Identity-Based Habits: Examples and How to Start

Each act becomes evidence you can point to. So use identity to choose your acts, not as a promise that a new belief will change you on its own.

What are identity-based habits?

In his essay on identity-based habits, and later in Atomic Habits (2018), Clear describes three layers of change. Outcomes are what you get. Processes are what you do. Identity is what you believe about yourself. Most goals start with the outcome. His suggestion is to start with identity: decide the type of person you want to be, then prove it to yourself with small wins.

It is a practical framework, not a research finding. The essay cites no studies; its case rests on examples and reasoning. The evidence has to come from elsewhere, and it is weaker than many summaries suggest.

For example, take someone who wants to run.

• Outcome first: “Run a half marathon in April.” Until April, every week is either on track or behind.
• Identity first: “I want to be someone who runs.” This week that means two 20-minute runs, on Tuesday and Saturday morning. Each run counts on the day it happens.

The half marathon can stay as a direction. The identity tells you what to do on Tuesday.

What are identity-based beliefs?

An identity-based belief is a belief about what kind of person you are, such as “I’m someone who finishes things”, that makes some acts feel natural and others feel out of character. In self-improvement, it is the belief that sits behind a habit. The same phrase is used in research on politics, religion and group loyalty, which is a different subject.

The belief and the habit are not the same thing. You can hold the belief and skip the act. You can also do the act for weeks before the belief feels true. The useful question is not “Do I believe it yet?” but “What did I do this week that fits it?”

Does identity-based habit building actually work?

Partly, and with caveats. Three lines of research are usually linked to the idea. None of them tests Clear’s method directly.

Calling yourself a noun: “voter” or “vote”

In a 2011 set of experiments, Christopher Bryan and colleagues asked eligible voters survey questions about “being a voter” or about “voting”. In two small studies (88 people in California in 2008 and 214 in New Jersey in 2009), the “voter” wording was followed by higher turnout: 89.9% against 79.0% in New Jersey, for example. The samples were small, turnout in both groups was higher than the authors expected in both studies (taking a pre-election survey may itself raise turnout), and the outcome was one act on one day.

A larger field test published in 2016 by Alan Gerber and colleagues compared the two wordings with 4,468 registered voters, contacted by phone before 2014 primary elections in three US states. Turnout was 30.1% with “voter” and 31.1% with “vote”: no meaningful difference. Because the designs differed, the authors suggest reading it as a failure to generalise rather than a failure to replicate, though they add that the original result may have been a false positive.

A related 2013 study found that “don’t be a cheater” led to less cheating than “don’t cheat” in three small experiments (50 to 99 people each) with small cash rewards. That is about avoiding a bad label in a short task, not building a habit. The authors also noted a risk: someone who slips after hearing the label may come to accept it.

Identity-based motivation: fit matters more than vividness

Psychologist Daphna Oyserman’s work on identity-based motivation argues that identities are built in the moment, not fixed, and push you to act when they feel relevant to the situation in front of you. It also describes how people read difficulty. If an act fits who you think you are, difficulty can feel like a sign it matters. If not, it can feel like proof the act is “not for people like me”.

In four experiments with University of Michigan students, Oyserman, Destin and Novin (2015) started from reviews suggesting that simply making a future self vivid does not reliably raise motivation or change action. Their experiments found that context decides: a hoped-for self motivated students more when success looked likely; a feared self motivated them more when failure looked likely. The studies measured intentions on one campus, not habits over months. The lesson still holds: imagining who you want to be is not enough. The identity has to connect to something you can do in a situation you are actually in.

Exercise identity: linked, but which comes first is unknown

A 2016 review by Ryan Rhodes and colleagues pooled 32 datasets, mostly of modest quality, and found a moderate link between seeing yourself as someone who exercises and being physically active (r = .44). The studies are correlational. They cannot show whether identity leads to exercise or exercise builds identity; both are plausible. The authors called for stronger studies, including ones that try to change identity.

The second direction echoes Daryl Bem’s older self-perception theory (1972): people partly work out what they are like by watching what they do. It is background, not proof.

How do you turn an identity into acts you repeat?

1. Write one “someone who” sentence. Use a verb you can do: “someone who writes”, “someone who keeps in touch”. Avoid a trait you would have to score, such as “a disciplined person”.
2. Name the outcome that is too big for this week. The novel, the marathon, the fluent conversation. Writing it down shows you what not to aim at yet.
3. Find a situation you will actually be in. Pick a time and place that already exists in your week: the train home, Saturday morning, ten minutes after dinner. This is Oyserman’s point: the identity has to fit the moment.
4. Choose one act small enough to be likely. Ask: “What would someone who writes do on this train?” Writing 100 words beats planning a chapter. In Oyserman’s experiments, hoped-for selves motivated more when success looked likely, so keep success likely.
5. Record what happened. Note the date, what you did and anything that got in the way. A missed act is a fact for the record, not a verdict on who you are.
6. Repeat for a few weeks before you raise the bar. When the act is happening most weeks, add a little: a longer session, a second day or a harder version.

When it gets hard, read the difficulty as a sign the act matters, not proof that it is not for you. If an act feels wrong for reasons other than effort, change the act, not the aim.

Examples: from identity belief to this week’s act

These are examples, not a programme. Swap in your own aims and times.

Should you set identity goals or outcome goals?

Use both, for different jobs. An outcome goal gives direction and a date: the race, the finished draft. An identity goal helps you choose what to do today. Trouble starts when the outcome is the only measure, because on most days you are neither finished nor failing. Judge the week by the acts you chose and did, and check now and then that they still point towards the outcome.

To keep the aim, the act and the result apart on paper, see how to set personal growth goals.

How do you change your identity?

Here, identity means your sense of what you are like, not a legal identity. Declaring it is not enough on its own. Pick one identity, choose acts that fit it and keep the record. Over weeks, the record gives you something more convincing than a statement: dates when you did the thing.

• Start with one. Several new identities at once means several new acts competing for the same evenings.
• Drop the harsh labels. “I’m lazy” is not a useful description of a missed Tuesday. Describe the act instead: “I didn’t walk on Tuesday because I worked late.”

To find the identity in the first place, use the who do you want to become action map. To keep one promise to yourself, try the consistency guide. For days when the act feels like a chore, see how to build discipline, or write to the person you are aiming at in a letter to your future self.

Laurels is being built around the same move. It is planned to use who you want to become and where you are starting to suggest a real-world challenge that fits you, with the choice left to you. It is not open yet.