PIVOT POINT: Identity can be a pivot superpower.Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.
—OSCAR WILDE
IMAGINE YOU have a friend who’s thirty and recently divorced. She’s the sole provider for her young daughter.
Now imagine that that friend has decided to pack up her life and move with her young daughter to Los Angeles to pursue her lifelong dream of becoming an actress.
Would you think she was crazy? What if I told you that she had little prior experience, no connections, and very little money? Would you tell her to turn that U-Haul right around and go home? Or would you tell her to keep on driving?
You might have been faced with exactly that dilemma if your friend was Barbara Niven.
Barbara’s wake-up call, and the beginning of her reinvention, arrived in her mailbox. At the time, she was the single mother of a two-year-old and living in Portland, Oregon. She was closing in on her thirtieth birthday when she checked the mail and discovered that her ten-year high school reunion was nearing.
High school reunions are so emotionally charged that entire books and movies have been built on them. For many, few things are so daunting as having to face your former classmates and go through the process of measuring up not just to your peers but to your own fears.
It was no less daunting for Barbara as she read the reunion notice. “It asked me to fill out the normal things,” she recalled. “Who I’d married, where was I living, do I have any kids, etc. But the last question was ‘Have you achieved all you thought you would in your life by now?’ That hit me like a ton of bricks that ten years had already gone by and I hadn’t even started! I’d been living everyone’s dream of me but my own. That day I hooked back into my true dream.”
That true and long-dormant dream was to be an actress. But as a nearly broke single mother, the odds seemed stacked against her. “Everyone told me I was crazy,” she said, “that it was impossible. But I found a way in.”
Barbara’s way in tapped into one of the most powerful pivot tools at your disposal, one that you can put to use regardless of your starting point. It’s called identity, and it’s the next stop on the path to pivot clarity.
Decades ago, a plastic surgeon, Maxwell Maltz, began to notice some patterns in his patients.
In many cases, the patterns were positive ones. Patients who were disfigured in accidents would have their self-esteem restored after reconstructive surgery. People who had suffered social abuse all their lives because of physical defects seemed to discover a new strength when the defects were changed by surgery.
None of that seemed particularly surprising. Who wouldn’t feel more confident after correcting a scar or a disfigurement?
What was more intriguing to Maltz were those who didn’t change. “Or what about all the others who acquired new faces,” he wrote in Psycho-Cybernetics, “but went right on wearing the same old personality? How to explain the reaction of people who insist that the surgery has made no difference whatsoever in their appearance? Every plastic surgeon has had this experience and has probably been as baffled by it as I was.”
Adding to his confusion was the fact that some people were disfigured but didn’t seem to care and even wore their scars with pride. For Maltz, it was proof that there was something more profound at work.
“I became definitively convinced that many of the people who consult a plastic surgeon need more than surgery and that some do not need surgery at all,” he wrote.
What Maltz concluded—and what he spent much of the rest of his life studying and teaching—was that the driving force behind what he saw in his patients’ reactions to their surgery, and indeed the driving force behind much of our success in life, was self-image.
For Maltz, it seemed to matter far less what people looked like and far more what they thought they looked like. It was the image they held of themselves, not the image in the mirror, that determined how they felt and, as a result, how they acted.
Maltz had seen in his patients something that psychologists and social scientists also see: that our identity—our image of ourselves and how we fit into the world around us—is a critical piece of how we think, feel, and behave. As a result, identity also determines a large part of the outcomes in our lives.
If you’ve ever read a comic book or watched a superhero film, you’re already familiar with the idea of identity. Superman adopted the identity of mild-mannered, nervous Clark Kent to hide his true self from the world.
People, like superheroes, have identities. We see ourselves as male or female, mothers or fathers, sons or daughters. We identify as white, black, Asian, Latino, African. We feel urban or rural and identify with various cultural, economic, social, and demographic groups. In high school we might have been jocks or geeks or stoners or goths or band campers or any number of other possibilities. The same applies to our family lives and careers. We adopt identities, and we may change them, depending on context.
