The Power of "I Am"

"I am..."

Fill in the blank. What would you put there? What identifiers jump to mind when you read or hear those words? What do you tell people? Maybe more importantly, what do you tell yourself? Those two little words have extreme power in our lives.

When you say, "I am a..." you are making a statement about yourself. These statements become a part of us. I am a Christian; a saved and redeemed child of God. That is my core identity. But the other things I believe about myself or people say about me, they affect how I view myself. These other things change with time and may even be complete lies, but the have an impact.

My brother and I struggle with math. It is our worst subject in school. One day, he kept saying that he was a failure at algebra. I kept saying, "no. You failed at algebra but you are not a failure at algebra." It's a subtle difference, but it's SO important.

When you say, "I am a failure at algebra" (or whatever your thing is), it sounds like you're being specific. "I'm not saying I'm a failure." But aren't you? I believe that when you say things, statements, starting with "I am a" you are reinforcing a belief. It might be subconscious, but it's there. It is a statement of belief.

I am not one to be all about mantras and positive sayings, but words do have power. One thing I've heard from photographers a lot is that you have to display confidence to your clients, even if you don't feel it. When I was starting out, I would tell people, "I'm starting a photography business" or "I'm working to be a professional photographer". Guess what? I struggled with confidence. When I changed to telling people "I am a professional photographer" my confidence became less and less faked. I think now that part of my math problem (no pun intended) was that in my mind, I was always thinking, and even saying, "I'm not good at math".

Sometimes you have to speak a belief into existence and we cannot let anything trivial become our core identity. For the believer, our identity must be in Christ. That's the root; the core. The rest - sibling, child, employee, business owner, parent, etc - those are branches. If one falls off or changes, that doesn't change the core. My life does not fall apart from the loss of a fringe identity. My roots are strong.

I'm not a psychologist, so I'm just going off of personal experience and things I've seen in other people's lives. Do you agree or disagree? What has your experience been like?