By Dina Aldabbagh

If you want to become anything in this life, you don’t become it by “becoming” it, you become it by being it. You might be being it at a more elementary level, but you are still embodying it. Anything you want to be, you become simply by living in that identity. It’s that simple. We often keep things at an arm’s length from us by literally holding it in our hand, an arm’s length away, and saying, “I’m going to have this one day” — but…you have it right now. It’s already right in front of you, all you have to do is put your arm down. To bring your hand close to your body and recognize, “Ah, I have this now.”

We keep things at an arm’s length away by putting our stiff arm out and saying, “This isn’t mine yet. This is still this far away from me.” The question then becomes, “Who are you being?” Are you being the person who is “becoming” what you want to be, or are you just being it? If your identity is always the “becoming,” then you never just are. 

Why are some people dieters for their entire lives? Logically, once you lose fat, all you have to do is maintain it. So they may lose the fat, but they still have the identity of the person who is not “lean,” but is “becoming lean.” Dieters become lean, lean people are just lean people. It’s their identity. You may have heard of the tiktok trend where girls ask their very athletic boyfriends, “Babe, do you ever wish you were athletic?” and it throws these men off, because they already are. Well, I finally saw one response that just took the cake on all of them. While most of these men responded in confusion or laughter or even anger, one man said, “No, I don’t wish I was athletic, because I am athletic.” You don’t have to wish to be the thing you already are. You just are it. 

There are people who are lean their entire lives, they’ve just always been that way. If you notice, these people never talk about themselves the way someone who doesn’t embody the “lean” identity does. The naturally lean-all-their-lives people never wish they are lean, they just are. They may wish to “tone up” or make comments about “being less bloated,” but they’re not seeing a large gap between who they currently are and who they want to be. They don’t have obsessive thoughts about “being lean,” they just be lean. They act like that person.

Most people in the US will fluctuate in their weight throughout their lives, but have you noticed how even when lean people gain weight, they still embody the identity of someone who is lean? Then when they lose weight, that “chubby phase” was just a blip in their life story. They never identified as fat, even if they were factually categorized as overweight. Even if they have some weeks or months where they eat more and get a bit puffier, they naturally regulate by recognizing any momentary weight-gain as a temporary thing — something that they simply use to push them back into center. They naturally eat a little lighter for a bit, or say no to a dessert here or there. They’re not “dieting,” they just want to feel like themselves — that being someone who is lean. That’s when they feel their best and that’s what they see their identity as. So even in liminal periods of minor weight-gain, they recognize that they are still the lean person, and they just want to feel centered again.

The way to “become” something is not to be stuck in the “becoming” stage, but actually it is to be that thing. Yes, logically that is qualified as a becoming. But if your identity is someone who is “trying” to be something, you will always keep actually being that thing at an arm’s length away. Think of it with the weight loss example: to arbitrarily throw out some numbers, say you were 200 lbs and you wanted to be 150 lbs — so you wanted to lose 50 lbs. You can be someone who is losing weight, but you don’t want to be a “dieter.” As in, you don’t want to be the person who is trying a bunch of quick fixes or weight loss trends in order to lose weight. There’s an elementally simple way to lose weight and to maintain it: you be someone who is lean. 

It’s an identity change. You can lose 50 lbs no problem, but if you still embody the “dieter” identity, you will gain and lose the same 50 lbs until you change that identity. The dieter loses…then gains…then loses…then gains, because the dieter may lose the 50 lbs, but their baseline is still made up of the beliefs, habits, and self-concept of someone who is at 200 lbs. Thus, they will eventually return to that center. We always stabilize at our baseline, so it can’t just be the performed “act of losing 50 lbs,” it has to be a fundamental baseline shift. 

So if you want to lose those 50 lbs, you lose it by literally just acting like a lean person. If that’s who you be, then weight loss is inevitable. It may not be as fast as the trends of starving yourself in order to lose weight, but it is infinitely more final. So do what a lean person does. Be a lean person…and you will be a lean person. See how simple that is? That doesn’t mean that you wake up and that’s it, you’re 50 lbs down, but it doesn’t need to. Because if you act like a lean person, then even if you have 30 extra lbs on you, you’re not embodying the identity of a person who is 30 lbs overweight. 

It may be a process — i.e. a becoming — but you don’t have to embody the identity of someone who is “trying” to be, you can just be. You won’t be as advanced in the beginning, sure, but you’re still just being. You’re owning the identity.

Think of it as someone who’s learning a second language. In America, why is it that kids learn Spanish in school for 3-6 years, yet if you ask them to speak, they can’t offer up anything past the most basic level of communication? Because you don’t just learn a language by learning all the grammar and vocab, you learn it by using it. If you ask anyone who’s learned a new language, they will tell you that in order to do so, you simply must speak it. You must engage in conversation. You must listen to it. If you want to speak Spanish, you won’t get there by learning and strategizing all day. You will simply only learn how to speak Spanish by speaking it.

And yes, of course learning is a part of the process. But you learn so that you can speak. You learn in order to communicate — which is what language is for. You learn a phrase or a structure, then you apply it. You speak. This is how you logically learn to speak a language… by speaking. But notice what’s going on here. You don’t become a Spanish speaker by wanting to learn Spanish, practicing some worksheets, or making a detailed 6 month learning plan, you become a Spanish speaker by speaking it. So even if you are doing it at the most basic and flawed level, you are still being a Spanish speaker. The only way to be it, is to be it. 

