If You’re Serious About Wanting Abundance in Your Life, You Need an Alter Ego
You might think alter egos are for kids — you’d be wrong.
Do you remember as a kid when you would want to be someone else?
For me, it was watching popstars on TV — and I decided that I needed to become Sporty Spice. I was already a Liverpool FC fan, so that ticked at least one of the boxes! I rather adopted Melanie Chisholm as my alter ego.
But alter egos are, indeed, for kids, right?
WRONG.
The Spice Girls themselves, aside from Ginger, were taking on alter egos. Stage personas. Their management team consciously amped up the girls’ most unique traits. By the time the stylists and designers were done, there was a Spice Girl for more or less everyone to identify with.
I read an interview with Julie Walters a little while ago. She blamed her bowel cancer on stress from acting. The stress came from her need to “be totally in it”. She will have moved from alter ego to alter ego in a very short period of time.
I want to make one thing clear, I’m not suggesting any of us do a Julie Walters and take on new identity after new identity. Therein lie stress and likely insanity! I do, however, believe that when we are trying to change our identity, an alter ego can assist us in doing that.
If your identity was the ‘correct’ one to get all of the things you want from life, you would have them already. To get everything we desire, we need to become the type of person that has those things. We need to change our identity.
Einstein famously said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” By the same token, we cannot create the abundance we want in life with the identity that currently doesn’t have it.
The alter ego is one step in changing the identity we currently have. It can help us learn how we need to behave to become who we need to in order to get the things we want from life.
I know we’d all love to stay in the comfort zone, but the comfort zone doesn’t get us where we want to be in life.
How many people do you know who bounce between being overweight and normal weight? A few, right? That’s because while they do the work (eating right, exercising), they stay in the comfort zone. The comfort zone holds the identity of “overweight person,” so that’s where they keep flipping back to.
The people who lose the weight and keep it off, they’re the ones who totally change their identity. Their change goes from the superficial right down into their subconscious.
It’s daunting to come up with a whole new identity for ourselves. That’s why I’ve found writing an alter ego to be incredibly helpful. It allows me to absorb the characteristics I need into my life and subconscious. I also use hypnosis to help with the latter.
An alter ego offers a sneaky way to persuade the brain to adopt a new identity. Instead of screaming at it that it’s a big change, you’re absorbing those character traits gradually.
Most of us have never altered our identity in any meaningful way. Many ingrained beliefs come from childhood, often before age eight. You’ve been carrying that identity for a long time.
Aristotle said, “Give me the boy until he is seven, and I will show you the man.” That is how deeply affected we are in those early years. We absorb beliefs from those around us before the brain is capable of analysing what we are absorbing.
Do you want the identity you developed when you were seven? Or do you want the identity that gets you everything you want from life?
You will not change the essence of who you are, but you will turn up the volume on those traits that will benefit you. This is just as the Spice Girls’ management team did to their stage personas. They didn’t lose who they were, but they did amp up the parts of themselves that served them best.
I’ll be discussing in my next blog how we go about constructing our alter ego, but I want to end by sharing how mine has been useful.
Keller, my alter ego, has the identity that I need to create what I currently desire in life. She is who I need to be — indeed, who I am in another dimension. She essentially comes from one question: Who do I need to be to get what I want?
“What would Keller do?” This is something I ask myself whenever I’m confused, lost, or stuck in procrastination mode. Keller is confident and decisive. She knows the answer. The more I align myself with my alter ego, the closer I get to having the identity I need to attract what I want from life.
I no longer dilly dally. I make the decisions I need to immediately. This has made a huge difference in my life because I don’t worry anymore. I remind myself Keller is who I need to be to get everything I currently want in life. Quite simply, my alter ego knows best.
Originally published at https://wildeaboutwellbeing.com on October 22, 2020.
