Dear Leaders,

I have a friend who is chronically late.

Not occasionally late. Structurally late. Everyone who knows her automatically assumes she’ll arrive ten to X minutes after the agreed time. Including her.

At this point, if she suddenly became consistently punctual, it would feel psychologically disorienting because it would no longer match the story she has repeated about herself for years.

Being late is no longer a behavior. It’s identity.

And that’s how labels work.

First we form the label. Then the label forms us.

A bad project becomes “I’m not a leader.” An uncomfortable conversation becomes “I’m not good with people.” A missed number becomes “I’m not a business person.”

We call it self-awareness; quick to integrate it into our identity.

Speaking of quick, in 1954, Roger Bannister ran a mile in under four minutes. No one had ever done it. It was considered impossible. Once Bannister achieved the “impossible,” thirty-seven runners did it the next year, and three hundred within two years.

The mile, of course, didn’t get shorter, nor did human beings suddenly evolve. “Impossible” became “done.” And once it was done, everyone else’s nervous system got the memo.

The limit was always definitional, never physiological.

Steven Pressfield writes: “It’s one thing to lie to ourselves. It’s another to believe it.” The label starts as a lie: a hasty conclusion drawn from a bad quarter, a failed project, or a single humiliation. That part is forgivable. The lie becomes the problem only when we stop treating it as one.

Over time, it stops feeling like interpretation and starts feeling like fact.

And the damage isn’t that labels are false. It’s that they become self-fulfilling. Once we’ve decided – and worse, announced – what we are, our behavior organizes around the story. We stop attempting the thing the label forbids. We outsource it, avoid it, and apologize for it. Every time we do, the label calcifies a little more.

Worth making a distinction here, because we often conflate the two:

A trait is something we consistently do.

A label is something we’ve decided we permanently are.

One describes behavior. The other forecloses it.

Being detail-oriented is a trait. “I’m not a big picture thinker” is a label. Preferring solo work is a trait. “I’m not a collaborator” is a label. Struggling with public speaking is a trait – a skill gap, at worst. “I’m not a natural communicator” is a label, and the moment we say it out loud, we’ve just abandoned our own development.

Traits tell us how we currently operate. Labels tell us what we’re no longer allowed to attempt.

That’s the line. Too often we cross it without noticing. And we don’t only do it to ourselves. We do it to the people around us with the same casual confidence.

“He’s a perfectionist.”
“She’s not a people person.”

And so on.

We say these things like we’re offering useful information. We’re not. We’re issuing verdicts on other people’s ceilings.

A boss who tells a young analyst “you’re not really a strategic thinker” hasn’t made an observation. They’ve instead planted an instruction. A parent who tells a child “you’re just like your father/mother, you never finish anything” hasn’t just expressed frustration, but written a script. A teacher who decides in October that a student is “not academic” hasn’t assessed a child, they’ve predicted one.

In fact, in 1968, psychologists Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson ran an experiment in a San Francisco elementary school. Teachers were told that certain students had been identified as likely to show significant intellectual growth that year.

The students had been chosen entirely at random.

But the teachers believed the label. So they treated those students differently. They gave them more attention, more patience, more encouragement, and more belief. By the end of the year, those students showed measurably higher IQ gains than their peers.

The expectation became performance.

This became known as the Pygmalion Effect: performance rises to meet expectation. Every time we casually label someone as limited, difficult, or fixed, we’re not simply describing them. We’re shaping them.

That’s a significant amount of power to exercise thoughtlessly.

I worked with a Senior Partner at a global consultancy. She was sixteen years in, exceptional at client relationships, considered herself categorically “not a leader.” She’d said it so many times it had become organizational fact. Her peers believed it. Her superiors believed it. She was on the unspoken track to remain a brilliant individual contributor until retirement.

When she said it to me, I stopped her, just like I stop any client who hands me their label, and asked the same question:

“When did you decide you were that?”

She paused longer than people usually pause. Then told me about a failed team project in 2011: put in charge of people she hadn’t chosen, during a crisis she hadn’t caused, with no support from above. She’d called it leadership, it hadn’t worked, and she’d closed the file permanently.

So I asked her to think of a time she wasn’t that. A time she’d influenced people, taken charge of a room, or made a decision that others organized around.

She had three examples inside two minutes. She’d just never filed them under the right category.

Over the next four months, she began realizing that a difficult year had subtly turned into a permanent self-definition. Today, she runs a global business unit – and does it damn well.

Same person. Different story.

So, how do you actually drop a label that’s been load-bearing for a decade?

Don’t challenge it directly. Arguing with your own identity is a losing fight. The identity always has more evidence on its side.

First, introduce ambiguity. Do one thing the label says you can’t. Make it questionable. Once it’s questionable, it’s already losing.

The goal here isn’t transformation. The goal is a crack.

Second, change the tense. Stop saying “I’m not a ______ person” and say “In the past, I’ve struggled with _______” Sounds like a small edit. It isn’t. The first sentence is a closed door. The second is a door that was closed. One is identity. The other is history. And history, unlike identity, is something you’re allowed to move past.

Third, watch what you say about other people. And not just for their sake, but because the labels you assign outward reveal the ones you’re most loyal to inward. The executive who constantly calls everyone around them “not strategic” is often revealing something unresolved in their own relationship with strategy, judgment, or uncertainty.

You’ve been many things in your life that you no longer are. The label you’re carrying isn’t a personality. It’s a position you took in a moment that no longer exists.

The moment’s passed. It’s time for you to move on too.

Onward,
Hamza