How the Lens You Carry Shapes the Life You Live
Most of us think they see reality objectively, we move through life convinced we are seeing it clearly, as it actually is. But we are not seeing reality.
We experience life through layers of interpretation – beliefs, emotional states, memories, identity, fears, expectations, and the silent narrative constantly running inside our minds. Long before we act, speak, or decide, we have already framed reality through the lens we carry within us. And often, that lens was not consciously chosen.
This is one of the central ideas behind Powers of Perspective:
your life is not only shaped by what happens to you, but by the meaning you assign to what happens.
Two people can walk into the exact same room and leave with completely different experiences. One sees opportunity, another sees rejection. One feels inspired, another feels threatened. The external world may be the same, the internal world is not – and that internal world shapes everything.
Your State Shapes Your Lens
One of the most underestimated forces in human behavior is the state you are in. When you are exhausted, anxious, insecure, or emotionally overwhelmed, your perspective narrows. You interpret neutral events negatively. You become more reactive, more doubtful, more defensive. But shift the state -even slightly- and the same world looks different. Ideas arrive. Courage returns. Things that felt impossible start to feel like problems you can actually solve.
This is why the same person can, on different days, seem like almost two different people. One version leans in, speaks up, takes the risk. The other hesitates, shrinks, goes quiet. Neither is the “real” you. Both are you, filtered through different states.
The question worth sitting with is: which state am I operating from right now?
The Quiet Architecture of Self-Talk
Most of us don’t pay close attention to the internal monologue running beneath everything we do. But it’s worth listening to, because those words -repeated enough- stop being thoughts and start being beliefs. And beliefs have a way of quietly shaping everything.
I always fall short. I’m not confident enough for this. I’m behind where I should be. I’m not like them.
These don’t announce themselves as limiting. They just feel like observations. Like facts. But over time, they become the architecture the self is built on – and the mind, being efficient, will dutifully find evidence to support whatever story it’s already decided is true.
Tell yourself you are not capable, and your brain becomes a very good detective for your failures. Shift the story to I’m learning – genuinely shift it, not just as a mantra – and the same brain starts noticing progress it would have otherwise ignored. The external facts may barely change. But what you perceive as possible changes enormously.
Your Beliefs Become Your Identity
Beliefs are more powerful than most of us give them credit for, because we live and act as if they are true. They quietly shape what we notice and what we ignore, what we reach for and what we avoid, what we expect from the world and what we think we’re allowed to want. Over time, they become so woven into how we see ourselves that they stop feeling like beliefs at all. They just feel like us.
This is a big part of why changing behavior is genuinely hard. It’s not usually a motivation problem, it’s an identity problem. When someone carries the belief I’m not disciplined, they don’t just think it – they act in quiet alignment with it, often without realizing it. When someone believes, somewhere underneath everything, that they’re not quite worthy of success, they’ll find ways to step back from opportunities just before they arrive. And when someone genuinely believes they’re capable of growth, something shifts: failure stops being proof of inadequacy and starts being information. The same setback, filtered through a different identity, becomes a different experience entirely.
Most people trying to change their lives focus on behavior – the habits, the routines, the actions. But behavior has a way of drifting back toward what feels familiar, because identity is always pulling on it from below. You can override it for a while through willpower or novelty. But if the underlying story of who you are hasn’t shifted, the old patterns tend to reassert themselves.
The harder and more important work is examining the story itself. And that story, for most of us, wasn’t something we sat down and chose. It assembled itself – from childhood, from the way early failures landed, from families and classrooms and relationships that reflected something back to us and called it truth. At some point, most of us stopped asking whether what we’d absorbed was actually accurate. We just started living inside it, the way you stop noticing the furniture in a room you’ve been in for years.
The perspective shift that changes things is a simple but genuinely disorienting one: a belief is not the same as reality. It’s an interpretation – often one that was repeated so many times it calcified into certainty. And once you actually feel that distinction, not just intellectually but in the way you hold your own thoughts, something loosens. Identity starts to feel less fixed. Growth starts to feel less like an act of will and more like a natural consequence of seeing yourself differently.
Identity is something you are continuously building – through the beliefs you keep reinforcing, and the ones you finally choose to set down.