Those identities aren’t just comic book costumes. They serve a critical purpose. They help us orient ourselves in the world, build social ties, and function and thrive when things are new or confusing, which they often are. Superman’s Clark Kent identity enabled him to fit in. To have a job. To be part of a community.
When it comes to pivoting, however, identity can provide us with a secret weapon—a superpower of sorts. To understand how, let’s go back to Barbara Niven’s pivot.
PIVOT POINT: Identity can be a pivot superpower.
After the reunion wake-up call, Barbara latched onto her acting dream, but, as with many pivots, the first obstacle was figuring out how to begin. Going from broke single mother to Hollywood actress was a challenge. To gain clarity, she assessed what was within range that fit the role of actress.
“I loved the camera and knew I could write,” she said, “so I thought: ‘TV news reporter.’ ”
The challenge? She had no college degree and no qualifications. That was when she tapped into the power of identity. Rather than apply for a job, she just started. She literally became a reporter, right then and there.
The first step? She knocked on the door of the news director at the local NBC affiliate and asked, “If I bring you stories, will you give me feedback?” The director liked her moxie and said yes.
Next she went looking for stories. “I then fibbed my way into places to get stories by saying, ‘I am an associate producer at KGW, and I need to interview you to see if you can qualify for a story.’ Of course everyone said yes because they wanted to be on TV! So I’d do an interview and then race home to type up a sample script, imagining the shots I’d use if I had a cameraman with me.”
Next Barbara took the scripts in to be critiqued, which eventually led to her being hired as an intern.
“As an intern,” Barbara said, “you get one shot to be in front of the camera and report a story. When my turn came, I told everyone that I was going to sell mine to the network!” Everyone laughed, but she found a “hook” for her story, and it ran nationally.
From there, she pushed further into acting, auditioning, then screen testing, and eventually landing paid acting gigs.
Barbara Niven would spend the next thirty years making her living in acting. Now she calls herself the “hardest-working actress in Hollywood.” A veteran of soap operas and Hallmark and Lifetime movies, at the time I write this Barbara is currently starring on the Hallmark television program Cedar Cove. Starting with almost nothing, the single mother found a way to her dreams through the power of identity.
Earning a living as an actor is no small feat. It’s something many, if not most, people are unable to do, even without the extra challenges of being a thirty-two-year-old single mother.
Those challenges are practical and logistical. They’re more than babysitters and grocery bills. They’re also mental challenges deeply programmed into our psyches.
Most people are programmed as children to believe the following: You do certain things in life in order to have certain things to then be someone whom others would respect as a result.
For example, you do well in school to get a good job to be able to have certain things in life (own a home, drive a nice car, and so on) to eventually be someone (a respected member of the community). Here’s the way that scenario looks:
DO → HAVE → BE
It’s a very effective formula—if you want to spend the rest of your life struggling.
The do-have-be formula is what sets most people on the wrong road in life at an early age and why many never find their true purpose. It’s a false promise, conditioned into us from a young age by people who don’t understand its flaws.
The flaw in the formula isn’t the parts, though—it’s the sequence. Barbara Niven, like a lucky few, knew intuitively that doing was not the first step in the process. Right from the start, she set aside concerns about what she didn’t have—experience, credentials, money, connections—and focused on being the person she wanted to become. She knew that the secret to success lay with the concept of identity.
When we move identity—the “be” in the equation—to the front of the line, we get this:
BE → DO → HAVE
That is the success equation, and to make the equation work we need to focus first on who it is we want to become.
Barbara didn’t ask the news director, “Can I have a job?” She didn’t even apply for a job. She asked, “Can I bring you stories?” She simply thought of herself as a reporter (be) and, in doing so, behaved like one (do). That allowed her to bypass all the normal requirements of a news reporter, such as education, credentials, experience, and connections, and eventually get a job as one.
