Why Your Brain Holds On to an Older Version of You

Picture a woman who has recently been promoted into a senior executive role.

She has spent years developing her expertise, building a reputation for excellence, and earning her colleagues' respect. The promotion is well deserved. Everyone around her appears confident that she belongs at this level.

Yet six months into the role, she still prepares for meetings as though she is about to sit an examination. She rehearses her contributions, anticipates every possible question, and feels uncomfortable when she cannot immediately answer.

Her colleagues see an accomplished executive. She still feels she needs to prove herself and calls the feeling imposter syndrome.

I have encountered versions of this throughout my years of coaching. People whose circumstances, capabilities, and achievements have changed significantly, yet who still operate from an understanding of themselves that belongs to an earlier chapter of their lives.

It raises an interesting question about the human brain.

How can we accumulate so much evidence of who we have become and still struggle to see ourselves differently?

The answer may have something to do with how our brains organise and update the beliefs we hold about ourselves.

Your brain has a surprisingly interconnected picture of you

We all have a self-concept, a collection of beliefs about our characteristics, abilities and personal qualities.

You might describe yourself as dependable, independent, intelligent, cautious, generous or someone who prefers to avoid confrontation.

These descriptions develop through experience. Our interactions, successes, disappointments, and the feedback we receive from others all shape our understanding of who we are.

What is particularly interesting is that these beliefs are connected.

In a 2023 study published in The Journal of Neuroscience, researchers Jacob Elder, Tyler Davis and Brent Hughes investigated how people update their self-beliefs when they receive feedback from others.

Participants evaluated their own personality traits, received social feedback and underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which allowed researchers to examine patterns of brain activity during the task.

The researchers used a computational model that represented relationships between personality traits. They wanted to understand how changing one belief might affect other connected beliefs within a person’s self-concept.

Their findings revealed something fascinating.

Participants were less likely to revise self-beliefs that had more connections to other beliefs within the model.

The researchers also observed activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a region involved in self-relevant and value-based processing, that reflected aspects of this constrained belief-updating process.

Consider what that might mean in everyday life.

Imagine someone whose identity is strongly connected to being independent.

For that person, independence might also be associated with being capable, dependable, self-sufficient and in control. They may have spent years being praised for managing without assistance, taking responsibility and finding their own solutions.

Now imagine that person enters a situation in which asking for help would produce a better outcome.

Accepting that they need assistance may involve considerably more than changing their mind about a single decision. It could challenge several interconnected beliefs about what makes them capable and valuable.

The specific connections in this example are illustrative. The research itself demonstrates something important about how interrelated self-beliefs can influence our willingness to update them.

And there is another discovery that makes this even more interesting.

Your brain does not necessarily believe the compliments

In November 2024, researchers at the University of Barcelona published a study examining how people incorporate feedback that either supports or contradicts their existing self-image.

They wanted to separate two influences: whether feedback was positive or negative, and whether it agreed with what a person already believed about themselves.

The distinction is important because positive feedback frequently confirms a positive self-image. That makes it difficult to determine whether people accept information because it is flattering or because it fits their existing beliefs.

In this experiment with 30 undergraduate participants, researchers found that people were more likely to incorporate feedback consistent with their existing self-view and discount feedback that contradicted it, whether positive or negative.

A subsequent 2025 publication, examining four experiments, also found that consistency with existing self-beliefs strongly influenced how participants incorporated social feedback, alongside a smaller effect favouring positive information.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Someone can receive genuinely positive feedback and still struggle to incorporate it into their understanding of themselves because it contradicts what they already believe.

Think about the person who dismisses a compliment with, “Oh, I was just lucky.”

Or the accomplished professional who attributes every success to unusually favourable circumstances, while treating a single mistake as confirmation of their inadequacy.

These experiments cannot tell us what is happening in any particular person’s mind. They do, however, help explain why new information about ourselves is not always absorbed in the way we might expect.

Our existing self-beliefs influence how we interpret the evidence arriving today.

