When Our Identity Becomes A Limiting Belief

(This is the final installment in the Legally Bold series on limiting beliefs and how they rob us of achieving fulfillment in essential areas of our lives. You can find the other posts in the series here.)

Our identity is a fully formed idea of who we are. It is our sense of self, and it shapes the way we look at our relationship to the world.

A person's identity has many interwoven parts. Generally, it includes some relatively permanent self-assessments like physical attributes, personality traits, occupations, hobbies, and knowledge of skills and abilities. But it also includes political opinions, moral attitudes, and religious beliefs.  

Using these guidelines means that in the past, I identified myself as an African American female attorney. I also knew myself to be smart, funny, liberal, Christian, and short, but not terribly athletic, artistic, or photogenic.

These self-identifying traits guided the choices that I made regularly and limited my view of what I thought I could do in th…