And when she went out to find those stories? She didn’t ask permission to be a reporter. She simply thought of herself as one and acted accordingly. And after that? She simply followed her reporter identity and handed in the stories to the editor. To start her pivot, she adopted a new identity to replace “single mother.” It didn’t mean she wasn’t a single mom anymore; it just meant she chose to “be” something else, too—to have a new identity.
Barbara calls this “acting as if.” She acted as if she were the person she intended to be, as if she had already fulfilled her dreams. She didn’t wait until she was ready by someone else’s standards; she just acted as if she already were. In her mind, she became a person who had what she wanted, did the things that kind of person might do, and received the results. In doing so, she reversed a common pivot challenge of wanting to have instead of simply being.
The best part? You can do exactly the same thing.
PIVOT POINT: Focus first on who you want to become, not what you want to have.
Barbara’s story raises an important point about identity. Clearly, we can adopt many identities during the course of our lives, and almost everyone does. We become salespeople, flight attendants, caregivers, community leaders. We are givers, takers, and lovers. We are healed and hurting, broken and whole. As Walt Whitman said, “I contain multitudes.”
But which identity matters? Which one will help you pivot? If your goal is to find your true purpose and pivot toward that, the answer is that the identity you need to tap into is your true one.
Barbara didn’t invent a new identity—she simply uncovered one that was already there. When Clark Kent went into the phone booth to change, he wasn’t there to hide but to reveal his truth, the identity that, like Barbara, mattered most to him and to a world in need. And although you don’t need to be faster than a speeding bullet (or kick-starting an acting career), you need to uncover your true self and find a way to bring that to the world.
But, you may be thinking, Barbara Niven already knew her identity. She already had a dream. She knew her true self. How can I find mine?
One of the first books I read after my wake-up call in the emergency room was M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled. I could not put that book down, which bordered on miraculous because the only reading material I had at the time was the New York Law Journal and Barron’s.
Reading Peck’s book scared me; the experience was like self-psychoanalysis. But when I was done, I knew my self-exploration had only just begun. I was hooked on knowing myself better than I had up until that time in my life. I was hooked on growing organically from the inside out.
The film action star Jackie Chan once said, “I never wanted to be the next Bruce Lee. I just wanted to be the first Jackie Chan.” And that’s where I found myself. I wanted to be the first Adam Markel.
With excitement and trepidation, I began to examine my life. I had been working all the time, and I had achieved financial success; but instead of feeling happy, I often felt angry, uneasy, and restless. I had trouble maintaining relationships. I sabotaged business deals and investments. I judged, resented, lied, took shortcuts. I lost my hair. I struggled every day, wanting “it” to “work.”
The problem was that “it” never worked. Nothing changed.
A pear will never become an apple no matter how long you sit in a full lotus position and meditate on it. No matter how hard you work at planting pear trees, they’ll never give you apples. And for years I had been planting the wrong thing.
Finally I began to understand that if you see apples hanging on your proverbial tree of life, you know one thing as sure as you know your own name: The roots of that tree are set for apples, period. If instead of apples you want pears, the only way to get that result is to plant new seeds and grow new roots. That is the way it is in nature, not some of the time but all of the time, and since we are also part of nature, it is always true for us as well.
Uncovering your true identity is about discovering who you are at the level of the roots, at the level of cause, at the level of the unseen. This explorative discovery and process is deep work, both literally and figuratively. It’s the kind of work and process that is essential for more successful living and is itself a life’s endeavor.
I threw myself into the process of self-discovery and discovered that I loved attending inner-growth seminars—which was new for me then. I especially enjoyed the meaningful teaching of the seminar leaders and the building of relationships between the students. Less than a year later I had a huge aha! moment—the one-handed clap, as I now call it.
I realized, I am also a teacher.
It was true. I taught swimming at camp when I was seventeen. I began my career path teaching English at Junior High School 185 in Queens, New York. And I had been a lawyer educating the court about my clients’ cases for more than a decade. What I had loved about law—the ability to defend, empower, and counsel—was all part of being a teacher. As I’d been drawn further into law as a business, I’d lost touch with that.
