When Did Your Strength Stop Being a Choice?

 The skills you developed to preserve your identity may still serve you.

The freedom comes from choosing when and how to use them.

A client shared something with me recently that beautifully illustrates an important part of identity work. He described how he has learned to put on and take off what he calls his invisibility cloak.

For much of his life, he had operated under an identity agreement that told him it was better to remain invisible because being visible meant becoming a target. At various stages of his development, that agreement served an important purpose; being “invisible” helped him avoid attention he had learned to associate with danger.

The difficulty came when his circumstances changed, and the same strategy that had supported his identity agreement began to interfere with the success he was working towards. Opportunities required him to become more visible, take up space and allow himself to be seen. His brain, however, kept predicting that visibility would make him a target.

Through our coaching work, he began recognising the agreement and understanding how it was influencing his decisions. As he developed a different relationship with it, something lovely emerged.

He described how, in certain situations, being invisible was strategically useful. He could put on his cloak, move through what he called the enemy camp without attracting unnecessary attention, and emerge on the other side having gained ground. At other times, success required him to remove the cloak, become visible and take his place on the battlefield.

What struck me about his metaphor was the freedom it represented. The ability to remain unseen had served him well, and it could still be valuable in certain circumstances. He was now developing the ability to assess those circumstances and choose whether visibility or invisibility would serve the outcome he wanted.

His story illustrates one of the most positive and hopeful possibilities I see in identity work: separating an identity preservation strategy from the genuine skill that may have developed through years of using it.

The skill beneath the strategy

Last week, we explored the story of Nadia, the successful design consultant who repeatedly accommodated her clients' requests, even when it cost her time, money, and capacity.

Nadia learned early in life that accommodating other people was an effective way to maintain connection and belonging. Her brain had developed an identity agreement that predicted relational difficulty if she disappointed someone, and her accommodating behaviour became a familiar strategy for avoiding that anticipated outcome.

We examined the psychological rewards that reinforced her behaviour, which I call identity profit, and how her brain could begin updating its predictions through deliberately designed identity experiments. I ended by asking what those years of accommodating people had helped Nadia become exceptionally good at.

Consider what Nadia had repeatedly practised throughout her life. To preserve the connection her identity agreement predicted she might lose, she paid close attention to other people's needs, learned to anticipate what might make them uncomfortable and became resourceful in finding ways to accommodate them. In business, these capabilities contributed to her reputation for excellent client service.

Some of those qualities may have been natural strengths. Others were developed, sharpened, or made more readily available through years of repetition.

Over time, the capabilities and the preservation response became entangled in how Nadia understood herself, what she called her identity. When a client made an unexpected request, her attentiveness and resourcefulness were recruited almost immediately to protect the relationship. Before she had considered the commercial implications, she was already working out how to make the request possible.

Her skills were valuable, yet the compulsion to use them in service of her identity preservation strategy had become costly.

I call this The Skill Beneath the Strategy™: the genuine capability that develops, strengthens or becomes highly accessible through repeatedly rehearsing an identity preservation strategy.

The distinction between identity profit and skill is crucial. For Nadia, the appreciation she received from clients and the relief of avoiding difficult conversations reinforced her sense of being valued. Those were psychological rewards that helped keep the identity agreement in place. Her ability to understand people's needs, communicate effectively and find workable solutions was a genuine capability, honed through years of practice. We need to understand both what reinforced the response and what she could continue using as that response changed.

Someone who has spent years protecting himself by remaining unnoticed may likewise have sharpened his situational awareness, discretion and sensitivity to group dynamics. My client's metaphor helps us separate the two. The invisibility cloak represents his familiar preservation strategy, while the judgement he now uses to assess a situation and decide when to remain unseen or step forward is a capability he can apply towards a chosen outcome. His ability to read the circumstances remains useful; invisibility no longer has to be his automatic response.

What the brain learns through repetition

Neuroscience explains why behaviours that have served us well can become so easy to access that we repeat them without considering whether they remain appropriate.

In a 2024 review published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, Wendy Wood examined how rewarding responses, repeatedly performed in familiar circumstances, develop into habits. Through repetition, the brain creates associations between situations and responses, allowing familiar behaviour to activate with relatively little conscious deliberation.

This helps explain why changing our intentions often has limited influence over behavioural responses that have become ingrained. The familiar situation can bring the practised response to mind before we consciously consider alternatives.

A 2025 review by Buabang and colleagues in Trends in Cognitive Sciences examined the relationship between habitual and goal-directed behaviour. The authors explain how the brain's capacity to repeat learned responses efficiently works alongside processes that let us consider outcomes, plan, and adapt our behaviour when circumstances change.

