Watch the self-talk: The dangers of typecasting yourself

Originally published in April, 2020.

The internal alarms started to go off when Dan Brooks noticed a pattern in his son's speech.

When his son didn't get good grades, he would reply, "I'm not intelligent." When he didn't want to see people, the reason was, "I'm an introvert."

This kind of typecasting raised concerns for Brooks about the way his son might be boxing himself in.

It's something Brooks knows firsthand.

For eight years, Brooks lived alone and worked from home, an experience he describes as "radical freedom and radical isolation." He loved that lifestyle and identified with it. 

When his romantic relationship with a single mom became serious, Brooks had to choose whether to embrace the childless identity he'd assigned himself or break free from that type and follow a very different path.

'A radical change'

"To become serious in my relationship with the woman who is now my wife, I had to make a choice, because I knew that [going] down that road would be a radical change in how I lived," Brooks said.

"And I'm very glad that I made that choice. I have never for a moment regretted it. And I think that if I had instead gone with the oft-repeated aphorism, 'be true to yourself,' I might have closed myself off to that choice because it's not the kind of thing a 'guy like me' does, or did up to that point."

Brooks is a father now. It's a role he takes very seriously. And he says it's one example of how assigning yourself as a "type of person" can be positive. 

"It's important for me to think of myself as a dad because if I get up every morning and I re-evaluate my role from scratch, I'm going to wind up bailing out on a lot of responsibilities and it's really important to me to fulfil those responsibilities," he said.

"I think that continuity of an idea of yourself from yesterday to tomorrow is crucially important."

But Brooks warns that the opposite can be true: dismissing yourself as a certain type of person can be an easy way to absolve yourself from responsibility.

Love is not something you feel, it's something you do.- Dan Brooks

"If I regard myself as a fundamentally dishonest person and that's just my nature, it doesn't feel as bad to lie on my taxes as it does if I think of myself as a person with free will who is affirmatively making that decision every time I do it," he said.

Brooks doesn't deny that people may have inherent tendencies, but he urges us to remember that we can choose to do something different, to evolve or change.

And ultimately he believes that actions speak louder than words.

"Love is not something you feel, it's something you do,"Brooks said. "There are so many times when we'll treat the people we love badly and then say, 'But I love you.' And I think if we understand love as an act, an opportunity to be good to other people, it becomes a much more powerful idea."

Dan Brooks is a freelance writer based in Missoula, Mont. His article Raising a person in a culture full of types was published in Outline.com.