Complete this sentence: "I am..."

You have many ways that you can identify yourself. Much of the conversation around identity has been around sex and race, recently, but we are so much more than our sexual or racial identity. In the pie chart below, are just 25 things that I thought of off the top of my head that make up who we are.

Now, don't get me wrong, certain aspects of our identity have a big impact on the rest of our lives, but none of us is just our race or our sexual identity or anything else. We are so much more complex.

My friend, Bonita, recently shared a post on LinkedIn that really made me think. She said, "I say, "I do same-sex relationships", because 'gay' isn't who I am, it's how I show up. I am more than gay." She is so much more than gay. She's so much more than an exceptional voice coach. She's so much more than a voiceover actor.

When we define ourselves by one aspect of our identity, not only do we sell ourselves short, but we also force ourselves to become fiercely territorial when it comes to that identity. If that identity is attacked, maligned, treated poorly, discriminated against, or suffers, it is very personal for us if that is how we are defined.

This reality rang all too true for me a couple years ago when I was removed from the school where I served as principal six weeks before the end of the year.

The problem wasn't that I was being treated how I feel was unfair. The problem was that I had tied my identity up with being a principal. The green area in the pie chart above was my identity as a principal, and it crowded out all the other aspects of me that are meaningful. It made me think that when that title was taken away from me, something that is a part of me was taken away from me. Imagine the void of losing something that was such a part of my identity!

I was depressed.

Very depressed.

Thankfully, I went back to who I was and what was important about my identity and was able to see that being a principal was just a small part of who I was. While I believe that my work is incredibly important, it's just a small fraction of who I am.

One of my beliefs is that we are ALL children of God. As I was talking with my daughter about calling other people names, I told her that my real problem with her calling people names is that it puts the name before what I believe is our most important attribute: that the person is a child of God first. If she says, "You're stupid!" she's defining that person by their stupidity, and equating that characteristic with being a child of God. I don't think that's right. People can behave in stupid ways, sure, but that's different.

In education, we say, "focus on the behavior, not the person." That means we say things like, "you did X", not "You are X."

Our experience in this area of identity is compounded by social media. In Tribes, Seth Godin defines tribes: "A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea. For millions of years, human beings have been part of one tribe or another. A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate."

Social media and our current environment has made it so that our "shared interest" has become more than a shared interest. It has become almost our whole identity.

This is a dangerous place for us to be. We tie our identities up in one small aspect of who we are and therefore limit our ability to grow, change, and become better, because our efforts are turned to defending that one identity.

Surely, I am not the first one to think this, and I want to learn more.

Who else is thinking this way?