Who Are You Without the Business

Machine transcribed from the episode audio, lightly cleaned. Timestamps are approximate.

0:00
You can build a business, lead a team, and still not know who you are the second that nobody is watching you perform. I say that with a smile on my face because the irony is this was my life for so many years. And it is the story of so many driven, successful Christian men that I coach, either in the private setting or in group environments. And so what I want to do by the end of this video, or if you're just listening to the audio, then you can take it as that. I want to help you understand exactly what it looks like to have a settled identity. This is what we do over the first four weeks of our Aligned Man coaching program.

0:51
But whether you jump into that program or not, I want to help you understand what it's going to take to truly have a settled identity. And I want you to walk away from watching this or listening to this with one move, one thing that you can make today, that you can do today, to help you understand where your worth is actually coming from right now. Not where it should be coming from. We all know that in theory. We read that in the Bible. But we need to identify specifically where we have tied our worth to so we can do something about that. And then we need to know where that's actually coming from. Look, I have sat across the table, across Zoom, across rooms from men who have built incredible lives for themselves.

1:45
Seven-figure businesses, just successful by every stretch of the imagination. And yet they cannot seem to tell me a thing about themselves that is connected to anything other than their title, than their role. And this is not out of the norm. Like, this stuff happens pretty regularly. But it's just, it is too common occurrence to not address and want to do something about. And like I said, I was that guy too. I built things and I called that my identity. It was what I say is performance wearing identities clothes. I didn't know the difference, what those two things were, until my business started to struggle.

2:30
And that's what I find a lot with other successful professionals is these guys, they kind of just think it's par for the course until something really hits. And as soon as that thing hits, they lose the business, they lose the job, they lose the title, whatever. And they start to realize that they actually don't know who they are. But before we talk about strategy, before we do that, before we talk about your marriage, before we talk about calling, before we talk about any of that stuff, I want you to understand that we have to talk about foundation. That's what we talk about in phase one of our Aligned Man program. We call it a settled identity.

3:16
And so what I want to do is I want to break down exactly what we do. So again, whether or not you jump into that coaching program, which by the way, we are just about to close out this first launch. It won't open up again until mid-September. So that one's going to launch August 6th. So if you've been thinking about it, you can comment Aligned below, or you can go to Instagram. It's at the Ryan James Miller. I get my X and Instagram profiles confused sometimes. So you can go to the Ryan James Miller, and you can DM me on Instagram, and I'd be more than happy to help walk through what that program looks like if that's something that you're interested in.

4:02
But anyway, but here's exactly what we do. So I'm going to walk you through each one of these things because I think it's really important. Okay, so first up is we do something called an identity audit. So this is something, though, that I don't think many people really want to talk about. I don't know if it's that they don't understand this, if they don't want to address this. I think a lot of times when other guys are talking to us guys, they are trying to pull at our performance strings. They're trying to pull at our achievement strings. And so they're showing us like, hey, push harder, grind harder, build this thing to get to where you want to go. And I get that. I've been there. And there's a lot of good tools there.

4:46
But I think that it misses this key component, which we've all been a part of, whereas we'll build that thing, achieve that thing, and we still feel this struggle, this stress, this fracture, this emptiness of sorts. So the reason why we start with settled identity is because, in my opinion, you cannot fix what you've never named. This is where the performance trap gets exposed for what it is. So here's the lie. Whether or not you will say this out loud, you and I have probably been conditioned to believe that our worth equals our output. The more that we do, the better we are. The more that we accomplish, the more people will appreciate us and respect us.

5:34
And again, there's some truth there. But underneath all of that is this lie that our identity is tied to our achievement, that our identity is tied to our outcomes. Our identity is tied to what we're able to do for other people. And that is crushing. And you're probably feeling some sense of that right now, which is why you follow along with my content. So what do we do? So we do something called an identity audit. And it's not just a worksheet, though there is a worksheet that is attached to it. We have worksheets and tools that we attach to every single step in our process because we need you to just write it down, not think about it. But this identity audit, it is a direct confrontation with where a man actually has been building his worth.

6:25
And so this could be money. This could be title. This could be the approval of other people. This could be achievement in the gym. This could be performance at church. Look at all good things become load bearing walls. They were never built to hold. Let me say that again. All good things will ultimately become load bearing walls that they were never meant to hold up. We were not created to base our worth and value on achievement. It was in Christ and Christ alone. And as Christians, we've heard that a lot. We believe that. We just don't typically live that out. So here's what I normally see as guys enter my world with this. A man walks in totally confident on paper.

