The Biology of Becoming, Part VII: Identity Expansion

Why Becoming Someone New Feels Uncomfortable (and Should)

I have noticed over the years, there is a particular kind of discomfort that doesn’t come from failure, but from growth.

Unlike the pain of failure which at least in your mind can seem like everyone saw that, the pain from growth arrives quietly, without spectacle. Not as panic, but as friction. You feel a little more annoyed at things, maybe even verbally or physically awkward. It’s at times like that you get that subtle sense that something is off, even when everything on the surface appears to be working. What is happening?

For example, you step into a room where you don’t quite recognize yourself in the role you’re playing. You’ve stepped into that same room many, many times before. But today, it feels a bit foreign, or rather you do within it. And then, to your own surprise, you feel it again when your voice sounds more certain than you’re used to hearing it. What is this?

Your life begins to expand beyond the version of you that once felt stable, and almost immediately, there is an instinct to pull back. Boy, do I know that feeling well. Retreat! Retreat! Soften, shrink, be smaller and go back to the familiar.

To a nervous system as ancient as ours is, unfamiliar and unsafe have always lived side by side.

The Brain That Prefers the Known Self

In simple terms, the brain is not designed for becoming, rather it is designed for doing, and maybe being, and certainly prediction.

At every moment, it is constructing a model of who you are, how you behave, what you value, and what is likely to happen next. If there is no change of state in progress, this model is efficient. It conserves energy and it keeps you coherent. It makes so much sense that this wiring served us for thousands of years – it kept us in our place, safe, and among things we knew we could face or conquer at least as a species.

But coherence has a cost, because the moment you begin to behave outside that model – to speak differently, to take risks you wouldn’t have taken before, to imagine a life that does not align with who you have been – the brain registers something important. Instead of ticking along based on a program it has run metabolically efficiently thousands of times, it registers a prediction error. And prediction errors do not feel like opportunity, they feel like instability.

You feel it in the body before you can name it in the mind. For some they feel it as a tightening in the chest or other key organs – maybe their gut or throat. You know I am increasingly fascinated and surprised at how well we DON’T actually know our bodies, or rather relate to them in the way we do a math equation or a piece of fruit we pick up at the store because it’s just perfect. For many of us these moments are uncomfortable and unknowable enough that in fact we DO retreat. We second-guess decisions that felt clear moments before, and submit to the urge to retreat back toward the familiar version of yourself, even when that version no longer fits.

But this here my friends – this is the biological edge of identity expansion. It’s not failure, it’s not weakness, it’s actually not a sign that we should stop evolving but it FEELS like it is. And if you, like me, find that you have or have had this feeling many times in your life and perhaps even at greater frequencies over the last 15-20 years, that’s because the pace of change around you has been cueing you to evolve, to transform, to become in response to a rapidly accelerating world around you.

But the nervous system trying to preserve a version of you it already understands.

Io and the Cost of Unintegrated Change

Which brings us, unexpectedly, to Io.

Who is Io? In the ancient Greek myth of Prometheus – who stole fire from the gods (read: “tech”) and gave it to humanity – our leading man was chained to a rock to live out the repeated fate of having his liver eaten daily by an eagle for rest of eternity. And in this myth, Io is the leading lady, if you will, of the story. As punishment for her proximity to a love triangle between Prometheus, Zeus and Hera, Io is turned into something she does not recognize. If the metaphors aren’t enough for you already – jealous Hera transforms Io into a cow (even in 479 B.C. Aeschylus knew what a mean girl would do). Io is left alongside Prometheus, also for eternity, to wander endlessly, chased by a gadfly she cannot escape, unable to rest, unable to stabilize, unable to return to herself.

Now this story is often told as punishment, but if it isn’t also something else. It is modern and timeless all at the same time – Prometheus pays the price of moving too fast for the structure around him, and Io ends up paying the price of constant motion without alignment or integration with who she was, is or is becoming. She is unmoored, unable to reconcile what she has become with what she once was. And so she moves – restless, reactive, perpetually in motion, but never at rest.

Especially when it comes to money and wealth, we tend to think of growth as something we want more of. The same is true for most of our lives as well when it comes to success, or scale, or anything to do with power and access. But Io reminds us that change without integration is going to feel just like she does: unmoored, restless, incapable of restoring.

And so in a world that is accelerating faster than any generation before us has experienced, that risk is no longer theoretical. It is lived. Io is us, and the fire is everywhere. How on earth did this happen?

The Acceleration We Are Carrying

For most of human history, identity evolved slowly. I know, the most overused phrase in investment management is “this time it’s different,” but hear me out. For most of the centuries that preceded this one, roles were relatively stable. Lives unfolded along relatively predictable lines, and even institutions like religion and marriage held up. They did their job and the rate of change made that possible. ‘Becoming’ was something that happened over decades, often within the same social and cultural container.

But in the last fifteen to twenty years, something shifted:
• Technology compressed time.
• Careers became fluid.
• Information became immediate.
• Comparison became constant.

And now, with the rise of artificial intelligence, even the definition of value – what it means to contribute, to create, to matter – is being rewritten in real time. Who’s got the time to become gradually? We are being asked to become continuously, and if you are not heeding that request, your body might be signaling some dissonance with that reality as well.

Reconfiguring who we are at a pace our biology was never designed to comfortably process is not something there are Greek myths written about – only myths about what it feels like if you don’t. And interestingly, for many women, this acceleration is not new, but it is amplified now more than ever.

Because while Io belongs to mythology, the experience she represents – the demand to be many things, often all at once, and constantly in motion doing it – has long been embedded in the architecture of a woman’s life.