These studies examine habitual learning and behavioural flexibility, providing a neuroscientific foundation for my Identity Agreement model, which explores the predictions about safety, belonging, value and worth that can give those responses their protective significance.

Keeping the strength while changing the strategy

In my work, I encounter highly capable people who recognise that a familiar way of operating has become costly, yet struggle with what changing it might mean for them.

Consider a leader whose identity agreement predicts that his credibility will be damaged if he does not personally ensure everything is done correctly. Years of maintaining control may have sharpened his attention to detail, ability to anticipate risks and capacity to manage complex operations.

As his responsibilities grow, however, the same strategy becomes a limitation. His involvement slows decisions, prevents his team from developing ownership and keeps him occupied with work that no longer belongs at his level.

His leadership growth does not require abandoning his attention to detail or becoming less concerned about quality. Instead, it asks him to learn when those capabilities matter most and when his intervention prevents others from developing their own competence.

He could use his ability to anticipate risk to establish effective accountability systems, rather than personally reviewing every decision, or he could apply his operational judgement to the decisions that genuinely require his experience, while allowing his team to take responsibility for the rest. His competence remains an asset, even as the agreement that required him to prove it through constant personal involvement begins to change.

🧠 Your weekly brain tool: Find the skill you want to keep

Consider a recurring behaviour you have been trying to change, especially one that has been part of your identity for a long time.

You may have already identified what the behaviour is costing you and perhaps even recognised the prediction that keeps it in place. This week, I invite you to approach that same behaviour from a slightly different perspective.

Ask yourself what capabilities you already had, and what you may have developed, sharpened or learned to access more readily through repeatedly using the identity preservation strategy.

For example, if you have spent years carrying responsibilities that belong to other people, you may have become highly organised, resourceful, resilient or exceptionally good at solving problems under pressure.

Once you can name a genuine capability, consider how the preservation strategy usually recruits it. You may have learned to respond to every problem by taking charge, even when the circumstances would be better served by letting someone else lead. The question is how to keep your ability to organise, anticipate, and solve problems while applying it toward an outcome you consciously choose.

The experiment we explored last week is a good place to start.

Choose one manageable situation in which you can use the skill differently. If your agreement predicts that being visible makes you a target, you might choose to contribute an idea in a meeting where you would ordinarily remain silent, using your ability to read the room to choose an appropriate moment. If your agreement predicts that letting go of control will damage your credibility, you might choose to use your planning skills to delegate a responsibility clearly and then allow someone else to carry it.

Beforehand, identify what your brain predicts will happen if you depart from the familiar response. Afterwards, record what actually occurred, whether you used the capability you intended to use, and whether you returned to the old preservation strategy. Include how you interpreted the experience, recognising that discomfort alone does not establish that the original prediction was correct.

The purpose is to give your brain an opportunity to gather evidence about what happens when you exercise your capabilities outside the conditions imposed by the old agreement.

There will also be situations in which the original preservation response remains entirely appropriate. Some environments genuinely call for discretion, caution or restraint. Developing greater choice includes learning to recognise those circumstances rather than assuming that every familiar response is appropriate or that every uncomfortable alternative is wrong.

The freedom to choose

What I particularly loved about my client's invisibility cloak was how it let him honour something that had once helped him navigate difficult situations, while choosing whether the same response served him today. He could remain discreet when discretion genuinely helped him move toward his objective, and he could take his place visibly on the battleground when the situation required it.

For me, this is one of the most liberating possibilities within identity work: recognising that the qualities we value about ourselves do not have to remain tied to the historical conditions under which we learned to use them.

Perhaps the next time you reach for a familiar response, ask whether you are choosing to use a valuable capability or whether an old identity agreement is making the choice for you.

In The Freedom Success Formula™, I explore how identity agreements develop, how they influence our decisions and why behaviours that once served us can begin limiting our capacity for success. Chapter 11 brings these ideas into business and leadership decisions, where well-rehearsed identity-preservation strategies can shape pricing, delegation, risk, and growth long before we consciously recognise the underlying driver.

If you recognise a valuable strength that has become difficult to use by choice, my book will help you examine the agreement beneath the behaviour and learn how to give your brain different evidence. I invite you to explore it, starting with situations in your own life or leadership where the old identity-preservation strategy now costs you more than it gives you.

Explore The Freedom Success Formula™

Much love, 

P.S. Something exciting! I have partnered with Amanda Rose and 40+ other experts to bring you the Infinite Power of You Bundle, a collection of personal development programmes and resources available completely FREE from 9–20 November. It includes my self-paced course: Identity Agreement Reset, a practical way to uncover the invisible agreements shaping your decisions and start changing them.

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