The Identity Code Revealed: Mastering the Art of Communication
Learn how your different identities shape the way you tell stories and influence others...
Feelings of worth can flourish only in an atmosphere where individual differences are appreciated, mistakes are tolerated, communication is open, and rules are flexible—the kind of atmosphere that is found in a nurturing family.
— Virginia Satir
When we communicate, there is a story, a storyteller, and a listener. The story travels from teller to listener, from writer to reader. Without people telling and listening, writing and reading, there would be no communication.
We began this discussion by talking about the importance of story. I wrote about the different ways people interact with the world, the way some people are primarily visual, some primarily auditory, some primarily kinesthetic, and so forth. In later articles, I talked about the importance of recognizing that someone else might not have the same response you have to a story and what techniques we can use to try to match their response to ours.
In all of these discussions, we assumed that the person who is reading, or listening to, or experiencing our story has just one identity. We talked about ways people are different from each other, but we haven’t yet talked about the different identities we each carry around inside ourselves.
Every day, we live out many different stories about ourselves. Another way of saying this is that we take on multiple identities to accomplish what we set out to do in the world. I am a husband to my wife, a father to my kids, a child to my mother, a friend to my friends, a boss to my employees, a performer to my radio listeners, an author to you, and so forth. Each requires different behaviors and, to some extent, different perspectives.
Many of us have experienced a personal “aha” moment when we saw or heard or felt who we really are, a deep and profound sense of personal identity and connection with all creation. Psychologists call that the core self, and Connirae and Tamara Andreas wrote a brilliant book about it in a therapeutic context, Core Transformation: Reaching the Wellspring Within. I learned much of what I know about this concept from a training session I took with them a decade ago (although the way I’m expressing this all is entirely mine—their expressions are much more elegant, detailed, and specific to therapy and personal growth and transformation).
Those moments when we discover our core selves are memorable because they don’t come that often. Most of the time, though, we are inhabiting one of our many sub-identities.
Each of these identities requires a different skill set. This doesn’t mean that we’re acting or playing a role or putting on a mask when we inhabit one of these identities. For example, the part of me you meet when I sign books is really me—but it’s just one “part” of me. You probably won’t meet the part of me who is a dad because it’s not useful for me to be my dad part when I’m signing books.
There’s that word useful again. By now you may have recognized that “usefulness” is a like a secret handshake for competent communicators. When you are an unconsciously competent communicator*, you instinctively recognize which part of yourself is most useful when communicating with someone else. And you understand how to identify the part of your listener that will be most likely to connect with or listen to you.
Effective communication happens when your message matches the part of you that most cares about and most uses that message—and reaches the part of your listener that most cares about and uses that message. This is a form of map and territory congruence (as mentioned in earlier articles in this series).
If you’ve been reading this series of articles in a linear way, you may think you’ve read this before. Matching your message to the person listening may sound an awful lot like “The Meaning of a Communication Is the Response You Get.” It is. The message of that article was that each of us is different from one another, so what persuades me may not be very persuasive to you. We talked about tools we can use—such as anchoring, future pacing, and the learning trance—to make it easier to persuade someone to at least pay attention when we communicate with him or her.
Mapping identity is about your relationship with the person listening to you, but it goes even deeper. At this level of the communication code, we learn that even if you are talking to just one person, there is not just one “me” talking and not just one “them” listening.
Each of us has multiple identities, and what is persuasive to one part of a person may not be persuasive to another part of them. To increase the effectiveness of these techniques, you’ll need to map out your listener’s identity and figure out which part will be most effective to speak with.
Creating Mini-Me’s
In the 1999 Mike Myers’ movie The Spy Who Shagged Me, the hero Austin Powers has a little problem with his nemesis, Dr. Evil. Dr Evil has cloned a part of himself and named the one-eighth-sized clone Mini-Me. Dr. Evil created Mini-Me because he felt he wasn’t quite evil enough; he created Mini-Me out of his frighteningly curled pinky finger—his purely evil part. Mini-Me can’t talk—or at least can’t talk much—because an evil part doesn’t really need to talk. He writes notes and fights (unfairly) very well. Whenever Dr. Evil seems to be in danger of showing the least bit of compassion or humanity, Mini-Me scribbles him a note to buck up his evil side. He’s a very useful sidekick to have around for a fictional character like Dr. Evil.
