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Identity Vocabulary Text

Hi, this is AJ and welcome to the vocabulary lesson for “Identity.” Let’s get started.

Our first word is associate. In this main talk I use associate in a slightly different way than normal. It’s a psychological meaning of associate, so psychologists use this word sometimes. To associate, when you’re talking about psychology, it means you’re connected to an experience. And the opposite is to disassociate. To disassociate means to unconnect [disconnect] yourself from an experience. It’s like you’re separate from your own body. It’s like you are separate from your own mind, separate from your experience. So it’s a psychological term, to associate or to disassociate. Associate means you’re in the moment. You’re in the experience totally. You’re feeling everything. You’re seeing everything. You are there. To disassociate means the opposite. It means you disconnect. It’s like you’re not really there. You’re not really feeling anything. It might be happening to you but you’re not feeling the feelings. You’re not feeling the emotion. You’re disconnecting from yourself.

So associate and disassociate. When we’re talking about positive experiences, positive memories, we want to associate. We want to be there in the experience and our bodies. Living it again makes it stronger, makes the emotions stronger. It makes it more powerful for us. And the opposite is also true. If you have some negative memories about English, for example, one way to make them weaker is to disassociate. Step out. Pretend you’re outside it looking at it. And then, of course, you can make it smaller and darker and push it away. So that’s all we’re doing when we’re playing with these pictures in our head. We’re associating or disassociating. We’re associating more to the positive, strong, empowering memories and images and we’re disassociating more from the negative ones, the limiting ones. Associate has other meanings, depends on the situation, but this is the psychological meaning of associate.

Okay, our next word is a repeat. We’ve had it before but let’s talk about it just one more time, just review it, and that’s the word reference. A reference is an example, basically, an example, a specific example. So when I talk about you need references for your beliefs, you need examples for your beliefs. If you just say “I’m good at English. I’m good at English. I’m good at English.” Eh, you know, that’s okay, but it’s stronger if you have examples to support it. If you can think in your life, even something small, some small success with English, a specific example of success, if you can find one or two or more and more and more.

The more examples you find, the more references you find. The stronger the belief becomes. So you want a lot of positive references. You want to remember the good things that happened, even when they’re small. And they did happen. You’ve got to

have some positive ones, everybody does. The problem is everybody forgets them and everyone focuses on the negative references and everyone makes those stronger. That’s not what you want to do. You want to do the opposite, weaken those. You want to focus on all the positive ones from your past, even the small ones, and remember to make them stronger, stronger, clearer, bigger. Build those references. Build those positive references to support your empowering global beliefs, your identity.

Okay, the most basic meaning of global means worldwide, about all of the world, connected to all of the world, related to all of the world. Global also has a little more specific meaning. It can mean about all of one topic or related to everything in one category or in one topic, so, for example, global beliefs about English. It means beliefs that affect everything else in this topic, everything else in English learning. So in this case global has this idea of kind of fundamental or it’s something that affects everything else that can also be global.

Okay, the next phrase is filter through, to filter through. I said we often filter our experiences through our beliefs. Hm, interesting. Filter something through our beliefs. So we have an experience and we filter it through our beliefs first and then we decide the meaning. Okay, filter through, a filter is something that you put between one thing and another thing, and the filter changes what’s coming in. Let me give you a simple example to help you understand. Let’s say you have a camera. You have a camera and you take a picture. And you get some red glass, red glass. You put it in front of the camera. Well, that’s a red filter, we call that a filter. The red glass would be a red filter. It means the light comes through the glass first then it reaches the camera. And what happens? Only red light comes through, right? The green light, the blue light, the yellow light is blocked so the camera only sees the red light. The filter blocks some of the information, some of the light, and it only lets through the red. So we have mental filters just like this. Our beliefs are mental filters. It means information comes into our eyes and our ears but before it reaches our brain, deep in our brain, our beliefs block some of the information or change some of the information.

So some of us have happy filters, happy beliefs. So everything that happens, we feel happy. Even if something bad happens. We lose money, “Oh well, that means I’m going to get more money later.” Right, that’s just a belief. That’s just a filter. So it’s the experience comes in and then the belief decides the meaning. On the other hand, if you have a very negative filter, negative beliefs, then maybe you get money, you earn money. But then your belief is “Well, I’m going to lose it. I’m never lucky. Someday I’m just going to lose all this money.” So the experience is not really the important thing, right? Losing money or gaining money are not positive or negative necessarily. We can change that meaning. It depends on our beliefs. It’s like a filter, right? It blocks some of the information. It changes the meaning of the information. So that’s what I say, we filter everything through the beliefs we have. It means our beliefs are like a filter. So to filter, it can be a verb too, it’s the act of blocking some information and changing it.

Okay, our last word is the title of this lesson, identity. I already talked about it. It’s a common word. You probably know it already. But let’s talk a little bit about it specifically. So again, identity means the collection of global beliefs about yourself. What you think about yourself. All of your opinions and beliefs about yourself, what kind of person you think you are. What you think you can do. What you think you can’t do. What you think you must do. What you think you shouldn’t do. All of those global beliefs together create your identity, who you are to yourself. A lot of people think identity is permanent, like you’re born with it or something or it can’t be changed. “This is who I am. I will always be this way.” A lot of people say that, right? “This is my identity. It’s who I am. I can’t change.” And what do we say about that?

We say “Bullshit!” It’s not true. Identity can be changed because identity, it’s just a collection of beliefs and as we have seen already, beliefs can be changed. Beliefs can be changed very dramatically, in a very big way. And if you start changing these global beliefs, you change your identity. If you change a lot of them, you can totally change your identity. You can choose your identity. You can choose a powerful, positive, enthusiastic, encouraging identity. You’re not stuck with the identity you have now.

You can change it and I encourage you to change it. To choose the identity you want. Be the kind of person you want to be. Believe what you want to believe about yourself. And change the references. Focus on the references that support the identity you want, about English learning, about who you are as a language learner. But also just in general, who you are as a person, that’s equally important. Of course, it’s more important, in fact.

Well, alright. That is the vocabulary for Lesson 8, “Identity.” Please listen to it a few times. Most importantly, do that activity in the main talk every day. Do the whole exercise with the pictures, the images, making them brighter, making them bigger, all of that. Please do that every single day this week. And you will see a very big change over time.

Okay, thank you and I’ll see you for the mini‑story.