Identity: The Invisible Architecture
Beneath almost everything you do, there is a structure most people never directly examine. It shapes how you carry yourself when you walk into a room full of strangers. How you respond when something goes wrong. How much space you feel entitled to take up. What you quietly believe you deserve – in relationships, in work, in life. Which futures feel available to you, and which feel like they belong to other kinds of people.
Identity is doing all of this, constantly, mostly out of sight.
A lot of people spend years trying to improve things on the surface – productivity, habits, goals, relationships – while underneath, they are still quietly guided by an older version of themselves. One shaped by limitation or self-doubt, or by a chapter of life that’s long closed but never quite let go. And the strange thing about identity is that it works very hard to protect itself. The mind is always looking to stay consistent with who it believes you are.
So if you’ve built your sense of self around being the responsible one, or the one who doesn’t quite make it, or the person who’s too much or not enough – you will find, almost mysteriously, that your behavior keeps confirming it. Not through any conscious choice, but through a thousand small adjustments that keep the story intact. You will undersell yourself in rooms where you could speak up. You’ll hesitate at the exact moment action would have mattered. You’ll explain away the evidence that contradicts the narrative you’ve been carrying.
This is why awareness isn’t a soft skill. It is actually foundational. The moment identity becomes visible, when you can see it rather than just live inside it, it can begin to change. You stop being the product of your past and start being the person who gets to decide what those experiences meant. That is not a small distinction, you are not only shaped by what happened to you, but you are shaped by the story you made of it.
The Parts We’ve Left Behind
Carl Jung spent much of his career thinking about the parts of ourselves we suppress – what he called the shadow. It’s a word that sounds ominous, but the shadow isn’t really about darkness. More often, it’s about the unlived parts of who we are. The confident voice you stopped trusting. The creative instinct you learned to apologize for. The ambition you quietly buried because it felt like too much, or not appropriate, or not who you were supposed to be.
A lot of self-improvement is actually about becoming someone new. But Jung’s insight – and it’s one that still lands hard – is that real transformation often runs in the opposite direction. It’s about going back and integrating the parts of yourself you abandoned. Not becoming perfect, but becoming more whole. That takes a particular kind of honesty. Not the comfortable kind, where we acknowledge the things we already knew. The courageous kind, where we look at the unconscious assumptions we’ve been living by and actually examine them. As Jung put it: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
The Beliefs We Mistake for Identity
There is something quietly dangerous about the moment a belief becomes part of your identity, because that is usually when you stop questioning it.
I’m not creative. I’m bad with people. I’m too old for this. I’m not the kind of person who…
Organizational psychologist Adam Grant makes the case that genuine intelligence isn’t just the ability to think. It’s the ability to rethink, to revisit your assumptions, update your mental models, revise the stories that no longer fit who you’re becoming. But rethinking is uncomfortable, especially when the belief in question is one you’ve built a sense of self around.
We stay attached to outdated identities partly for safety, and partly because certainty – even the limiting kind – at least feels stable. The cost is that we confuse a story we’ve told ourselves for a fixed truth about who we are. And perhaps one of the most genuinely freeing things a person can realize is that they get to revise that story. Not by pretending the past was different, and not overnight – but deliberately, one chosen belief at a time. Deciding which parts of your inherited identity actually belong to you, and which you’ve simply been carrying out of habit. Every time you do that, you make a little more room for whoever you’re still becoming.
A Practice, Not a Moment
Real perspective shifts rarely arrive as lightning bolts. They accumulate. They happen in the small moments – catching a familiar narrative mid-sentence, noticing the emotional state that’s coloring your thinking, recognizing a fear that’s been quietly disguised as reason. Perspective isn’t something you achieve. It’s something you practice, actively, while you’re living your actual life. It means holding a kind of dual awareness: being present in the moment while also watching yourself from a slight distance, curious rather than judgmental about what you notice.
That is where real freedom starts. Not when life finally arranges itself the way you hoped. But when you realize you’re no longer entirely at the mercy of the stories running silently in the background. Because the moment you see the lens – really see it – you finally have a chance to choose something different.
Read more in the book Powers of Perspective