Mini-Me gets most of the laughs in the film. It’s funny to see a pint-size version of an already cartoonish character, and actor Verne Troyer does a great job of imitating actor Mike Myers’s Dr. Evil character. As with most jokes, though, there’s also a germ of truth. All of us create Mini-Me’s, parts of ourselves that take on a life and an identity of their own. We create them because, like Dr. Evil, we find them useful.
It’s easiest to identify the different Mini-Me’s that play defined social roles in the world, such as my dad part, my friend part, and so on. These are identities that are created by our relationships with other people. Closer to our core, we have identities that we create from our own needs and desires. For example, I have a curious part, a hungry part, a compassionate part, a spiritual part, and so on. Being human, I also have a selfish part, a vengeful part, and a part capable of expressing anger.
We create, throughout the course of our lives, parts for every aspect of our being.
These parts have developed because they are useful to us. When we are born, parts emerge to accomplish certain tasks and to meet specific needs. Crying was a behavior controlled by one of our first parts, a part we developed because we needed a way to tell the world that we were hungry. Every time a new need arose, a new part of our brain was activated as a resource to meet that need. One part took responsibility for getting the diapers changed, another for getting fed, another for getting affection, and so forth.
As we go through life, we develop a whole repertory of parts. An entire cast of these parts develops to handle particular desires, needs, problems, and crises. Very often these parts were momentary loci of focused energy and attention; and when they were finished with their job, they dissolved back into your core self, the totality that is you.
Others were created to meet ongoing and lifelong needs, such as the need to be fed, or the need for attention, or the need to protect the body. These parts tend to come into being when we face large life changes, such as going to kindergarten, engaging in our first romantic relationship, leaving home, suffering a deep personal loss, and so on.
The parts that emerge to provide us with important new skill sets can take on relatively independent lives of their own. They each have a unique identity and personality. That’s why it’s more useful to say that there are multiple “me’s” than to talk about just one “me.”
“Wait,” you might say. “You make it sound like each of us has multiple-personality disorder.” We do each have multiple personalities, but for most of us they are not disordered.
The difference between someone who is mentally healthy and someone who has multiple-personality disorder (MPD) is that with MPD one part takes over, gives itself a name, and causes amnesia about all the other parts. In a mentally healthy person, a part takes center stage when needed but is aware of the other parts and, in fact, interacts with them.
For example, I can use my teaching part while I write this article, and at the same time I’m drawing on my friend part (thinking of you in a positive way, trying to give you something useful) and my parent part (hoping to equip you for the world, to one day see you fly on your own). Mentally healthy people unconsciously and intuitively understand that each of these parts is “me” and that collectively they make up the larger “me.”
We juggle our different parts all the time. The part that comes to the fore when you’re having a fight is very different from the part in charge when you’re falling in love; and both are quite different from the part that takes charge when you are applying for a job, dealing with a store clerk, or advocating for something you believe in.
Therapists can use this information about our different parts to heal dysfunctional parts and help us find our core self. I talk about how to do that in my book Living with ADHD: Simple Exercises to Change Your Daily Life. When we communicate specific, individual-issue messages, however, we almost always want to speak to a particular part.
Consider how George W. Bush spoke to our hurt and vengeful parts when he used the bullhorn at Ground Zero in New York. Or how some politicians speak to their constituents’ fearful child parts when they repeatedly invoke 9/11 “be afraid” frames. That’s because each part has its own function, and we can use the differences between parts to control how our message is heard. This is the primary key to cracking the identity code.
*As mentioned in an earlier article in this series, the transition we make (think of riding a bicycle) is from unconsciously incompetent (we don’t know that we don’t know how to ride the bike), to consciously incompetent (we try to ride and fall and realize we don’t know how), to consciously competent (we learn how to ride a bike, but still have to pay attention to what we’re doing or we’ll fall over), to unconsciously competent (we can ride the bike without even thinking about it). That same process applies to pretty much everything in life, including becoming an unconsciously competent communicator.