What role does Identity Capital play in shaping your core values?

In the most recent Leaders’ Book Club post, I discuss that building your identity is more so a process of collecting Identity Capital over time.  

These are the experiences you have, passions you follow, challenges you face, and lessons you learn; be it mastering chess or running a marathon to overcoming a trauma or disease.  

Any form of Identity Capital inevitably helps you better understand and connect with yourself, other people, and the world. As such, Identity Capital is less about “having” done something you can just write on a resume but more about who you have “become” as a result. 

In other words, the Identity Capital you’ve collected throughout your life impacts how you speak to, conduct yourself with, and treat others. 

But what role does Identity Capital play in shaping your core values, the north stars to how you live and often reflected in your actions? 

When I first posed this question to myself, I wasn’t sure where to start. 

Admittedly, this is because I hadn’t truly defined what my core values are, or, at a minimum, gone through an exercise to narrow down the 3-5 values I have lived by up to this point in my life.  

So, in understanding Identity Capital and the impact collecting it has on my identity, I wanted to begin by uncovering what common themes I could find between all of mine. Perhaps this would help me understand how much of a role, if at all, Identity Capital plays in shaping my core values.  

Using a core values exercise from BetterUp, a coaching and mental health and performance company, I opened my journal and got busy writing about the following: 

1) What have been the most meaningful moments in my life?

2) What have been the least satisfying or challenging moments in my life?

3) What stories, people, or visions inspire me?

4) What makes me angry?

5) Imagine my ideal world or community. How would I describe it?

6) What are my proudest accomplishments?

As I spent time on each prompt, I found myself digging beyond superficial answers and started recalling some deeply personal pieces of Identity Capital (experiences, passions, challenges, and lessons).  

For example, and interestingly, I had a common answer to prompts #1 and #2: my lived experience with a rare genetic disease that prevents me from sweating (among other symptoms).  

Those who know me well or have played collegiate soccer or done triathlons with me know that I must pour a varying amount of water on my head/body to stay cool, and train almost 2x harder than other athletes to see the same outcomes. This piece of Identity Capital has taught me to never give up and work hard for every opportunity everything I am presented.  

Throughout my childhood, though, I got bullied and shamed for having this different “cooling mechanism” and the other kids would point their fingers at me, take a step away when I walked up, or make sly comments. Little did they know their taunts would make me just that much grittier than them. 

As such, my lived experiences and traumas with my disease have presented both incredibly meaningful and challenging moments, like the above, throughout my life and are major pieces of Identity Capital for me. 

The pattern I started to notice with this example and as I continued to answer the prompts from the BetterUp exercise is that a sizable number of pieces of my Identity Capital revolve around grit, hard work, and overcoming deep, personal challenges.  

After all, as Greg Stulberg, a famous researcher, writer, and coach on mental health, put it on Rich Roll’s podcast, “we sometimes have to get into past traumas or experiences to understand how it’s impacting your present.”  

Thus, my core value of Resilience was born, encapsulating my many experiences (Identity Capital) related to me being resilient and something I value deeply in being reflected in my actions and other people.  

So, as I continued to notice patterns in what I value across my answers to the prompts, I ended up narrowing my core values to the following (and in no order of importance): 

• Resilience 

• Health 

• Fulfillment 

• Action 

• Empathy 

The question I pose earlier around what role Identity Capital plays in reflecting and shaping your core values is straightforward to answer: your pieces of Identity Capital will continue to influence and shape your values over time.  

In other words, the core values we glean from our Identity Capital are the morals of the stories told from the different experiences we’ve had in our lives up to this point. The goal, as such, is for your core values to continue to evolve and shape as you continue to collect Identity Capital every single day.