Before we talk about performance-based identities, let’s take a quick quiz. Respond yes or no to the following descriptive statements about yourself. Most of the statements have details to help explain them. Write down the total number of “yes” answers on a separate piece of paper. Be honest with your answers and try not to judge what is good or bad.
1) There is a high need for control.
- Believe “Having control of __ will prevent me from being in pain.”
2) Frequently don’t relate to your own feelings.
- You’ve learned to hide or ignore your feelings.
- Expert at “stuffing them” because feeling hurts too much.
- Not showing feelings isn’t the same as not having feelings.
- Basic statements: “I don’t know what I feel”; “Whatever”; “I don’t care.”
3) Seem to lose sense of yourself in people.
- Look for that lost love in all the wrong places and ways.
- Afraid of losing person based on belief that fulfillment will go with him or her…
- Basic statements: “If he could only change, if he could love me right, then everything would be all right”; “If (name a person) were to die or leave me, I couldn’t go on living.”
4) Highly aware of performance.
- Have to work for three crucial needs (worth, acceptance and love) to be met
- Basic statements: “I’m acceptable when…”; “When I get this job I’ll be happy”; “I’ll be okay once I make a certain amount of money.”
5) Difficult to have fun without guilt.
- Uncomfortable with being enjoyed and enjoying others.
- Feel need to be accomplishing something.
- Difficult to just rest or do nothing.
6) Have feeling like don’t fit in.
- Feel out of step with other people and environment.
- Feel alone and like no one else is or has gone through what you have.
7) Tend to code when you communicate.
- You say, “That pizza smells really good!” instead of simply asking for a slice. Assume other will pick up hint without asking directly.
- Intentionally indirect in order to not hurt person or be rejected.
- Afraid to say what you really mean.
- Assume person can and will read your code.
8) Feel overly responsible.
- Believe you have power or ability to make someone happy.
- Feel need to compensate for others’ shortcomings or neglect.
9) Have a high level of worry.
- Continually in fear or worry about what others are thinking, doing, feeling.
- Continually second-guessing yourself.
10) A martyr.
- Make excuses for other person’s harm.
- Go out of way (expense, work, time, life, etc.) to make other person happy.
- Believe that if you work hard enough, are nice and loving enough, think of other person’s feelings instead if your own enough, etc., the person will change or come to finally appreciate and love you.
11) Afraid of being deserted.
- Feel need to perform or behave in order to hold onto people.
- Being alone equates with failure or unacceptability on your part. (“If I were a better wife, woman, mother, girlfriend, Christian, etc. they would not have left me.”)
12) Set inappropriate boundaries.
- Either too relaxed or too rigid. Trying to control pain either way.
- Practicing what you know and experienced.
13) Don’t allow mistakes (or admit them).
If you answered YES to 8 or more of the questions, you may have an identity that has a base in low self-esteem, shame, a negative self-concept and/or a performance-based identity. If this is you, don’t beat yourself up. Many, many people share this with you. The key is to add this information to what we are going to learn about performance and identify areas that may aiding in your fight to try to measure up.
Performance-based identity
When we think of the word performance, we usually relate the word to the arts, work, competition, or something done before an audience. Rarely do we connect the word to our identity; the condition or character as to who we are.
People with a performance-based identity try to get their crucial needs met through what they do instead of who they are. They believe, at some level, that they can earn love, acceptance, and worth by doing something or performing a certain way. They believe that if they can just perform well enough they can control the people and the world around them.
Often people will try to change their character, look different, act different, or will accept bad behavior from someone due to the belief that their performance will earn someone’s love. Some will judge others, deny any struggles they have in life, have an arrogant attitude, or appear strong and overly confident. Still others will work hard at their places of employment, positions of leadership, as parents, church members, teachers, CEOs, and students believing the harder they work and sacrifice the higher level of worth they will gain.
Young, old, male, female, positively programmed or negatively programmed, we all struggle with areas of performance-based identity. The reason why comes from the words of Janet Jackson’s 1986 hit song, “Control”: “Control of what I say, Control of what I do … Control to get what I want”.1
Performance-based identities are grounded in the desired for control. As humans, we cannot control certain events, God, other people, or the future, and we do not like that. However, if we can somehow hold onto the belief that we have a measure of control in how an event, God, other people, or the future will respond, we feel empowered and in the driver’s seat of our own lives.
The difficulty is in realizing that with the exception of a few things, we have very little control in our lives. Even our next breath or knowing if we will return home after saying goodbye to the family in the morning is out of our complete control.
