CHAPTER 2
IDENTITY CRISIS
At the end of every year, organizations like the American Dialect Society, Merriam-Webster, and the Oxford University Press name a Word of the Year. This is the night when the stars of the word world hit the red carpet. It’s the Oscars of words.
In 2015, dictionary.com named identity as their Word of the Year. I bet the words that gave birth to identity were elated. Evidently, the people of dictionary.com had made their decision after spending some time looking through the headlines. Because that year saw article after article wrestling with some of the most complicated and discussed questions of our day—questions about identity.
• Is it possible for a person to have been born to white parents but identify as black? Rachel Dolezal seemed to think so.
• When people identify with a gender other than the one they were identified as at birth, which bathroom should they be allowed to use? Houston, Texas, took a citywide vote on this question.
• If a government clerk identifies as a Christian, should her identity as a Christian allow her to refuse issuing licenses for same-sex marriage? In Rowan County, Kentucky, Kim Davis went to jail because she believed so.
Questions about identity are front and center in our society. Should we be surprised? Few things are as crucial to who you are than how you see yourself and how others see you. The problem with identity is that it’s . . . squishy. Like Jell-O, it’s challenging to pin to the wall. Psychologists Erik Erikson, Carl Jung, and Sigmund Freud dedicated their careers to countless hours of research and wrote volumes of theories to answer what identity is and is not. So maybe you’re thinking, With all of this top-level research, do you think you have something to add to the conversation? I believe I do. Actually, I believe we all do.
Near the core of what makes a person a leader is their sense of identity. The way you see yourself is determinative for your life and for the decisions you make as a leader. Your sense of identity directs you in every situation. It is foundational, determining the level of confidence you have when you challenge your boss in a disagreement. It establishes your sense of security when you face doubts. It’s what enables you to process your emotions during tense conversations. Though much of your identity is formed at an early age, your identity is always evolving. So it’s never too early or too late to begin processing your sense of self.
Near the core of what makes a person a leader is their sense of identity.
Your personal identity is even more crucial when you’re determining how best to lead when you’re not in charge. Most people in this situation focus on learning new behaviors to compensate for a lack of authority, but the challenge goes deeper than that. Leading well without formal authority has less to do with your behavior and far more to do with your identity. Like the ace of spades, who we are trumps what we do every time.
During that crucible of clarity a few years ago in Andy’s office, I processed a full swath of emotions. On one side, I felt insecure and inadequate, looking for the nearest corner to ball up into. Do I have what it takes to lead well? I think I’ve been passively avoiding doing what I need to do to lead well. Is it because I don’t have what it takes to lead well? I’ve been put in this position. I don’t deserve it. I haven’t actually done anything to warrant this opportunity. What if I’m exposed as a counterfeit leader? What if I can’t do this?
On the other side, I could feel my pride being threatened, and I wanted to rise up and defend myself. How dare you question my ability to lead! Do you know how difficult it is to exist in your shadow? Do you know the frustrations that come with trying to navigate the complexity of this organization? If only I were in charge . . . I’m not exactly sure what I would do, but I wouldn’t make people feel this way.
I have found that amid swirling emotions, my ability to calmly process my thoughts with awareness and emotional intelligence is largely dependent on the security of my identity. It’s as if all the work I have or haven’t done to see myself accurately comes to call in that moment. If I’ve spent too much time dwelling on my failures and inadequacies, it will show in my response. If I’ve spent too much time re-watching my own highlights, it will also show. If identity is anything, it’s everything.
I’ll tell you this right now: every distortion between the authority you have and the leadership you exercise can be traced to a crisis of identity. Whether it’s the “under the thumb” authoritarian or the power-hungry ladder-climber or the passively reluctant leader, every leadership distortion is ultimately rooted in the ever-so-important chamber of identity. How we see ourselves affects our ability to follow others, our ability to lead others, and our ability to find the future God has for us. And until you know who you are, you cannot do what God has called you to do. As we will see in this chapter, before God pushes men and women into the call of duty, he shapes and molds their character by speaking into their identities. He has done that with me, and I believe he wants to do the same with you.
Kurt Vonnegut famously said, “I am a human being, not a human doing.” Vonnegut was an avowed atheist and president of the American Humanist Association, but his observation parallels the orthodox Christian view of how God created us. We were crafted in God’s image to be something before we were given any mandates to do something. This tells us something about God, but it also says much about how God sees us. Another way to say this is that our identities precede our actions; our behaviors flow from our identities. So before we spend any energy on what we do as leaders, we really need to spend some time on who we are as leaders, especially when we are not the ones in charge.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY
Are there certain movies you just can’t resist watching when you run across them while channel surfing? For me, it’s any of the Bourne movies, A Few Good Men, and Catch Me If You Can. These movies are like communal pizza. It’s hard to just have one slice when there are more available. These are actual “Netflix and Chill” movies, in the purest sense of the term. Catch Me If You Can might have a leg up on the others because it’s based on a true story. Frank, if you’re reading this, let’s hang sometime. Here’s a quick synopsis of the story line in case your church has recently been boycotting Hollywood:
Frank Abagnale, Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio) grew up in a home where impressing his father was everything to him. His appetite for approval and his thirst for thrills drove him to impersonate a doctor, a lawyer, and a copilot for a major airline. And he did all of this before his eighteenth birthday. As a master of deception, Frank not only bounced from career to career, but he also brilliantly forged checks to the tune of millions of dollars. All of this led to a cat-and-mouse game between Frank and FBI agent Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks). Carl made it his mission to capture Frank, but Frank was always one step ahead.
