At Leverage to Lead, the complexity of identity is always on our minds. It’s core to how we think about leadership itself. You can’t lead people, or yourself, without reckoning with who you understand yourself to be.
Our approach to leadership development is to concentrate on your strengths, skills, and expertise. We ask leaders to be more of who they are, and yet we consistently see resistance to naming what you’re great at. We aren’t well practiced at this in our culture, and at the heart of it, most of us are still grappling with our own identity. Who am I and how do I see myself? When you’re still working out who you are, it’s hard to show up consistently in your leadership.
We define identity at L2L as who you are and who you want to be in the world. It shows up in three ways: how you think about yourself, how you’re viewed by the world, and the characteristics that mark you as unique and as a member of various groups. And identity isn’t static. It changes with the environment: the version of you that shows up in a room of executives is not the version that shows up at your kid’s soccer game, and neither is more “real” than the other.
The conundrum of how you’re viewed by the world often collides with how you view yourself. And most of us spend a lot of energy trying to manage that collision. We perform, explain, over-correct, or armor up, all in service of controlling how we’re seen.
Here’s the problem: you can’t.
You cannot prevent someone else from comparing you against their own experience and drawing their own conclusions. Every person who meets you filters you through their history, their assumptions, their categories. That filtering isn’t malicious, it’s how perception works. But when we build our sense of self on the outcome of other people’s filters, we get stuck. We start living inside categories that were never built to hold the richness of a lived life.
And the trap works in both directions. It’s not only that people unlike us reduce us to a category. It’s that people who share an identity marker with us, whether that’s race, profession, diagnosis, or hometown, sometimes assume that shared marker means shared experience. It doesn’t. Two people can hold the same marker and have lived entirely different lives beneath it.
Somebody else’s version of your identity is still only their version. It is not a map of you.
Returning to Your Center
There are two models we keep coming back to, developed by Bobbie Harro: the Cycle of Socialization and the Cycle of Liberation. In the Cycle of Socialization, the core is fear, ignorance, confusion, insecurity. Acting from that core tends to look like staying quiet when something’s wrong, going along with a role you didn’t choose, deciding it’s safer not to ask the question. It’s built from the outside in: institutions, family, culture, assumed rewards and punishments, until a person’s sense of self is essentially assembled out of other people’s messaging.
The Cycle of Liberation flips the architecture. Its core is self-love, self-esteem, balance, joy, support. Acting from that core tends to look like the opposite: naming what’s true even when it’s inconvenient, setting a boundary without over-explaining it, asking for help without treating it as a failure. Everything else we do, from reaching out to building community to creating change, radiates out from that core rather than being poured into it.
Most of us were handed an identity built on the first model without ever choosing it. Our physical characteristics, our roles, our category memberships sat at the center, and we spent years managing how the world reacted to them. The work is relocating the center. Not erasing the characteristics or the group memberships; they’re real and they matter. But refusing to let them be the foundation. Letting self-worth and security anchor the core instead, so that when the world misreads you, or a peer assumes they know your story, it registers as information rather than a verdict on who you are.
Relocating the center isn’t a one-time effort. It’s a practice, and the practice is care. Caring for your own identity means tending it the way you’d tend anything you wanted to last: revisiting it, protecting it from other people’s shorthand, letting it grow instead of freezing it into a fixed category. And here’s what that practice makes possible: once you know what it takes to care for your identity, you start recognizing that same effort in other people. You no longer mistake someone’s surface identity for their whole story, because you know from your own experience how much more there is underneath it.
Telling Your Own Story, With Care
The clearest place to exercise care for your whole self is in the story you tell about who you are.
Your identity is a story, but it’s one you’re the author of, not one you’re delivering for an audience. And the way you tell it to yourself matters as much as the facts inside it. You can narrate your own history the way the world sometimes has: as a list of categories, comparisons, and other people’s verdicts. Or you can narrate it the way you’d tell a story about someone you loved, with attention to what it cost you, what it gave you, and why it’s worth holding onto.
That’s what caring for your own identity actually looks like:
- Naming who you are and what you feel honestly, instead of the version that’s easiest for other people to accept.
- Making room for what’s difficult or painful in the story rather than editing it out, because a story with the hard parts removed isn’t self-love. It’s self-erasure.
- Placing your own worth at the center of the telling, not as a conclusion you’re trying to earn, but as the ground the whole story stands on.
When your worth is the foundation rather than the finish line, the story changes. It stops being something you have to defend and starts being something you simply get to own.
That’s also why naming a strength out loud can feel harder than it should. You’re not just describing a skill. You’re testing whether your own story can hold it without flinching. The resistance we see in leaders isn’t really about modesty. It’s a sign of how much work is still left in accepting the story underneath the strength.
Telling yourself that story honestly, worth and hard parts included, isn’t a reward you earn for finally getting your identity right. It is self-love. Acceptance isn’t the destination you arrive at once the story is settled; it’s what happens each time you choose the true version over the “safe” one.