When yesterday’s identity continues to influence today’s decisions

Let us return to our executive.

Early in her career, being exceptionally well prepared earned her recognition. Her ability to anticipate questions, solve difficult problems and provide reliable answers became an important part of her professional reputation.

Over time, she came to understand herself as the person who always knew what to do.

That identity served her extraordinarily well.

Now her responsibilities have changed. Her organisation needs her to think strategically, tolerate uncertainty, develop other people’s judgement and create the conditions in which her team can make decisions without her constant involvement.

Yet she still feels responsible for having every answer.

She spends hours reviewing work that her team could manage. She becomes frustrated when people bring problems to her without solutions, while repeatedly stepping in before they have the opportunity to develop those solutions themselves.

Eventually, she becomes the bottleneck in the very organisation she is trying so hard to lead effectively.

This is where my work with Identity Agreements offers another perspective.

An identity agreement is an internal instruction about who we believe we must be, or what we must do, to obtain or maintain something important to us.

For this executive, the instruction might be:

To be respected and valued, I must be the person who knows.

There is a psychological benefit in continuing to fulfil that agreement. Being knowledgeable gives her a sense of competence, credibility and perhaps even security.

I refer to this benefit as the identity profit.

The difficulty arises when the way she has learned to secure those benefits starts producing consequences that interfere with the leader she now needs to become.

Her experience illustrates how a previously useful understanding of ourselves can continue influencing our behaviour after our circumstances have changed.

The neuroscience studies I describe investigate self-concept and belief updating and provide a scientific foundation for exploring how established self-beliefs persist.

They also invite us to consider something personally significant.

If a belief about who you are has helped you succeed for years, what would make you willing to reconsider it?

Is your understanding of yourself keeping pace with your life?

I would like to leave you with something to explore this week.

Think about a description of yourself that you have been using for years.

Perhaps it is “I am independent”, “I am terrible at confrontation”, “I have always been the responsible one”, or “I am simply not a creative person”.

Choose one that feels particularly familiar.

First, when did you begin describing yourself this way?

Think about the experiences that originally supported the belief. What was happening in your life then? What did that description help you understand about yourself?

Second, what other beliefs are connected to it?

If you have always regarded yourself as independent, does asking for assistance feel sensible, or does it carry an uncomfortable implication about your competence?

What does maintaining that identity allow you to experience, achieve or protect?

Third, what evidence exists in your life today that deserves reconsideration?

Look at what you have learned, the responsibilities you now carry, the decisions you make and the person you have become.

Is your description still accurate? Does it capture the full picture?

You may discover that some of your established identity agreements remain entirely appropriate. Others may deserve updating.

The research gives us a reason to approach this exercise with curiosity. Our self-concept develops through experience and keeps changing, though some beliefs resist revision more than others.

There is something remarkable about how much we can grow without necessarily recognising the extent of that growth. We accumulate experiences, develop capabilities, survive difficulties and achieve things that an earlier version of ourselves might never have imagined.

Sometimes we keep telling ourselves the same old story.

Perhaps one of the most interesting questions we can ask ourselves is whether the person we believe ourselves to be accurately reflects who we have become.

Much love, 

References

1. Elder, J. J., Davis, T. H., & Hughes, B. L. (2023). A Fluid Self-Concept: How the Brain Maintains Coherence and Positivity across an Interconnected Self-Concept While Incorporating Social Feedback. The Journal of Neuroscience, 43(22), 4110–4128. Read the research

2. García-Arch, J., Friedrich, S., Wu, X., Cucurell, D., & Fuentemilla, L. (2024). Beyond the Positivity Bias: The Processing and Integration of Self-Relevant Feedback Is Driven by Its Alignment With Pre-Existing Self-Views. Cognitive Science, 48(11), e70017. Read the research

3. García-Arch, J., Sabio-Albert, M., & Fuentemilla, L. (2025). Selective Integration of Social Feedback Promotes a Stable and Positively Biased Self-Concept. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 66(5), 683–701. Read the research