This movie is all about identity. As Frank struggled to find himself, he chased everything he wanted to be. Like so many of us, Frank was chasing a particular identity because of his desire to please someone else. In his case, he was trying to make his father proud. Seems innocent enough, right? Unfortunately, trying to make their fathers proud is just one of the traps young leaders fall into when they don’t have a firmly established identity. But that’s not the only one.
I’ve found there are three common identity traps that snag young leaders, especially when they are trying to lead without being in charge. We’ve all been guilty of choosing from multiple passports, using a fake ID, or misrepresenting height and weight on a driver’s license. Here’s what I mean by each of these.
CHOOSING FROM MULTIPLE PASSPORTS
Early in the movie The Bourne Identity, Jason Bourne walks into a Zurich bank. The only clue he has to his identity is this:
000–7–17-12–0–14–26
Gemeinschaft Bank
Zurich
Because he suffers from dissociative amnesia, Bourne knows nothing of his real identity other than the fact that he was fluent in several languages and had some sick combat
skills. Wearing a loose-fitting zip-up sweater, Bourne craftily works his way through the bank, finds privacy to open the safe-deposit box, and realizes his picture, with different names, is attached to multiple passports from multiple countries. I love that scene because it’s so easy to get wrapped up in the identity crisis Bourne is having.
Unless you work for the CIA (or have dual citizenship), you’ve probably never had to flip through multiple passports to decide who you are going to be for the day. Unfortunately though, many young leaders can relate to changing their identity to fit their circumstances. Attempting to be outgoing because you think it will make your boss happy isn’t healthy. We’ve all seen the person who tries to be the funny guy because he thinks that will allow him to fit in. We’ve all seen the girl who tries to be the boss when the boss walks out of the room because she thinks that’s what leadership is. Choosing an identity based on the situation and circumstances might have worked for Jason Bourne, but it won’t work for you.
It’s one thing to determine what posture and approach fits the circumstances you’re facing. It’s another thing for the instability of your identity to create wobble in your persona because you’re trying to fit in or because you think it’ll help you win. We’ve all felt the pressure to be who others want us to be. Most of us faced this temptation in middle school. Sadly, it doesn’t end there. It doesn’t matter if you are the President of the United States or a mentor to high school students—if your identity is unstable, you’ll subconsciously flip through identities to find the one you think others need you to be.
USING A FAKE ID
Though some may not believe this based on my grade point average, I wasn’t a big drinker while attending Georgia Tech. But one night I used a fake ID to get into the local bar called Moondogs. This bar was so popular among students that the church across the street was nicknamed Moondogs Methodist (that still makes me laugh). Pulling my hat down low on a Thursday night, I anxiously stood in line before the supersized bouncer, trying to memorize the address, height, and weight of the dude I was pretending to be. I got in, but I had to sweat through an uncomfortable fifteen seconds while the bouncer looked me over and examined my ID.
Pretenders don’t last very long. Standing in line with my fake ID wasn’t just a compromise of my integrity; it created real anxiety for me. I wasn’t comfortable pretending, and I knew deep down that pretending wouldn’t work well for me in the long term. Yet the truth is that you and I pretend all the time, especially when we’re under pressure. We do this by projecting an image that we have it all together. We work longer hours to make sure we’re seen as proficient and committed. Most of the time, these things are so subtle that we don’t even notice we’re doing them. But we find clues in the nuances of how we tell a story, what details we share and don’t share with others, and who we blame when something goes wrong.
No one wants to be known as a pretender. For teenagers, college students, and young leaders, being called “fake” is an egregious insult. Because of that, I’ve seen many young leaders admit weaknesses in the name of keeping it real. I love the authenticity of that. But we have to find the balance between authentically admitting our weaknesses and excusing weaknesses. Too many young leaders use phrases like “That’s just who I am” or “They just need to know that’s how I’ve always been” to excuse areas of potential growth.