In hindsight, it was all so obvious. But at the time, the path I needed to take in order to get back to those roots was obscured. It was the work of cleaning my windshield to find clarity that eventually led me to realize that I had strayed from an essential part of my identity.
Knowing who you are is how you start to design and create a life on purpose. It’s the opposite of the default, reactive mode of creation in which so many people are stuck. We’re all planting seeds of some sort. And we reap what we sow both unconsciously and consciously in our finances and money, career, health, and relationships. By uncovering your identity, you are planting and planning your life with purpose.
PIVOT POINT: Your true identity is a signpost to your purpose.
Like Barbara, I was able to find my true purpose and pivot toward it. And, like Barbara, defining my identity was a critical part of that process. I discovered that not only was I completely out of alignment with my true purpose, but my current path was blocking me from moving forward, and it was actually doing damage to both myself and others.
In my prepivot years, I was quite different from how I am now. I was scrappy, competitive, and quick to argue. I wasn’t mean-spirited, but I was feisty. Really, though, what I was was angry.
It seems obvious now, but only in hindsight: I was angry because I was living the wrong life. I was off-purpose and miserable. At the time, though, it was just who I was—an attorney. I had adopted that identity. After years of schooling and preparation and years of hard work, I’d become a lawyer, not in the sense of being called to the bar but in terms of identity. I hadn’t just become a lawyer the day I got my license to practice or finished law school; I’d become a lawyer over years of gradually adopting that identity. I’d gone into the pivot phone booth a teacher and come out a lawyer.
What’s worse, as a lawyer I was in the perfect position to deny, justify, or just plain ignore my growing anger. After all, it was a passionate job that came with a lot of fights. Every case had an enemy. There were always opponents to do battle with. We even had a battlefield—the courtroom—where it was acceptable to go to war. I lived a life where it was easy, even encouraged, to exercise (and exorcise) one’s anger every day.
If you had asked if I was angry, though, I would have thought you were crazy. It was part of the job, part of the identity of a Manhattan lawyer. Hard-driving, hard-working, fast-talking, take-no-prisoners, take-charge, make-it-happen. It wasn’t anger; it was just life.
Yet I was angry, and it was slowly killing me.
I just couldn’t see it. And until I did, I couldn’t change. My identity as a lawyer was preventing me from seeing deeper and finding my true self.
It’s not enough to discover your true self and purpose. You also need to understand what limitations your current identity and self-image are placing on you. I couldn’t move ahead being an angry lawyer and a consciousness-raising teacher simultaneously. Could I still be a lawyer? Certainly—and I continued to be for some time as I worked on my pivot. But I couldn’t be an angry one. I couldn’t move ahead while I was shackled by the anger I’d attached to that identity.
The problem—and the promise—of identity is that the labels we give ourselves and others come with premade restrictions. “Single mothers,” we tell ourselves, “are busy and cash-strapped and have to sacrifice their own dreams in order to maintain stability for their children.” It would have been easy for Barbara to stick with the prepackaged single-mother identity. It would have felt safe. She could have easily assumed that, given the barriers inherent in that label, she couldn’t possibly do what was required to become an actress, therefore she couldn’t have any opportunities to act, and therefore she couldn’t be an actress. By changing the equation, though, she found clarity. By focusing on her identity first—on being—Barbara was able to do and then eventually have all of the things she lacked when she started out: experience, credentials, money, and connections.
What would have happened to her dream if she had waited until she had all of her ducks lined up in a row? Until some distant day when, perhaps, “single mother” was no longer her identity? What would have happened to her life, her future, her daughter’s future, if she had focused on having, rather than on being?
What roles do you currently identify with? How are they holding you back?
Do you hold the identity of “single parent” and perhaps feel that change is not possible? Do you hold the identity of “employee” and as a result see yourself as someone who isn’t capable of running a business?
Whatever you identify with can work for you or against you. Your job is to know the difference.