Imagine this scenario: It is Christmas Day and my friend Valecia has a holiday dinner party and invites me. She spends the night before and the morning of cleaning the house and preparing everything for her guests. One of my favorite desserts made by Valecia is her Watergate Salad and she is making an extra bowl just for me. Imagine me entering her house and immediately starting to wipe off counters and clean the floors. Of course, Valecia would ask, “Charlotte, what are you doing? I’ve already spent the morning cleaning the house.” I ignore her and continue cleaning and setting the table. Again, Valecia would ask, “What are you doing?” I reply, “I know you made an extra bowl of Watergate Salad for me, and I just wanted to do something to let you know I’m grateful.” Valecia would smile and in her humorous way would say, “I made it so you could enjoy it, not work for it!”
While the scenario is laughable, we do similar performances all the time. It might not be an attempt to earn a way to the Watergate Salad bowl, but other scenarios happen in which we believe we need to earn or perform well in order to receive.
Performance-based identities can be difficult to interpret in our everyday lives. However, they are based on receiving worth, love, and acceptance through some type of performance. Even finding difficulty in asking for help is based on fear of having less worth.
Now that we have an insight into how performance affects our lives and decisions, let’s begin to explore how performance can steal our dreams. Regardless of the degree to which performance influences our identity, the fact remains that everything is a choice and we have the power to allow our performance to stand in the way of our dreams or to choose differently.
Performance-based identities are dream stealers because our dreams and each effort along the journey are based on how well we perform. If we make a mistake or fail in an attempt, we see it as an attack on our performance and a reflection of us. If a book is not selling well in our dream of becoming a national best-selling author, we might shut down and throw our dream to the side because the book is not meeting expectations, which is a reflection on our performance. If situations and difficulties are happening along the way, which they will, and we cannot overcome them easily inside our control, we wonder why goals are unmet despite our best performance.
One of the major ways performance acts as a dream stealer is through self-protection. Self-protection or defense mechanisms place a shield around us to keep pain out. The problem is that while the attempt creates a shield, it pushes out people, growth, and potential as well.
One of those self-protective shields takes the form of walls. Walls are emotional limitations that silently state, “I will only allow you to move to within a certain distance in getting to know me before I push you away or shut down.” The wall of protection prevents us from sharing and receiving information relationally, which is vital in walking out the journey. If walls are in place, when the journey becomes harder and the thought of giving up seems easier, no emotional support will be in place to help. The journey will be lonely and self-talk will certainly hinder the dream.
Another self-protective shield is unrealistic expectations. The interesting point about having unrealistic expectations of others is that we often have them of ourselves as well. Daily, we expect situations to happen. We expect our children to be home after school by a certain time, the mail carrier to bring the mail daily, and our favorite television programs to show at their designated time and day. All of those are typical expectations.
However, when typical expectations become unrealistic we can easily get discouraged, frustrated and give up on the dreams and visions we long for. A typical expectation of a friend coming to your house for coffee would be that he or she would arrive on time or close to the time of your appointment. It becomes unrealistic when we expect the friend to ask about our absence at a mutual event and then feel hurt and unseen when they don’t.
Unrealistic expectations make assumptions about what we believe should happen. When the expectation is unmet, the reaction is not to reverse or lower the expectation, but to ascribe blame or judgment to ourselves, something, or someone else.
Unrealistic expectations become dream stealers by making assumptions of where and what should be happening during the course of our journey to our dreams. When certain expectations are unmet, we slowly alter or begin to doubt our dream and ability to move toward it. With each unmet expectation comes more discouragement, frustration, stirred-up emotions, and push for performance until at some point we simply say, “It’s too hard to dream” and stop moving forward.
The good news is everything is a choice. It is and will be a continual practice of separating our feelings from the truth. Remember, our emotions are only indicators of something, they are most times, NOT based on reality therefore should not be used as fact. You can do this. Healing is a process and journey and not a goal. Take one step at a time and if needed, I highly suggest seeking professional help or someone with wisdom to walk with you in your process. No one can walk their journey alone.
Hopefully, you have enjoyed this series and have been able to answer some of your questions regarding the fight of trying to measure up and the impact on our needs for worth, love and acceptance.
Take care,
Charlotte
Dream Madly, Pursue Wildly, Trust Completely tm
Copyright © 2021 by Charlotte D. Hunt All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopy, or otherwise without written permission from the author except for brief quotations in printed reviews.
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