Identity is mostly discussed on LW in a cautionary manner: keep your identity small, be aware of the identities you are attached to. As benlandautaylor points out, identities are very powerful, and while being rightfully cautious about them, we can also cultivate them deliberately to help us achieve our goals.
Some helpful identities that I have that seem generally applicable:
- growth mindset
- low-hanging fruit picker
- truth-seeker
- jack-of-all trades (someone who is good at a variety of skills)
- someone who tries new things
- universal curiosity
- mirror (someone who learns other people's skills)
Out of the above, the most useful is probably growth mindset, since it's effectively a meta-identity that allows the other parts of my identity to be fluid. The low-hanging fruit identity helps me be on the lookout for easy optimizations. The universal curiosity identity motivates me to try to understand various systems and fields of knowledge, besides the domains I'm already familiar with. It helps to give these playful or creative names, for example, "champion of low-hanging fruit". Some of these work well together, for example the "trying new things" identity contributes to the "jack of all trades" identity.
It's also important to identify unhelpful identities that get in your way. Negative identities can be vague like "lazy person" or specific like "someone who can't finish a project". With identities, just like with habits, the easiest way to reduce or eliminate a bad one seems to be to install a new one that is incompatible with it. For example, if you have a "shy person" identity, then going to parties or starting conversations with strangers can generate counterexamples for that identity, and help to displace it with a new one of "sociable person". Costly signaling can be used to achieve this - for example, joining a public speaking club. The old identity will not necessarily go away entirely, but the competing identity will create cognitive dissonance, which it can be useful to deliberately focus on. More specific identities require more specific counterexamples. Since the original negative identity makes it difficult to perform the actions that generate counterexamples, there needs to be some form of success spiral that starts with small steps.
Some examples of unhelpful identities I've had in the past were "person who doesn't waste things" and "person with poor intuition". The aversion to wasting money and material things predictably led to wasting time and attention instead. I found it useful to try "thinking like a trader" to counteract this "stingy person" identity, and get comfortable with the idea of trading money for time. Now I no longer obsess about recycling or buy the cheapest version of everything. Underconfidence in my intuition was likely responsible for my tendency to miss the forest for the trees when studying math or statistics, where I focused on details and missed the big picture ideas that are essential to actual understanding. My main objection to intuitions was that they feel imprecise, and I am trying to develop an identity of an "intuition wizard" who can manipulate concepts from a distance without zooming in. That is a cooler name than "someone who thinks about things without really understanding them", and brings to mind some people I know who have amazing intuition for math, which should help the identity stick.
There can also be ambiguously useful identities, for example I have a "tough person" identity, which motivates me to challenge myself and expand my comfort zone, but also increases self-criticism and self-neglect. Given the mixed effects, I'm not yet sure what to do about this one - maybe I can come up with an identity that only has the positive effects.
Which identities hold you back, and which ones propel you forward? If you managed to diminish negative identities, how did you do it and how far did you get?
If I play the game a level higher than another person than I think through the tree of possibilities and pick the node with the highest payoff, whether or not the behavior in that node looks like something that a confident person would do. If I reduce my space of possible choices to those choices that signal confidence to myself I'm less flexible to adept myself to the situation.
The same goes for proving to yourself that you are intelligent, that you are a worthy human being, that you are normal, that you are rational, that you are contrarian or even that you exist.
If you spent energy on proving those things to yourself you are constraining the field of possibilities for your actions.
If you would tell me: "Look there an attractive woman and she looks over to you in a way that indicates she's attracted to you, go and tell her she's beautiful and ask her for a date.", I couldn't do it even if I agree with your reading of the situation.
My confidence has limits and there are behaviors that are outside of my sphere of actions.
I have a friend who I have seen telling a woman: "You're too sexy, talking to you would just distract me, so get away from me." and he meant it 100% and didn't interact any further with her. Behavior like that is completely out of the sphere of my actions.
I can practice my dancing turns while waiting for public transportation without caring at all for whether someone who watches me will watch me as strange and I don't do it to prove to myself that I can do it but simply because I want to practice my turns at a particular moment in time and have a few minutes to fill till the train comes.
A month ago I was in a situation where I felt inconfident and I just told myself. No need to fight it or pretend that it isn't there or to hide it. Just allow it to express itself and move on. If people see that I'm inconfident and that I'm vulnerable that's okay.