Identity and Who I Believe I Am
The start of a new role comes with no promises for success. I’ve worked through my education, training, and experiences, in an effort to prove to others (employers, family, peers), and to myself, that my identity, matches with the title I hope to have (engineer, manager, director, CEO). When I’m hired or promoted, I get to try on the new title.
Imposter syndrome is a name given to the experience of feeling that what I am doing and how I am behaving is not measuring up with my expectations for the title I currently hold. This feeling challenges my identity and the story I have of myself. I’m intimately familiar with my failures and think that someone with these failures surely isn’t built for this role. On the other end of the spectrum is the Dunning-Kruger effect which imparts confidence even when my abilities are not actually in line with the role. I may resort to tools that are familiar to me (I have a hammer so every problem looks like a nail) so I have a sense of confidence even while the solution may be more nuanced.
Within a team or company, the interaction of these can become exacerbated. Folks with a lack of confidence and great opinions can be intimidated by others that exhibit high confidence and are not aware of their shortcomings. The confident person dominates the conversation and the best ideas are squelched. Decisions are deferred to the loudest voice in the room. Left unchecked and unchallenged within an organization the Peter Principle plays out and the most confident people get lauded and promoted until their lack of ability becomes an organizational liability.
All of these behaviors are grounded in the lack of a shared objective context. Consider the two graphs below with the same data on different scales. If my scope of objective reality is too narrow then my growth and abilities seem monumental, if my scope is too wide, holding standards far outside what is even exemplary, then my abilities seem dwarfed. I need to use an appropriate scale when I measure myself and compare myself with objective reality.
Where then, do we find objective reality? Is it found by looking at someone that I can use as a role model? This at least sets a benchmark that is external to my mind and is based on relative reality. It’s a start but certainly not objective and could lead to the same conclusions of inadequacy or superiority based on who we pick.
My organization may be able to help set the standard with career matrixes or ladders. This takes a broader view and certainly informs what is important for advancement within the organization. These measurements for an organization can also often be crafted to be similar within the same industry. For example, if I can become a great engineer at company X then that roughly translates to a great engineer at company Y, but not always. This is helpful to know how to become successful where you are but what about becoming successful outside of the bounds of your current situation?
Comparing my behaviors to a role model or a set of skills on a grid still focuses more on what I’m doing and not who I am. James Clear in the book Atomic Habits writes, “when you want to become better at something, proving your identity to yourself is far more important than getting amazing results.” As my identity is concerned, there are skills that I am gifted at and skills that require my concentration to just get by. The Japanese concept Ikigai means “a reason for being” and attempts to put a more concrete framework around evaluating identity. It not only asks the question, “What am I good at,” but also, “What do I love, what does the world need and what can I get paid for.” The intersection of all of those questions is Ikigai.
These questions may help drill in on our identity and how to set goals and make progress. Asking these questions can help not just with the immediate next successful step but aiming at longer more fulfilling life goals.
The Ikigai concept however is still just a set of questions. Questions that need grounding in objective truth. Asking the question, “What the world needs,” still leaves us wanting for a worldview to provide an answer. I, as a Christian, find this worldview in the Bible. The objective truth about who I am and how the world works is found in scripture and helps to ground my identity.
My identity is in Christ and what He has done. A helpful way to frame this is around the categories, indicative and imperative. Michael Horton outlines the two well when he says, “the indicative is a declaration of what God has done and of who we are in Christ as a result” and “the imperative instructs us in how we should therefore live out that new reality.” In a much more technical description, Herman Ridderbos makes the statement that “the imperative rests on the indicative and that this order is not reversible.” This appears to be what James Clear in his book Atomic Habits is grasping for but has the order reversed: “Your identity emerges out of your habits” and with his “simple two-step process:
1. Decide the type of person you want to be.
2. Prove it to yourself with small wins.”
Does this mean we do everything perfect when God declares us perfect in His sight? Unfortunately, reflecting on the last day of any of our lives proves this wrong. There is an already-but-not-yet tension that we aim our sights on living out the habits of who we truly are. We do what we do because we are who we are. Because we are all fallen and sinful we do not live our new nature perfectly but we are on the path to the not-yet of this perfect sanctification.
