The Coaching Exercise That Makes the Identity Shift Real
Why the founders who scale fastest claim the identity before it feels earned, and what the research says about why it works.
I write for founders and executives navigating the inner game of scaling. Every week you’ll get one core idea, one tiny experiment, or one founder insight you can apply now.
Inspired by conversations with Andrea Nguyen, Anyi Sun, Dani Tan, Haris Butt, Katrina Purcell, and Maggie Blackburn. Founders and leaders who had to become the person before they could do the work.
Think about the last time you pulled back from something you knew how to do. Was it really the skill you were missing, or the permission to be the person who uses it?
Sit with this for a moment.
The Belief Worth Challenging
There’s an assumption most of us carry without questioning it: get good enough, and the identity will follow. Put in the reps. Build the portfolio. Hit the milestones. Eventually, you’ll feel like the person the role requires you to be.
It sounds logical. It’s also backwards.
Across six conversations with founders and leaders at different stages of building, the same pattern kept surfacing. The skill was already there. The experience was already there. What was missing was the internal shift: the moment where they stopped qualifying who they were and started owning it.
That shift didn’t come from a promotion, a funding round, or a positive review. It came from a decision. A quiet, often private decision to call themselves the thing they already were.
This issue is about what happens on the other side of that decision, and why it has to come first.
What It Actually Looks Like
Anyi Sun was in the middle of a career pivot into design when she heard a podcast about pursuing creative professions. The host talked about writing yourself a permission letter to become the person you wanted to be. Anyi didn’t sit down and write one. She was cooking. Chopping vegetables. But something shifted internally.
“I didn’t actually write it down, but I wrote it down in my mind mentally. I was cooking. I was like chopping vegetable and then I was thinking about that inside my mind. And that was really helpful.”
What happened next was concrete. Anyi described a psychological flip that changed how she showed up in the job search. Once she embraced the identity of designer, the confidence in conversations followed.
“I think there was this like mental psychological flip or switch I needed to do for myself in order to even just embrace that identity. And once I was able to embrace it, I was able to talk about design more confidently when I was looking for a job.”
This wasn’t about acquiring new skills. Anyi already had the design ability. What she needed was to stop seeing herself as someone trying to become a designer and start seeing herself as one. The permission letter, even the unwritten version, was the mechanism that closed that gap.
Dani Tan went through something similar when she left her corporate role to build her own coaching business. She was already doing the work and serving clients. But owning the word “entrepreneur” took months.
“I think it took me like six months to a year where I was like, no, I’m a full on entrepreneur. I’m a business owner. I actually wasn’t necessarily fully owned and proud of it. Like even when I left, I think I had like a little bit of like, oh, it’s just made up and anyone can be a business owner. And now I’m like, no, we went through some things to get here. So we own it.”
Haris Butt saw himself as a technologist for most of his career. That was the label, the identity he operated from. It wasn’t until he joined ClickUp that something shifted.
“Up until that point [in] my life, where I saw myself primarily as a technologist. And it wasn’t until I got to ClickUp where I started to see myself as a leader.”
Katrina Purcell has been running her own company for two years and still catches herself thinking like an employee. She gets to her computer at eight o’clock. When she goes to lunch with a client, she feels like she’s doing something wrong.
“The thought of putting myself as like a CEO or a founder is always like, always feel like there’s a qualifier and I need to get to a point where there’s not.”
Maggie Blackburn experienced the same friction from the other direction. After moving from consulting to tech, she found herself in unfamiliar territory.
“I remember just being very stressed and had imposter syndrome, didn’t know how to navigate certain situations internally.” She described the transition period honestly: “I feel like I was pretending sometimes like how to do something or that I knew the answer to.”
The thread connecting all of these stories isn’t about skill gaps or lack of preparation. In most cases, the capability was already there. The lag was internal. The identity hadn’t caught up to the reality.
If this resonates, forward it to a founder or a leader who’s been doing the work but hasn’t fully claimed the title yet.
From the Coaching Room
I coached a client who had clearly stepped into a leadership role. She was running the team. She was making the decisions. Her manager saw it too, and offered to promote her. She hesitated.
When we explored the hesitation, readiness wasn't the issue. She had the skills and the track record. The gap was identity. She saw herself as someone doing leadership work temporarily, as if the real leader would eventually show up and take over.
Through coaching, we challenged the limiting beliefs she was carrying about what kind of person gets to hold that title. We looked at the evidence: the decisions she’d already made, the team she’d already built, the trust she’d already earned. Once her identity aligned with leadership, the promotion wasn’t a leap. It was a natural next step.
The skill was never the bottleneck. The identity was. And once she closed that gap, everything else opened up.
What the Research Actually Shows
Identity Changes What Difficulty Means
Daphna Oyserman’s identity-based motivation theory, developed across multiple studies and published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology in 2009, rests on three core principles.
