Become the Man You Want to Be

Most of us approach change by asking what we need to do differently.

We decide we need to wake up earlier, exercise more, eat better, spend less time on our phones, be more present with our families, or finally start working toward something we've been putting off. We create new goals and habits, hoping that if we do them long enough, eventually our lives will change.

There is nothing wrong with any of that, but I think there is a deeper question that needs to come first.

Who do you actually want to become?

Because underneath almost every decision you make is an idea of who you believe you are.

If you see yourself as someone who always quits, it becomes easier to quit. If you believe you're terrible with money, you'll probably continue making decisions that reinforce that story. If you've spent years telling yourself you're too busy to take care of yourself, your life will somehow continue filling every available space.

We tend to think our circumstances create our identity, but our identity also has a powerful influence on the circumstances we continue creating.

Start With Who, Not What

Before deciding what you want to accomplish, take everything else away for a moment.

Forget about money, status, recognition, and what other people expect from you. Forget about the version of success you've inherited from your parents, friends, or society.

Ask yourself:

If I had nothing to prove to anyone, and money wasn’t an issue who would I actually want to become?

Maybe you want to be a man who takes action on the book idea he has or podcast he wants to start to share your voice. Or a man who puts his physical and mental health first before anything else. Maybe man you becomes someone who keeps his word, speaks honestly, takes risks, creates meaningful work, or has the courage to choose his own path.

The answer has to be yours, nobody can tell you what your hearts calling is.

If you're trying to become someone because you think that's who you're supposed to be, eventually you'll exhaust yourself trying to maintain an identity that was never really yours.

Once you have some clarity, you can begin asking a different question throughout your day:

What would that man do here?

Not someday. Right now.

“Our self-image and our habits tend to go together. Change one and you will automatically change the other.”

— Maxwell Maltz

Your Actions Become Evidence

There is an important difference between telling yourself who you want to become and actually becoming him.

You can write down, I'm the type of man who takes care of his body. You can remind yourself that you're someone who has difficult conversations instead of avoiding them. You can visualize yourself being more disciplined, present, courageous, or patient.

Those things may help clarify the direction, but eventually life is going to ask you to prove it through your choices.

If you want to become someone who keeps his word, keep it when breaking it would be easier. If you want to become a present partner, put the phone down when your in the room with them and they want your attention. If you want to become someone who faces difficult things, have the conversation you've been avoiding.

Every one of those moments becomes evidence.

You aren't simply completing a habit. You're showing yourself who you are.

Over time, enough evidence begins to change your self-image.

There Is a Gap

This is probably the hardest part of meaningful change.

There is often a gap between becoming different internally and seeing the results externally.

You can start training and still look the same in the mirror. You can change how you show up in your marriage and still have problems to work through. This is where it's easy to fall back into the old identity because the outside world hasn't caught up yet.

We want evidence that the work is paying off, but sometimes the first evidence isn't found in our circumstances. It's found in the way we're responding to them.

Maybe you handled a situation differently than you would have six months ago, and you stayed calm when you normally would have reacted. Or you followed through when the old version of you would have found an excuse.

Those moments matter because you're building the man who will eventually create different results.

Let Experience Change You

I also think we underestimate how much growth comes from simply getting more reps at life.

You can spend years reading about courage, but eventually you have to do something that scares you. You can understand vulnerability intellectually, but at some point you have to tell someone the truth. You can learn everything imaginable about leadership, but eventually you have to lead when things aren't going well.

Experience has a way of revealing parts of ourselves that thinking alone never will.

This is why discomfort can be so valuable. When we deliberately step outside the patterns that have kept us safe, we discover where our edges actually are. Sometimes we fail. Sometimes we embarrass ourselves. Sometimes things don't work.

But every experience gives us information, and that information becomes part of who we're becoming.

Take Ownership of the Life You Have

This is where Agency, the second milestone of The Balanced Man Method, becomes so important.

Once you become aware of the identity and patterns you've been living from, you have a choice. You can continue explaining your life through your past, your circumstances, other people's decisions, or everything that has happened to you.

Or you can take ownership of what happens next.

Taking ownership doesn't mean believing everything that has happened to you was your fault. It means recognizing that your next decision belongs to you.

There is tremendous freedom in that distinction.

Your past may explain who you've been, but it doesn't have to decide who you become.

Start Living as Him

You don't need to reinvent your entire life tomorrow.

Choose the man you want to become and begin giving yourself evidence that you are already becoming him.

When a difficult decision appears, ask what he would choose. When you're tempted to fall back into an old pattern, notice it and choose again. When you fail, learn from it instead of turning the failure into another story about who you are.

Do that enough times and something begins to shift.

Eventually, you're no longer trying to become that man.

You're simply living as him.

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