7:12
His business is working. His marriage looks fine from the outside. But then I ask this question of these guys, and it's, if your business disappeared tomorrow, who are you? And there is just silence. And that silence tells me that these men have been drifting into a performance-based identity. And so I would encourage you to ask yourself the same question that so many guys can't answer. Are you able to separate what you have built from who you are? So if you want to do a micro exercise on this identity audit that we take an entire week in our community and our program to do, here's what you can do. Write down one sentence answering that question honestly.

7:59
Where has my worth actually been coming from this year? Not some Sunday school answer, but the real one. Okay, so that's the identity audit. At least that scratches the surface on it. Look, it's not going to fix anything by itself, but it's going to tell you the truth about where you're standing right now. Because once a man can see where his identity has actually been built, the next question then is what he builds instead. And that moves into the second week of this phase. And we call that the foundation rebuild. So it's one thing to know where we've gone adrift. It's another thing to figure out how we're going to start to rebuild that. So I know, I see. You probably would agree with this. That a man cannot rebuild his identity by trying harder.

8:45
Because you've done that. Trying harder is just more of the performance trap. This is why discipline on the wrong foundation just makes things worse. Really, it makes the wrong things stronger and the weak things weaker. And that's, we're trying to do the opposite. So this turns from diagnosis to actually laying a foundation that we can build on. And what we normally see is that there's this old foundation that we identify. More effort, more hustle, more discipline. And it's aimed at the wrong target. And what we see this new foundation become is one where we have an identity in Christ. That it's not just a phrase that we hear in church that we read about in the Bible.

9:30
But it's a place that we can actually locate and put our weight on. This will bear it all. Jesus says in the Bible, he says, Come to me, all who are weary, and I will give you rest. He says that his burden is light. And so he says, give me your heavy burden and I'll give you the light one. A man cannot rebuild his identity by trying harder. And again, you've done this. You've got to rebuild it by standing somewhere solid. This is not a nicer, better, up-to-date, AI-charged version of performance. It's a different foundation entirely.

10:16
So what we typically do here is we help to name one identity statement that is true of you because of who God says you are, not because of what you've produced. And then we try to install it first thing in the morning, right out of the gate. So I want to encourage you to do that. So second step here, again, we're scratching the surface of what we do over an entire week, a lot of education, a lot of coaching. But I want you to say that statement out loud every morning for the next week when you wake up. So what is one statement that is true of you because of who God says you are that has nothing to do with how you perform? And then every morning, so write that down. And then every morning, wake up by repeating that, by reciting that.

11:01
I have this charge that I've written for myself. And every morning, I wake up and I read that charge before I start my day. And it is just a way to remind me of who I am in Christ before the day goes really, really good or really, really bad. I just don't want to set myself off on the wrong path because as much as I talk about the drift, I will find myself drifting all over again. So that's how you start to rebuild that. A foundation you can actually stand on when a bad quarter hits, when a hard season hits, when you get that phone call that you don't want, when that client that you were really banking on ends up deciding not to move forward or increase your fee or whatever that may be. So again, we start off with an audit.

11:44
Then we lay a foundation. And then from there, we start to understand that a foundation only holds. It will only hold if you keep standing on it after the feeling wears off. And that's what we do in week three of this first phase of the Aligned Man. We want to make sure that we don't just build a foundation and then go take off and do something else because that's what I see happen a lot. We have these like transformational moments up on a mountaintop at a retreat or at some one day event or after listening to something. We're like, okay, I'm going to do it. And then I lay my new foundation and then I just go back to doing things the way that it was before. All caught up in performance, even for good reason.

12:23
And I get lost and I don't want to do that. And so what we need to do is we want to make sure that week, that week two, that step two in this, which again is that laying that new foundation that it is not just a feeling, that it's an actual declaration. And I'll pause right here and say, if you want to see exactly where your life has drifted, you're like, Ryan, I know it. I can feel it. I know that there's something that's off. I'm just not 100% sure where it's coming from or what it is. Like I can't name it. So we've done, we've created something. I've created something. It's a custom GPT with chat GPT called the gap check. It's a seven question assessment. It'll take you about 10 minutes. And so you can go down to the description below.

13:07
You can click that link for the gap check. It's free to take. You don't even have to put in an email address and it will give you some understanding of where you have drifted and start to give you some clarity as to how you're going to come back. So you can do that or you can come to Instagram. You can DM me that you want the gap check. I'll send it to you that way. So whatever's going to work out best for you. But again, I highly recommend that you take that. Okay. And then number three. So this third step in phase one of the aligned man, as we walk guys through this, is we want to help them then start to leverage this identity declaration. See, because what we don't declare, we will end up drifting back into.

