We always have chutney in our house. It is my husband's favourite condiment, and I make sure that we always have it
My favourite condiment is a particular brand of mayonnaise. When it comes to grocery shopping, I invariably decide that the mayonnaise is too expensive and take it off the list, despite the fact that there is only a samll difference in price.
This type of behaviour, though it may seem illogical, is more common than you expect; I’ve seen it in my clients, and perhaps you do something similar. Still, I did not recognise it in myself.
That story is also a clear practical representation of the workings of an identity agreement, specifically, an agreement that I had taken on a long time ago. Somewhere along the line, I had agreed that in order to be a good wife and mother, I needed to sacrifice myself.
What is most interesting about the agreement is that it never once felt like a sacrifice. It felt like love, like doing my job, like responsibility, and it felt good.
The agreement was not limited, of course, to condiment choices.
It also showed up in the way I always thought ahead for everyone else, making sure they had what they needed. Or my saying yes to spending requests, and then working out behind the scenes how to make the money stretch.
It looked like placing myself at the end of that same spending list and not experiencing it as a problem. If someone I loved wanted something, I found a way to make it happen, even if that meant I went without something. I did not resent it, I barely noticed it. It honestly felt like that was just how it was supposed to be.
To be clear, nobody asked me to make all those sacrifices. I volunteered, and kept volunteering, for years.
I had long been aware of a pattern in my life: I could have wealth or a really great relationship, not both. The mystery puzzled me, and I worked on it constantly. I even took it to therapy, and although I could see the pattern, I could never see what was underneath, driving the pattern.
One day, I sat pondering that dynamic through a different lens; I was observing my relationship with business development, my own positioning, and how I seemed to be playing a frustratingly small when it came to my business. It was then that the phrase popped into my head for the first time. “A good wife (and mother) sacrifices herself, silently.”
How on earth is that related to business, you may ask? Or wealth, for that matter?
Therein lies the power of the Invisible Identity AgreementTM.
What I recognised was that I was using self-sacrifice to prove my goodness. Of course, if that is the case, the corollary is that the conditions must be such that someone would have to sacrifice.
If sacrificing was what made me “good”, then there had to be a state of too little. There had to be a ceiling so that someone in the system would be the one who sacrificed. That person, of course, would be me, the willing volunteer, the “good mom and wife”.
Abundance, on the other hand, would eradicate the necessity for anyone to sacrifice. That would disrupt the entire arrangement of the agreement. When there is more than enough to go around, it becomes incredibly challenging to keep sacrificing yourself.
It was in that moment that I saw exactly how I had been keeping myself in a position to be able to prove my worth through sacrifice for years.
At this point, I also want to be clear that nobody was giving me medals for the sacrifice, except me. Inside my ego, I was subconsciously congratulating myself on how good I was because of the sacrifices I was making. My family did not see the sacrifice as medal-worthy. In fact, it concerned them, and in hindsight, I recognise that it often left them feeling uncomfortable.
For example, even though I am the family accountant, my husband would comment, with concern, that I always seemed to put myself last on every list.
It was no wonder that I felt impoverished. I kept recreating the experience of having less by ensuring I was the last to receive.
The more uncomfortable truth I had to acknowledge was that this agreement had followed me into my business.
I suddenly saw how I had been holding back my own business and financial growth without consciously realising it.
If my business became too successful, if there was too much money, if I became truly wealthy, the old identity would lose one of its main ways of proving that I was good.
This is what makes identity work so challenging. The behaviour only makes sense once you understand the identity agreement it is protecting.
From the outside, it can look like poor financial decisions, lack of ambition, inconsistency or self-sabotage. From the inside, it is the nervous system that preserves an identity that has helped you feel safe, worthy, or morally good.
Self-sabotage is self-protection.
Once I could see the agreement clearly, I decided I was no longer willing to keep my entire family system under a financial ceiling just to be the “good wife”. I would no longer agree to that.
That decision changed something in me. I started to notice the subtle ways in which I was proving my worth through sacrifice, and then ran an experiment to build evidence that I have value even when I honour myself without sacrificing.
The interesting part is that an identity shift does not always happen instantly. It is not like the movies where a genie in a maintenance uniform snaps their fingers, and you wake up as a different version of yourself.
In truth, the old identity begins to dissolve because you can no longer agree with the rule that held it together. From that moment of decision, the brain begins to rewire itself, and the new identity starts to form as you stop organising your life around the old agreement.
My questions to you are: what agreements have you made about how you prove your value and worth?
What is the true cost of living by those agreements?
When will you decide that you can no longer agree to that?
If you already know, reply to this email and share with me. I would love to hear from you.
Much love,
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