Why are we so tempted to pretend? Using a fake ID is a form of hiding who we are that began back in the Garden of Eden. After Adam disobeys God’s command and eats from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in Genesis 3, God looks for Adam and asks him where he’s been. Adam responds by saying, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid” (Gen. 3:10, emphasis mine). Because he had broken trust with God, Adam was hiding and didn’t want to be found or known by God. Pretending (or hiding ourselves from God and others) is a spiritual issue. It’s rooted in a failure of trust, a failure to believe what God says about us. I’ll get to that in a bit. For now, we can all agree that pretending is a consequence of the fall.
MISREPRESENTING HEIGHT AND WEIGHT ON A DRIVER’S LICENSE
Don’t we all exaggerate our height and weight on our driver’s license . . . just a little bit? I had always assumed so. For the longest time, I continued to live in a time warp, thinking I was still a college student. My driver’s license indicated that I weighed 165 pounds, and when the time came to renew, I just added another ten pounds and called it good. I was pretty sure I had gained an inch or two around the waist, but who needs to actually measure these things?
The consequences of being “generous” on your driver’s license are minimal. But being overly generous with the way you see yourself—your self-identity—can have far more significant consequences. And it can go two ways. Honestly, I don’t know which is more damaging—being too critical or thinking too highly of yourself. Either way, accepting a distorted identity is failing to live in reality, which will ultimately erode your ability to lead.
Paul speaks directly to this problem in Romans 12:3 (emphasis mine), “For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you.” A distorted identity will cause you to think too lowly or too highly of yourself, when the goal is to think rightly. If you think too lowly, you will often see yourself as unqualified or unworthy of leadership, and you will miss opportunities to make change and create something great with the responsibility you’ve been given. If you think too highly of yourself, you will tend to overestimate your abilities and may even take credit for the work of others in an effort to promote yourself. You’ll tend to hide your mistakes and make much of your successes, and you’ll live in constant fear of being exposed as a fraud.
Finding the correct identity is a constant challenge for every human on the planet. The temptation of choosing from multiple passports, using a fake ID, or misrepresenting height and weight will never go away, but when your identity is rooted in something, you are much more likely to live and lead from a place of stability and security. The rest of this chapter is an attempt to pour concrete on the identity that will lead to the best version of you.
THIS IS US: THE ARCHITECTURE OF IDENTITY
As you can see, your self-identity is complicated, so let’s put it in simple terms: your identity is the conception you have of yourself. It is those core beliefs about yourself that you tell yourself all day long. The most important ongoing conversation you have in your life is the one you have with yourself every day.
There are five basic components of identity, and to help you remember them, I’ve made sure they all start with the letter “P.” They are your past, your people, your personality, your purpose, and your priorities. Let’s take a closer look at each one.
Your Past
Your family plays a large role in sculpting your identity. And this includes factors like your race, your socioeconomic class, your citizenship, and your gender. How you see your family of origin and the lineage of people from which you’ve come determines the constancy and consistency of your identity.
This is your self-in-time.
When I think about my family of origin, I notice a few key factors that have strongly influenced how I see myself. I have great parents. My father is a man of exceptional character. As a kid, I always respected his ability to identify the right thing to do and the best attitude to display. My mother is the captain of my cheerleading squad. Someone once told me that Alexander the Great’s mother, Olympias, repeatedly told him he was the son of a god. We all know he wasn’t (he was the son of Philip II of Macedonia), but his mom obnoxiously believed far more about him than he even believed about himself. My mom never told me I was the son of a god, but her faith in my abilities and my potential was a powerful force in shaping my identity. Her wind in my sails pushed me ahead on days when I would’ve packed it up and gone home.
; For those of us who are Christians, we cannot neglect to mention that great and sometimes not-so-great cloud of witnesses (listed for us by the unknown author of Hebrews) that has preceded us. My faith in God and the examples of those who have come before me have had a profound influence on my life. The more I’ve processed my own identity, the more I’ve been able to identify some of these important voices from my past.
How has your past shaped how you see yourself? A worthwhile exercise to help you find your self-in-time would be to chart your life on a timeline by picking five highs and five lows from your past and marking them chronologically. If you’ve never done this, it’s a great exercise to do with a team or a group.
Your People
Your identity is not just a matter of how you perceive yourself based on your past, but it’s also based on how you sense others perceive you today. The people you’re surrounded by in your existing relationships and roles distinctly shape who you are in the here and now. Have you ever felt like you were a different person in different seasons of your life? We’ve all had that experience and it’s because who we’re around in different seasons of life has such a profound impact on who we are. The people we are in relationship with greatly affect how we see ourselves.
This is your self-in-relationships.
I was recently speaking with a good friend who was telling me that he felt like he was “losing himself in his new job.” As we processed this together, he began to identify how the people he was working with in this particular organization were toxic for him. Their values were so opposed to his, and that constant pressure and tension were deeply affecting him. We’d all like to think that the people around us don’t change how we see ourselves—that we are in complete control of our identity—but that’s just not true.
How to Lead When You're Not in Charge Page 3