PIVOT POINT: Your identity can work for you or against you; it’s your job to know the difference.
A friend, whom I’ll call Maya, has been on a spiritual quest since she graduated from college. For years, she searched for what she called “real and true happiness.” She attended retreats, read books, took workshops, all while climbing the corporate ladder in male-dominated Silicon Valley. Yet for years she failed to find what she was looking for.
Maya had been doing plenty of inner work in her workshops and at her retreats, but she was still caught in the do-have-be cycle. She’d been doing the work in the hope of becoming a person who would experience real and true happiness, rather than becoming a person who would experience real and true happiness right from the start. She was a seeker—but a skeptical seeker, often looking for proof of results before committing to the practice.
That all changed when she met Mata Amritanandamayi, better known as Amma, the spiritual leader and humanitarian called “the hugging saint.”
When Maya went to meet Amma, she went in with a healthy dose of skepticism but an open heart. When she was hugged by Amma, she felt nothing out of the ordinary. But that night, everything changed. “I was getting up to leave when a woman recommended I stay for the morning ceremony,” Maya said. “She said, ‘The morning ceremony is extraordinary. It is Mother revealing and gracing us with Divine Mother energy.’ I was curious, so I found a spot in the room and lay down on my blanket.
“In the morning, the same woman who encouraged me to stay pushed me to the front of the stage to be near Amma for the ceremony. I was so close to her, I could feel her energy. Suddenly, my heart burst open with a flood of joyful tears. I honestly can’t describe the feeling with words. It was incredible.”
Maya started carrying a picture of Amma around in her wallet. She began to research Amma and her teachings, to study the results gained by her followers. Still working through her experience with her rational mind, it wasn’t until she began focusing on her picture of Amma and asking for help that she began to understand that Amma was her connection to spirit.
“I searched my whole life to find a spiritual connection that would bring me real and true happiness,” she said. “But it was only when I surrendered to becoming the person I had hoped to be for years and years that I finally let my mind follow my heart’s path.”
Maya left her job in Silicon Valley and committed herself to her connection with Amma and to helping people deliver their own transformational messages to the world. She laughs now when she thinks back to her corporate “suit” days. “I’m like a monk now. My main focus is spiritual practice, and that carries forward in the work I do with messengers and change agents, helping them build a strong platform from which to share their teaching with the world.”
Sometimes pivoting is as simple as giving yourself over to your true identity, your true self. It’s as simple, and as fast, as stepping into the pivot phone booth and casting off the identity that’s kept you small, unhappy, and afraid to reveal your truth.
Right now, there’s a world in need out there. You have something in you that’s worth sharing. You might share that through your job or your business. You might share it through your cooking, your caring, or your collection of poetry. But, like Superman, you have to stop hiding who you are to help yourself—and a world in need.
PIVOT POINT: Change requires that you surrender to whom you need to become.
When I was studying to become a transformational program trainer, and before I was ever allowed to present material to any students, I bought a very special microphone that cost more than eight hundred dollars. At the time, that was an awful lot of money to invest in something I might never use even once.
The act of buying that piece of equipment, though, was more than an act of faith; it was an act of identity. I was acting as if I already were a successful trainer, and that act alone spoke volumes to the Universe about my true intention and purpose.
Not long after, I began to work with my first students. And before long I was standing in front of thousands, speaking into an expensive microphone, standing in my true identity, and living my purpose.
You might want to change your job. Your income. Your relationships or your health. You might want to change any number of things about your life and the world you live in.
But at the heart of reinvention, underpinning every change you want, is a kernel of truth: If you want to change your life, you have to change yourself.
In order to have a different life, you need to become something different. Like Barbara Niven, me, or the untold multitude of Clark Kents of the world, you need to uncover the true identity that’s been hidden away. You need to change. And that change needs to happen sooner, not later.
When you begin to think and behave like the person you want to be in the life you want to live, you gain enormous clarity, and you set monumental forces to work. You don’t get an acting career so that you can finally be an actress. You start thinking and acting like an actress so that you can have the career.