• be capable, but not threatening.
• be ambitious, but not at the expense of others.
• be present, but also run a separate agenda in the background where you are progressing.
• be selfless, but still somehow at some point, we are expected to “arrive” self-actualized.

And now, in a world that is accelerating, those expectations have not been replaced, they have been stacked.

“Career” is no longer a single trajectory. It’s adaptive, evolving, and constantly recalibrated.
“Motherhood”, for those who choose it, is no longer a contained role. It’s immersive, identity-shaping, and often concurrent with peak earning and performance years. Health, relationships, contribution, visibility – all of these faculties are constantly expanding, all demanding presence but like Io, underneath it all, the same nervous system.

Remember at the heart of it, the brain is a prediction engine. It wants stability, and yet here we are with identity expansion happening over decades and sometimes even shorter horizons – years even – trying to predict, stabilize, and answer a question it was never designed to answer at this speed: Who am I now?

Why do I bring this up? Two reasons.

1) There is a quiet risk here. I’m not worried that women will fail to become, bur that they will be asked to become so many things, so quickly, that integration becomes secondary to performance. And if we stand any chance at closing the wealth gap or perhaps changing the definition of what wealth actually feels like, it does not seem fair to women or men alike, that integration should be valued any less than performance, financially or otherwise. And,

2) Because – believe it or not – I, yours truly, played the role of Io in the 1997 production of Prometheus Bound at Robinson Memorial Theatre in my second year at McMaster University while competing my undergrad.

What the heck did I know then about any of this? I’ll tell you: nothing. Saw none of it coming. Didn’t see integration coming, didn’t see wealth management coming for me, didn’t know I would have two kids, multiple businesses, and an equally strong desire to be as much Betty Crocker as I wanted to be Wonder Woman and Oprah Winfrey. But what I do remember is that playing the role of Io was utterly exhausting. Emotionally, physically, rehearsals through performances – viscerally I felt sorry for the woman who could not stop moving frantically.

And yet, here we are. What is it that they say about history? Or instead, what is it that I am saying about identity: it becomes something managed externally, rather than metabolized internally. Here I am playing all of those roles, and like many of you, there are more moments in a week than I might like to admit to where movement replaces coherence.

Still, there is another truth sitting just beneath this one.

Because if identity expansion is the defining demand of this moment – if the ability to hold multiple forms of self, across time and context, is what the future requires –

Then the very experience that has stretched women across roles, across expectations, across identities… May not be a disadvantage, but a form of preparation.

What we have done for centuries is a type of “biological and psychological cross-training” for a world that is only now asking everyone else to do the same.

Which raises my next question: If not those who have already learned how to hold complexity – how to integrate, not just perform – then who?

The Myth of Identity Death

It would be easy, at this point, to assume that the solution is to simplify. Just choose one identity, stabilize, and stop expanding.

But I’m going to suggest that is not how biology works, and it’s definitely not where growth lives. And as we’ve learned in past weeks: the brain loves goals and dopamine loves direction.

We often describe reinvention as if it requires leaving something behind, but the brain does not erase. This is one of the coolest things I can report anecdotally based on my experience AND it’s backed by science. The brain does not erase – instead it reorganizes.

The neural pathways that once defined you do not disappear – most certainly they quiet and weaken, but they remain. And under the right conditions (meaning you don’t completely outsource them to an AI in the meantime, nudge nudge), they return – often faster, and stronger, than something entirely new. Which means something important.

Those earlier versions of you, the ones that feel like past lives, are not gone, but stored.

The Lives We Carry Forward

Before I was a writer, a speaker, a wealth advisor, I was an art student. Before that, I was a competitive figure skater. Disciplined, creative, immersed daily in movement and expression in ways that felt, at the time, like the whole story, and then life expanded and presented other roles to take on and responsibilities I could – let’s say – subscribe to. I mean at the time, motherhood felt like “what you’re supposed to do next” but to be fair, my life goals from the time I was 20 were “fully paid for house, two kids, and quiet money.” So building something stable, something meaningful, something that could hold weight over time became the goal. For then.

And then, for a while, those newer identities felt like they belonged to someone else. But nothing was lost. The skater remained in the discipline, in the physical intelligence, in the ability to push through discomfort. The artist remained in the way I saw patterns, in how I shaped ideas, in how I communicated meaning.

And when I began writing, speaking, training again, not as a continuation, but as something new, it wasn’t a reinvention it was a reassembly.

The Biology of Integration

The fastest way forward is not always forward, sometimes, it is backward. And I don’t mean going backward to stay there but to retrieve something. This is one of my favourite coaching exercises learned from a coach I had WAY back in the 2010s, which was recalling the top 100 things you liked to do as a kid. Who lists 100 of anything these days? And who’s got the time to do it with a pen? Well that was the exercise. Retrieving some of those prized, deeply valued “stored” identities can be one of the most authentic ways to refortify your current identity, and without the metabolic cost of integrating something new.

Because identity expansion is not about becoming someone entirely new, it’s about becoming someone who can finally use everything you have already been. Your nervous system does not need you to start from nothing.

My Quiet Invitation For You

If becoming someone new feels uncomfortable, it’s not a sign you are doing it wrong, it’s a sign your nervous system is updating.

But before you look for the next version of yourself somewhere out ahead – something unfamiliar, something not yet formed – pause. Look back. Not with nostalgia, rather with curiosity.

Because hidden in the earlier versions of your life are often the exact capabilities, instincts, and passions you need now.

You don’t have to start from nothing.

You never did.