In a classroom in South Tyneside, a small group of 11-year-olds is considering the finer points of Stoic philosophy. The teacher, Mrs Carrahar, points helpfully at the blackboard. “Come on now, kids, remember your ABC: Adversity, Belief, Consequence. Sometimes how we feel about things depends on … what? It begins with P … Yes, Darren?” “Perspective, miss!” says a small child. “Very good, Darren!”

Read the rest here: Teaching happiness: the classes in wellbeing that are helping our children

Main stream Psychology continues to forge into bold new territories. Some people are starting to realise that it might be a good thing to focus on what we want to move towards and not just what we want to get away from.

You’ll often hear people say that if you really want to get the best results for yourself you need to do more than just change your behaviours or even your beliefs. You need to start changing the core aspects that make up your identity.

For the moment we’ll leave aside questions of whether there is such a thing as an identity and whether or not it is made up of different aspects; Id, ego, conscious, sub-conscious etc. For our purposes ‘identity’ is all the ways in which you can finish the sentence ‘I am…’.

The first experience I had of the power of my identity was when I was 16 or 17. I had made some new friends that played in a band and for some reason I just knew that I was a great song-writer. I had never written any lyrics and had only ever played the xylophone in music class.

So I bought myself a guitar, set about teaching myself to play, and am still playing ten years later. Now whether or not I’m a good song-writer or guitar-player is subjective. But the point is that I did not and will not stop writing songs and practising the guitar until my outward experiences match those I believe to be that of a great song-writer and guitar-player. For me personally that is pride in my own work and abilities, recognition from other musicians, and people enjoying my music. I chose an identity and from that all kinds of beliefs and behaviours that were needed to get me to the end state started to flow.

Looking around I see a lot of people choosing identities for themselves, consciously or not. Unconsciously people often resort to certain stereotypes. For example if I asked you to think of a stock-market trader you’ll instantly recall a certain stereotype. You’ll have an idea of his personality, how he behaves, his interests and hobbies. Now of course everyone is an individual but stereo-types don’t come out of nowhere. Certain people are attracted to that job. Then it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle as young people that want to become traders, will start to dress, talk and act the way they think traders do. They take on the identity and the beliefs and behaviours follow.

Because I was really interested in making music I often spent time at gigs and around other musicians. The popular conception of musicians, at least those that make music like rock or hip-hop, is that alcohol and drugs are a normal part of their life-style. Now I’m not against alcohol and drugs but it’s funny to me how ingrained the idea is that drugs and alcohol fuel creativity. I don’t believe it’s at all necessary and think that the majority are just living up to some idea of what they think musicians and rock-stars ought to be.

Now that your aware of this maybe you can think about what kind of identity you’ve taken on. What beliefs and behaviours are attached to this identity. I’m talking about everything from whether or not this identity encourages you to jump out of bed in the morning, get drunk on a Friday night or keep your promises. All your beliefs and behaviours point to an identity.

So write down the phrase ‘I am…’ and finish the sentence in as many ways as you can. Then decide if the identity they describe is one that you’re happy with. Would you like to trade it, or just augment it somehow? Getting your identity right will allow all the right beliefs and behaviours to flow naturally.

I’ve worked with some people for whom public speaking or approaching a stranger brings on intense negative emotions and physical feelings. It can be debilitating and cause a large amount of stress. It’s a lot more common than you would think and you’d be surprised who suffers from it. When I went travelling in Australia I met a man who used to be in the special-forces branch of the army. He was in his 30’s but already retired. This man, who has probably done night time parachute jumps and could survive in the jungle with a pen-knife, was scared to death of going up to a strange woman in order to talk to her.

It was a text-book case of someone talking themselves into a negative state. Amongst other things he described it as ‘nerve-racking’. And spoke in universals as if it were true for everyone. Just talking about it created very negative physical feelings in his body. His hands cramped up, his face was grimacing, all the muscles in his body were becoming tight.

Now when I want to help someone for whom anxiety in a social setting is a problem I like to take two approaches. The first is remedial change work which is working on the immediate behaviour that is the problem. If someone goes into a negative state every time they have to do public speaking or want to approach someone then there is a specific way they do this. They will speak to themselves in a certain way, describe their feelings, thoughts and the outside world in a specific way. They’ll make particular images in their mind, play sounds to themselves and create feelings in their bodies. That’s stuff you can easily work on with NLP and EFT.

But a problem which people often have is that using the above methods they’ll initially get some good results but then snap back to their old way of being after a couple of days or weeks.

In this case you need to get some generative change happening. That means changing things so that you automatically start displaying more useful behaviours. You start looking at what underlying beliefs are creating these negative states. Beliefs like ‘Talking to strangers in unnatural’ and ‘People get bored when I speak to them’. Working on these kinds of beliefs will get you better results by making a more fundamental change.

But there’s a deeper level that you can work on that in my opinion leads to a more profound change. That is working on the fundamental beliefs that govern your identity and how it can change. Once you start working on this all other change work will happen much easier and you won’t get that bounce back to your old behaviours.

You need to investigate questions like: ‘Do I believe people can actually change? Do I believe I can change? How long do I believe change needs to take?’ etc. For me this is like ensuring that the plants and flowers you wish to grow have fertile soil to live in.

This will really loosen up your ideas about your identity and what you are capable of. Your whole behaviour will automatically adjust to whatever you consider your identity to be, because anything else just isn’t you.