I remember the exact day my vocal cords started to get tight. It was during an evening performance of “Angles Among Us” at an evening church function where I played the piano and sang for a group of women. At the time I thought it was odd. I was still able to sing the song, but I had a sense of foreboding that I couldn’t quite put a finger on.

I don’t remember the exact day I started to look up, because honestly… I had to look up more than once. During the following weeks, that foreboding energy proved it was real as my voice became more and more strained and then…my singing voice was silenced.

When I finally looked up (by looking in), I remember the feeling. It was a sudden, vertigo-inducing awareness that the life I had so carefully and deliberately built…had been built around a person I had been performing, not who I actually was.

It’s eerily similar to this story. You might know it.

A man found an eagle’s egg and put the egg in the nest of a barnyard hen. 

The eaglet hatched with the brood of chickens and grew up with them. All his life the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken. He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet in the air. 

Years passed and the eagle grew very old. One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents, with scarcely a beat of its strong golden wings. 

The old eagle looked up in awe, “Who is that?” he exclaimed, feeling like his breath was completely taken from him.

“That’s the eagle, the King of the birds,” said the rather neighborly, know-it-all chicken next to him. “He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth - we’re chickens.” 

So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that’s what he thought he was.  

If an eagle lives its life exactly like a chicken…would it really be an eagle? Or is it actually a chicken? Does the way it shows up in the world trump what it actually is? 

Our answer: It is still an eagle. It is simply living out of alignment with its Identity.

Let’s get a little crazy by going one step deeper: if an eagle lived its life as a chicken, does it really matter if it was an eagle at all? 

Our answer: Yes, it matters because the potential to fly was always there, even if it was unused.

And what about perception? If all the little barnyard chickens surrounding him viewed him as a chicken (even though they clearly knew what an eagle looked like - what does that tell ya’?), does that still make him more of a chicken than an actual eagle?

Our answer: No. Perception doesn’t alter identity, it just alters behaviors.

The last Inner Circle meeting we went to, almost all of the entrepreneur-led presentations were surrounding Identity. We heard things like, “I had to change my identity from ‘this’ to ‘this’” in order to succeed the way I wanted to. We’re not kidding when we say at least three-quarters of the presentations, if not more, touched on that exact concept. That might not sound too out-in-left-field to you, but to give you more context, the usual go-to at Inner Circle is 99.9% tactics and strategies.

No one seems to fully understand Identity, but most growth-minded people have grasped it as a key lever point in life. We’re told you step into the Identity of who you want to become, and everything is just supposed to fall in line, right?

Or not? Or…sort of? Or… we wish?

Our understanding of what Identity is and isn’t has evolved, or at least we are questioning what we used to think. These are our current thoughts.

We are told repeatedly that we can change our Identity, but what seems to be the actual truth is…identity doesn’t change at all. What changes is our expression of it. Think about it: an eagle can’t become a chicken, but in our story it could express itself as one. 

Identity is the essence of who you are when you first arrive in the world. It’s the “you” before all the wounds, stories, and the borrowed beliefs begin to settle in.

It’s the eaglet inside you, born with wings, even if you’ve never used them. 

From that point forward, we’re introduced to the big old “chicken coop of the world” and we absorb and repeat the behaviors all the little chickens in our environment teaches us. We start to call that our Identity. But in reality, it’s a mask that is better known as “personality.”

That personality mask becomes our entire life perspective - who we are, what we believe about ourselves, how the world is going to treat us, and so on. It’s flexible, and it’s shaped by our environment. But we become so invested in the current mask, that we insist it’s who we are and we want to fight anyone who tells us to put it down. This isn’t our Identity. It’s simply how we’re expressing it into the world.

And most of the time, that expression is out of alignment with who we really are.

Misalignment always comes with a cost. Whether it is nervous system dysregulation (living with flight-or-flight as our baseline), fatigue that sleep doesn’t fix, a low grade restlessness that makes us feel like a part of our life is unlived, working constantly to prove ourselves (or try to keep up), or we experience dis-ease (symptoms) in the body.

These are all signals. Your body is saying, “You have wings, and you need to use them.”

The exciting news is that since personality is just a tool we use to express ourselves, we can try different expressions on. We already do, we just don’t always do it intentionally. We would be willing to bet your personality is completely different when you are at work versus when you are out with friends. The key is making sure whatever mask we are wearing is in alignment with who we are underneath it.

Here’s where the eagle story could have changed:

That eagle had to have been in his midlife era when he looked up into the sky and caught sight of that magnificent soaring bird. He saw what he was meant to be. He had the opportunity in that moment to feel the pull of his true identity, and to answer it.

An eagle is born with wings and an instinct to fly. Those instincts were never meant to be contained inside a coop. The urge to soar, hunt, to live high above the ground doesn’t just disappear because you’ve spent years scratching around in the dirt.

That’s what happens to us, too.

At some point (usually midlife) we look up and see who we really are. Something calls from deep inside: our instinctual essence trying to live in alignment. An eagle’s instinct is to soar, even if it has spent its whole life walking. Your instinct might be to teach, to heal, to create, or to hold space. That’s how your identity makes itself known to the world.

When the personality mask begins to crack, we start to see the wings we’ve never used. And we feel an urgent, deep, sometimes terrifying pull toward something we can’t quite name, but can’t quite ignore, either. We instinctively want to use our wings.

Finding your true Identity is not about adding more. It’s about letting go. Let go of the fake mask, of the stories, of the fears that keep you grounded in the barnyard. When we let go of who we’ve been performing and start to see ourselves for who we are, our expression shifts into full alignment.

Want a compass to figure all of this out? You instinctually have one! Desire is a compass toward what your unique identity wants to express. If you feel pulled to speak on stage, to heal, to sing, to build, that is your Identity calling. As you start to move toward it, you might feel massive fear or resistance start to rise up. It’s normal. Even little bird wings first shake before they can fly. That’s when you get real with yourself and ask: Does this fear feel expansive or constrictive in my body? Does my desire feel like performance or resonance? Does the thought of doing it make me feel more alive than scared?

Everyone is born into this world with a unique Identity. The question is not whether you have wings.

The question is whether you’ll remember to use them.