If I’m to follow the pilot interviews I’ve been doing, then the next stage of this will be for me to select and focus on particular episodes (side question: are experiences episodic?) in more detail. I’ve been using some of the interview tasks that Dan McAdams (1997) used in his book “Exploring Your Myth”, and which feature in Leonie Sugarman’s (2001) excellent “Life-Span Development”.
But I decided first that I should let yesterday’s posting sit for a day or two before taking a look at it again. And anyway, back at work after the long break, today I found two questions came to my mind. The first was “why reflect at all?” The second “what do we mean by identity?”
Taking up the latter here, is identity what makes us the same, or what makes us the different? In the past, when I have asked myself the question “who am I?”, I have always treated it as an inward-bound question, that this is a personal matter and an internal question, with an answer unique to me. But in fact identity makes no sense as a concept unless it forms a comparison, and surely this means defining it by finding either similarity or difference.
Dictionary definitions of “identity” reveal nuances of meaning and an etymology from the Latin root for a sense of repetition:
a. the fact of remaining the same, in varying conditions of time and/or space
b. the fact of being oneself, and not another
c. the condition or character of who or what a person or thing is
d. the state of being the same as what is being described
e. the sense of self, providing sameness and continuity in personality over time
…and so on.
Simon Jenkins (2008) in his book “Social Identity” says that identity is established when we actively do two things – classify things or people, and then associate or attach ourselves within those classifications. Identity is not a thing, and does not reside in me (nor in you), but is a constant doing, a to-and-fro process of negotiation between you and me (and between ‘us’ and ‘them’?). Yet we defend, or cling to, the illusion of a static, solid and personally constructed self.
To grasp that is, I think, to have a handle on the question of the purpose of reflection as part of an educational process, such as this PhD.
Chris Dalton's Personal Development Blog 
The patterns that describe the cycle of my behavior, its recognition, and the resulting behavior of change are my identity.