13:50
And so we need to make a statement that we stand on and that we live by as we move forward. Just because you think about it, just because you're like, oh, you know, like this is the problem with self-awareness is a lot of people are like, oh yeah, I'm totally aware. I'm like, yeah, but you're not doing anything about it. So are you really aware? And even if you are aware, what a waste if you're not going to take action on it. And so what happens is, is that when we have this identity declaration, we are able to complete this settled identity. We're able to truly settle around getting rid of the old. I'm laying anew and I'm declaring that to myself and to the world around me. I mean, it's so incredibly powerful.

14:30
And this is how we're going to defeat the performance trap. This is how we're going to defeat this need to fall back into achievement as a way of, of worth and value. It's so crippling. It's so crushing. Like you're still going to perform. You're still going to push hard. That's just not going to, that's not going to dictate how worthy or unworthy you are. Look, I often see guys do this and the, and the problem is, is they stop at just thinking about it. And when a guy has only thought about his identity, he will lose it the next time you have a hard Tuesday. But a man who declares it, who speaks it out loud, who says it regularly, who says it in rooms around other guys that he respects, and he puts it into writing where he can look

15:20
at it again. He has something to return to when the drift comes back because it is coming back. You know it. It's happened to you before. It's going to happen to you again. It happens to me all the time. I get in these really good grooves. And then all of a sudden I start to drift and I'm like, oh my gosh, you know what? I haven't been reading my identity declaration. I have not been reading this charge. I have not been reminding myself each and every day of who I am. And therefore what I am called to do. This is the anchor. This is the anchor piece in practice. It is something that you've got to be able to do. And you got to do it every single day. You do that before the day begins. So that way the day does not define you.

16:04
You define the day. So my encouragement to you would be if you're starting to think about, oh man, this is actually who I am based upon who God has called me to be. Write that down. This isn't a mission statement. Stuff like that will come later. This is a declaration of who you are before the Lord, regardless of your output. Read it every single morning when you wake up, before you open the dang phone and check an email or a social media notification. Declare to yourself and the world, this is who you are. For us, across three weeks, we audit, we rebuild, and we declare. This is the entire first phase of our Aligned Man program. And it matters so much.

16:50
This matters so much more than any tactic that I teach. And here's three reasons why. And this is really just a recap of what I've been sharing with you. So the first one is, the first reason is because the identity audit shows you where your worth has actually been coming from. We need to see where we have misplaced our worth and value. Then we move into the foundation rebuild. And that helps move our weight onto something that won't collapse under a bad quarter, a hard season, a messed up conversation, or one bad day. Right? And then the identity declaration, it locks all of that in. So we have something to return to when the drift starts pulling at us again, because it's going to pull at us again.

17:30
So again, let me ask you this one question as I kind of start to land the plane. I want you to reflect on this. If everything you've built, if everything that you've created for yourself was ripped away from you tomorrow, and by the way, November of 2013, that happened to me. When it's all ripped away, all of the things that you worked hard to build for yourself, your house, your business, your cars, your clothes, the watches, all that stuff got ripped from me, what would still be true about you? Because I know what was true about me in that moment and is the only thing that saved me from going completely off the deep end. And 13 years later, rebuilding to the place that I'm in now. That is the whole game.

18:11
The drift creates this gap in us. And the gap starts right here with what I'm talking about. In a man who does not know who he is apart from what he's done. The settled identity, it's not a soft starting point. It's the only foundation that is strong enough to hold a marriage, a body, and a calling on top of it all. So if you read your identity declaration tomorrow morning, and you still feel like you're performing instead of standing on something real, that's exactly who this aligned man was built for. Or if you really don't even know where to get started, you're like, I hear this stuff, but I just don't know how to apply it. Hit me up. Go to Instagram, the Ryan James Miller. DM me. I'd be more than happy to talk with you about whether or not you'd be a good fit.

18:56
We're in 12-man cohorts, so it's really tight environments. We go 12 weeks. I'd be more than happy to walk you through what that program looks like. We've got an incredible founder rate that will double when we move to our September launch. So this is a great opportunity to jump in as well. So look at, let me remind you of this. I don't want you to do what I did, which was get to the place where you basically blow your whole life up before you finally realize that you need to do something about it. All you need to do is just understand who you are before the day tells you who you're going to be. So my question to you is, do you know who you are?

19:41
Are you living from that day by day? Or do you need some support along the way? I'm here. Keep following along. DM me. Comment below. Whatever it is you want to do. If you find me, I'll make sure I reach back out to you. Peace. Peace.