Barbara Niven isn’t the only person who’s used identity as a tool to pivot. Every successful pivoter I know has, at some point, simply chosen to be what it is he or she wants to be.
You don’t become a writer by having a book published. You become a writer when you decide to be one. That decision leads you to write every day. That daily habit leads to having a writing career.
You don’t become an entrepreneur by having a multimillion-dollar company. You first decide to be an entrepreneur. Then you do the things that entrepreneurs do, from creating products to selling to recruiting and leadership. Then you can have a multimillion-dollar business.
Robert Riopel, a successful entrepreneur and trainer, experienced this many times as he pivoted toward his true purpose.
“Growing up,” he said, “I was conditioned that if you work hard and stay loyal to a company, you’ll be rewarded.” By the time he was twenty-one, though, he’d been laid off three times, and what he’d been taught just didn’t seem to be true.
Robert pivoted from there, delivering pizzas, then becoming a Domino’s manager, then a franchisee. But although their income rose, he and his wife found their debts climbing even faster. They had nice things but were constantly working and couldn’t enjoy them.
As I did, Robert attended a Millionaire Mind Intensive event led by Harv Eker. Inspired, he and his wife began attending more and more of Harv’s events, volunteering their help wherever it was needed. It was there that Robert discovered his passion for teaching and training others.
“I wanted to teach,” Robert recalled. “Harv had been saying he was looking for a trainer, but there were all these criteria. So many hours of training in front of so many students.”
Robert didn’t meet the criteria. But he had passion. And so he did what so many pivoters do: He just started living life as if he were actually a trainer. “If you have passion about something,” he said, “you find a way to begin learning, and you see if it’s a fit. For two and a half years I volunteered at almost thirty-eight events a year.”
Living in their RV, Robert and his wife helped revitalize flagging pizza franchises in various locations and traveled to every MMI event they could.
One day, opportunity finally met preparation. Harv asked Robert to help him out for five minutes onstage—to do some announcements and send the students to bed. After that, he did the same thing the following three weeks in a row. Next, he got his first tiny teaching opportunity at an event—a brief session as an actual trainer onstage. His being was turning into doing.
In Los Angeles, in June 2004, Robert stood up in front of 1,200 people and became the first person other than Harv Eker to teach the Millionaire Mind Intensive. Over the next four and a half years he would do more than 120 trainings across North America, help to launch the company in Asia, and live the life he had dreamed of.
Ironically, Robert never did meet the supposed prerequisites to become a trainer until after he became one. His years of experience of simply acting as if he were a trainer gave him the knowledge and experience to become one. Harv would eventually tell him, “The reason I put you onstage that first time is because I couldn’t ignore you anymore. You were always there, being of service, and you had an amazing presence.”
Robert could have tried to attend school to become a certified trainer or start a business to meet the requisite numbers. But neither of those actions would have opened the door that simply showing up did.
“I don’t have any preconceived notions about where I need to start,” he said. “I will jump in wherever I have to. Being at those events kept me around the energy and the people. It kept me dreaming and moving forward.” Like Barbara, Robert learned that, first, you must be—so that you can do and then have.
The question, then, that you need to ask yourself is not “What do I have to do to pivot?” The question is “Who do I have to become?”
PIVOT POINT: Don’t ask what you have to do to pivot. Ask who you need to become.
Tim Jones, the architect who pawned his most prized possessions to reinvent himself, told me this: “Become what you want, even if it feels like you’re pretending. Just be who you want to be, and the world will adjust.”
It’s a profound insight that I think any successful pivoter would support. Take any action that feels in alignment with the dream you have created for yourself. If you believe you will be a successful business owner, go out and do something that someone in that position would do.
But it does raise another question: How do you know what you want? What if, like Barbara Niven, you don’t have a long-standing dream waiting to be dusted off? What if all you know is what you don’t want?
That’s our next step on the journey to pivot clarity.