put yourself in a position to choose something different.
The next level is about finally giving yourself permission to become more of who you really are.
WATCH MY FULL CONVERSATION WITH DOUG DANE BELOW:
If this has you thinking about what’s next for you, I’ve created a collection of free trainings to help you go deeper into these principles and begin applying them to the results you really want to create.