First, identities are dynamically constructed: though they feel fixed, they’re shaped by context and situational cues. Second, people prefer to act in identity-congruent ways. We don’t just pursue goals. We pursue the goals that feel like something a person like me would do. Third, and this is the finding that matters most here: when an action feels identity-consistent, people interpret difficulty as a sign that the task is important rather than a sign they should quit. When the action feels identity-incongruent, the same difficulty gets read as impossibility.
For founders, this reframes the entire question. Claiming the identity of leader, founder, or CEO is a motivational act, not a branding one. The label changes how you interpret the hard parts of the job: whether the friction of a tough quarter feels like evidence you're not cut out for this, or evidence that the work matters.1
Founder Identity Predicts Who Actually Makes the Leap
Hoang and Gimeno’s 2010 study in the Journal of Business Venturing examined how founder role identity affects entrepreneurial transitions. They found that people who viewed the founder role as central to their self-definition were more likely to actually make the transition from employee to entrepreneur, and more likely to persist through the early-stage difficulties that cause most people to quit.
The mechanism is worth noting: identity centrality reduced the anxiety and stress associated with role novelty. When “founder” felt like a core part of who someone was, the unfamiliarity of the role became tolerable rather than threatening. This maps directly to what Dani, Katrina, and Haris described. The capability was already there. What changed was whether the identity felt central enough to keep going when things got hard.2
How to Own the Title Before It Feels Earned
These aren’t mindset tricks. They’re small, deliberate ways to close the gap between who you already are and who you think you need to become.
Write your own permission letter.
Anyi heard about this on a podcast and did it while chopping vegetables. All that matters is the decision. Name the identity you've been circling: founder, leader, designer, whatever the word is. Then give yourself explicit permission to use it. Say it out loud or write it somewhere you'll see it. The act of naming it is what makes it real.
Audit how you introduce yourself.
Katrina noticed she always adds a qualifier when she calls herself a founder. Pay attention to the language you use when someone asks what you do. If you hedge, soften, or redirect, that’s a signal. Practice the clean version: “I run a company.” “I’m a founder.” “I lead the team.” No caveats. The way you describe yourself to others shapes how you describe yourself to yourself.
Separate the identity from the milestone.
Dani waited six months to a year before calling herself an entrepreneur, even though she was already building a business. The milestone (revenue, team size, funding) will always move. The identity doesn’t require you to hit a number first. If you’re doing the work, the title is already yours. Stop waiting for permission from a milestone that keeps shifting.
Find one environment where the new identity is the default.
Haris didn’t become a leader through self-reflection alone. It happened at ClickUp, in a context where leadership was the expectation. Put yourself in rooms, groups, or conversations where the identity you’re growing into is the norm. When the people around you treat you as the thing you’re becoming, the internal shift follows faster.
The Bigger Picture
The conventional path says: build the skill, earn the credential, get the validation, then call yourself the thing. Every founder and leader in this series did it the other way around. They claimed the identity before it felt comfortable, and then the capability caught up.
And the research is clear on why this works. When the identity leads, difficulty becomes fuel. When it doesn't, the same difficulty becomes a reason to stop.
“I think there was this like mental psychological flip or switch I needed to do for myself in order to even just embrace that identity.” ~ Anyi Sun
The gap between who you are and who you think you are is where many founders get stuck. Not in the strategy. Not in the execution. In the space between doing the work and owning the work.
Close that gap, and everything else gets easier.
Ready to try this yourself?
The Identity Alignment Audit is a coaching tool built on the GAP framework (Get Clear, Audit Your Evidence, Practice One Experiment). It’s designed to help you close the gap between who you already are and who you think you need to become.
Founder Circle
There’s probably a decision in this essay you recognized as yours. Founder Circle is a live, small-group coaching session where ten founders each work through one real challenge and leave with clarity they didn’t have walking in. Join us for our next circle by reserving your spot.
P.S. What’s a title or role you’ve been doing the work of but haven’t fully claimed yet? I read every response.
I’m Dar Patel, an ICF-certified executive coach (PCC) and founder of Little Pursuits. I partner with founders and executives through the leadership inflection points: the identity shifts, the hard conversations, the decisions you keep carrying alone. This newsletter is where that work meets the page. Find me on LinkedIn.
If you want to go deeper to check out the references used in our research:
1 Oyserman, D. (2009). Identity-based motivation: Implications for action-readiness, procedural-readiness, and consumer behavior. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 19(3), 250–260.
2 Hoang, H., & Gimeno, J. (2010). Becoming a founder: How founder role identity affects entrepreneurial transitions and persistence in founding. Journal of Business Venturing, 25(1), 41–53.
Oh I love this! And I feel this shift happening inside me right now. A few weeks back I attended a friends birthday party and hated to call myself a founder and already now I talk about my company way more confidently and even introduced myself as founder the other day 😬