This is actually the entire mechanism of manifestation that people talk about. The “act like you have it,” “live in the end,” “fake it ‘till you make it,” is all to say you just have to be the person who you want to be. You don’t be the person who becomes, you be the person who is. To “manifest” is honestly much less spiritual than it’s made to seem. It’s not really woo-woo, it’s logical; it makes sense. In order to be anything, you just be that thing. You may not be it in its entirety on day 1 or day 100, but you close that gap every single time you choose to be that thing. 

Think of it like a child learning their native language. They don’t know all the words — far from it. They pronounce many things wrong. They use the wrong structures and they conjugate verbs wrong all the time. And yet…they are an “English” speaker, or whatever language it is. Everyone would look at them and say, “Yes, that’s an English speaker.” They would also recognize that it’s a child — aka someone who’s in the process of learning how to speak the language at a proficient level — but they give them that identity of an English speaker. They don’t say, “They’re trying to learn English,” as if they’re from a Spanish-speaking country and English is their second language — even though “learning English” is logically what they’re doing. Instead, they recognize the child as someone who is learning the language of their identity. 

But of course, it’s a child, and proficiency takes time. Yet no one blinks twice at that child’s identity as a native speaker. They are simply less proficient. And how funny that someone who cannot read or write English, but was born and raised in America is still socially given the identity of being fluent in English — they just engage with the language at a less proficient level. But no one takes away their identity of being. 

“Being” does not mean perfection. Being, oh-so simply means, being. It means showing up as that thing. It means choosing as the thing. It means speaking like that thing. It means thinking like that thing. It means dressing like that thing. It means acting like that thing. It means believing the beliefs of that thing. It means having the self-concept of that thing. It means seeing yourself as that thing. It means allowing that identity to manifest. That’s how you stop keeping things at an arm’s length away, once you just allow whatever it is to actually be. That’s how you close the gap. 

Ready does not mean completion, it means willingness. You are not finally a Spanish speaker once you learn 2000 words — you are a Spanish speaker when you speak Spanish. If you are willing to choose to be like the identity you want to become, then you immediately become that thing. Instant manifestation, because you instantly “manifested” it into being. 

You may not see proficiency immediately, but that is absolutely inevitable. If something is being done over and over again, it naturally becomes proficient. If you choose from the identity you want to embody over and over again, then getting good at it is the natural consequence. But if you’re always choosing from the identity of the person who “wants to be” that identity, then all you’re getting proficient at is being the person who wants, who becomes, who is trying. That’s what keeps the gap wide — because you’re distancing yourself from the actual embodiment of that thing. 

I became a runner the day I ran my first mile. I stayed a runner with every mile I ran, and established that identity — so that even on days or weeks I wasn’t running, I still saw myself as a runner. Other people did too. Even if I wasn’t running at that exact moment, I was still a runner. I didn’t need to run for three months straight — or any other arbitrary number — to finally “become” a runner. I ran, so then I was a runner. Because that’s what runners do — they run. I became a marathoner as soon as I ran a marathon. I didn’t need to run a certain number of marathons in order to become a marathoner. The moment I put in those 26.2 miles, I became a marathoner. Why? Because all a marathoner is, is someone who runs 26.2 miles. So I just had to be that. Then — immediate identity shift. The training for the marathon may have prepared me, but it didn’t make me a marathoner. Only running a marathon did. 

You see how that works? The process, the preparation, the conditioning, it may be the bridge to get you to be that thing, but that in and of itself can never make you that thing. The only thing that can make you a marathoner, a Spanish speaker, a lean person, is to simply be those things. 

The trick is, in a way, you can reject the present reality — but not in the way where you don’t accept it. You can look at the present and accept what it currently looks like, but you can also know that it’s temporary. If you’re acting like a lean person this week, but last week you were acting like an overweight person, then you can look at the mirror and say, “That’s okay. It’s okay that my body looks like that right now because I know my right now choices are resulting in the body of a lean person.” 

You know that the body’s process of burning energy takes time. You don’t have to know how long or how the process works, you just have to know that the process is working and the result of what you’re doing now is inevitable. So you can, in that way, look at your reality and be unmoved. You don’t reject that it’s true for the moment, but you know it’s temporary. And that what will be seen very soon is a certain outcome to your actions right now.  

When you are actively making choices of the identity you want, then you can look at whatever is going on right now…and then look away. You don’t have to pay attention to it. You can say, “That’s not for long,” because you know exactly what’s next. 

You can make a mistake while speaking Spanish and say, “whatever.” You don’t have to make it mean you’re just never going to be a fluent Spanish speaker. You can actually make it mean that it’s just a part of the process of becoming a fluent Spanish speaker — which it is. When you don’t pay so much attention to the little pieces of evidence of the manifested past, you can keep your focus on what’s going to happen. You can understand that what’s going to happen is not a maybe, but a sure thing, and it’s just in the process of unfolding. 

Your body is just burning through the calories it took on last week, give it a sec to do so. Your mind is just in the process of forming the neural pathways to speak Spanish, and every mistake that you notice is a part of not making that mistake again. That’s the unfolding of developing the proficiency of a fluent speaker. 

So you don’t become by being the person who becomes, you become by just starting to be. And over time, you get better at being. Then being whatever thing it is that you want to be is the most natural thing in the world. That’s what closing the gap is. It is not planning how to be, it’s just being, and slowly getting better at being.