Yesterday we talked about foundations. The thing underneath everything you're building. Today we're going one layer deeper.

You can't lay a foundation for a life you haven't defined. Most people skip the hardest part of building anything. They skip the question of who is doing the building.

Today is about identity. Not the version on your profile. The version that exists when the Wi-Fi goes out and nobody can see you.

3 REAL DEAL PRINCIPLES

IDENTITY

You are not your resume, your follower count, or the story other people tell about you.

Somewhere between middle school and your first job interview, you learned to define yourself by external things. Your GPA. Your position on the team. Your major. Your title. And every time one of those things changed, you had a small identity crisis because you’d built your sense of self on something that was never yours to keep.

The foundation most people miss is this. Identity isn’t what you do. It’s who you are when what you do gets taken away. The athlete who gets injured. The student who doesn’t get accepted. The worker who gets laid off. If you only know yourself by your role, you’ll lose yourself every time the role changes.

The work of knowing who you are, separate from what you produce, is the most important foundation you'll ever lay. Start there.

Knowing who you are requires the courage to stop being who you’re not.

Most people don’t have an identity problem. They have a honesty problem. They know, somewhere underneath the noise, that the version of themselves they’re presenting to the world isn’t the real one. But the real one feels risky. Unpolished. Uncertain.

Faith shows up here in a way most people don’t expect. It takes faith to believe that who you actually are is enough. That you don’t need to perform. That the real version, the unfinished, still-figuring-it-out version, is the one worth building on.

That’s not arrogance. That’s the deepest kind of trust. Trust in something bigger than your ability to impress people.

You can’t serve anyone from behind a mask.

There’s a direct line between knowing yourself and being useful to others. The person who hasn’t done the work of self-awareness brings their unresolved issues into every room. They lead from insecurity. They give to get. They help people in ways that are really about helping themselves.

But the person who has looked in the mirror and done the honest work of understanding who they are and who they aren’t? They can actually show up for other people. Because they’re not trying to prove anything. They’re not performing generosity. They’re just present.

And presence, real presence, is the rarest gift you can give someone.

“Authenticity is a collection of choices that we have to make every day. It’s about the choice to show up and be real. The choice to be honest. The choice to let our true selves be seen.”

Brown has spent two decades researching vulnerability and courage. The through line in all of it is this: the people who live the most connected, meaningful lives are the ones who stopped pretending. Not once, but every single day. Authenticity isn’t a personality trait. It’s a practice that starts rough and gets stronger the more you do it.

“I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”

This verse doesn’t say you’re perfect. It says you’re intentional. You weren’t mass-produced. You were designed. The foundation of identity isn’t self-improvement - it’s recognition. Before the world started telling you who to be, you already were something worth building on. You don’t need to become someone else. You need to uncover the person you were made to be.

Your Challenge Today —

Ask someone who knows you well, not someone who will just be polite, this question: “When do you think I’m most myself?”

Don’t explain why you’re asking. Don’t argue with their answer. Just listen. Write it down. Sit with it tonight. The gap between when you feel most like yourself and when others see you as most yourself is one of the most revealing things you’ll ever discover.

Know someone who needs this? Sign Them Up & Tell Them You Did!