It is sometimes expedient to forget who we are.

Your sense of who you are can quietly rule out useful things: asking a beginner’s question, doing a task beneath your title, changing your mind in public. Setting the self-image down for an hour is often what allows the work to move. Not everything has to be consistent with the story you tell about yourself, and the story is usually less interesting to others than you assume.

Find a task you have avoided because it seemed beneath you or outside your role. Do it once, quietly, without narrating it. Notice how little the identity you were protecting actually needed protecting.