A couple of years ago, I was the head coach of a high school Varsity Girls basketball team. We had eight players on the roster, five of whom were freshmen. We weren’t particularly experienced, and we didn’t win a lot of games. But one thing I appreciated about that group was that they competed. They played hard, stayed together, and continued giving their best effort even when the scoreboard wasn’t in our favor.
As a coach, I took pride in that. Of course, I wanted us to win more games. Winning matters, and I don’t think we should pretend otherwise. But I also understood the circumstances surrounding our team, and I believed the girls were learning lessons that would serve them beyond basketball. At the end of the season, however, the school decided to make a coaching change. I was being let go as the Girls head coach.
Our Athletic Director conducted the discussion at a highly professional level. She explained the reasons for the decision, and I accepted them. But I also became emotional. I shed a few tears sitting there with her. No ugly crying, thankfully! What upset me most was knowing I wouldn’t have the same opportunity to work directly with those girls that I cared about anymore. I enjoyed helping them develop as basketball players, and I wanted to continue helping them grow as people.
I was losing something meaningful to me, and that obviously hurt. But I didn’t feel that losing my coaching position meant I’d somehow become less valuable as a person. I didn’t believe our win-loss record defined who I was, either.
That experience has stayed with me because it raises a question I think applies to athletes, coaches, leaders, and just about anyone who cares deeply about what they do: Who are we when the thing we’ve been doing is no longer something we get to do?
When What We Do Becomes Who We Are
We identify ourselves through our roles all the time. When someone asks what we do, we might say we’re a basketball player, a coach, a teacher, a business owner, or a parent. Those descriptions are useful. They tell people something about our responsibilities, interests, and how we spend our time. And sometimes those roles become a very important part of how we understand ourselves.
Think about an athlete who has spent most of their life playing a sport. They may have started when they were very young. They’ve practiced for thousands of hours, made friendships through the game, experienced success and disappointment, and organized much of their daily routine around becoming better than they were the previous day. Being an athlete isn’t simply an activity for that person. It’s become a part of their identity.
I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with that. In fact, research suggests that having a strong athletic identity can be beneficial. A systematic review and meta-analysis examining more than 100 studies found associations between stronger athletic identity and positive characteristics, including motivation and commitment.¹
That makes sense to me because when something matters to us, we’re often more willing to invest our time and energy into it. We may find purpose in the pursuit, develop meaningful relationships, and feel connected to something larger than ourselves. The potential difficulty arises when that role becomes so central to our identity that we have trouble imagining ourselves without it.
Researchers have explored this through the concept of athletic identity foreclosure, which involves committing strongly to the athlete role without adequately exploring other aspects of identity. This can become particularly relevant when athletes experience injuries, retirement, or other transitions that prevent them from continuing in the same capacity.²
Imagine someone who has spent twenty years being known primarily as a basketball player. Then, one day, their playing career ends. They may still love basketball and possess tremendous knowledge of the game, but they no longer have the practices, games, teammates, and responsibilities that helped organize their lives. They may also lose a sense of belonging that came from being part of a team. That’s a significant adjustment, and I think it’s understandable that someone would struggle with it.
And it isn’t limited to athletes. A successful business owner might face the same challenge after selling a company. A leader might struggle after losing a position. A parent might experience something similar when their children become independent and no longer need the same kind of daily care.
Our roles can be meaningful parts of our identity. But I wonder what happens when we allow one role to become the entire answer to who we are.
Performance Is Information, Not a Complete Evaluation of a Person
Let’s return to my Girls basketball team. If I told someone that I coached a team that lost most of its games and I was subsequently fired, they might reasonably wonder whether I was a good coach. And I wouldn’t blame them for wondering.
Winning and losing are part of how we evaluate performance in competitive sports. Coaches are responsible for helping teams improve, preparing players, making decisions, and producing results. We can’t simply dismiss outcomes because they don’t reflect favorably on us. But outcomes don’t tell the entire story.
Our team had eight players, five of whom were freshmen. We faced teams with different levels of experience, depth, and talent. I didn’t duck any smoke when I made up our schedule. We competed hard, and I believe the girls made progress throughout the season. Those things mattered, even if they weren’t reflected in our win-loss record.
Interestingly, when the Boys Varsity head coach learned I was being let go, he asked our Athletic Director whether I’d be interested in joining his staff. This was a coach who had won multiple state championships, and he had just taken our Boys team to the state Final Four in his first year at the school. We didn’t have a particularly close relationship at that point, but because the Girls usually played before the Boys, he’d had opportunities to watch our team. Apparently, he’d seen something in how we played and how I coached that made him interested in working with me. And other schools also reached out after learning about my coaching change situation.
I appreciated that. It meant something to me to know that other people respected my work, especially coaches whose judgment I valued. But here’s something I’ve thought about since then: What if none of those opportunities had appeared? Would that have made me less valuable as a person? I don’t believe so.
Research on what psychologists call contingencies of self-worth helps explain why this distinction matters. Jennifer Crocker and Connie Wolfe proposed that people often base their self-esteem on success or failure in particular areas of Life, such as achievement, approval from others, or competition. When our sense of worth depends heavily on one of those areas, our self-esteem can rise and fall with what happens there.³
Think about two athletes who have terrible games. One might say, “I played poorly tonight. I need to understand what happened and figure out how to improve.” Another might say, “I played poorly tonight. I’m worthless.” Both athletes recognize that their performance was disappointing, but they’re drawing very different conclusions from the same experience. The first is evaluating what happened. The second is using what happened to evaluate their entire worth as a person.
And I think we need to be careful about doing that. We should be willing to evaluate our performance critically, acknowledge mistakes, accept responsibility, and recognize when we haven’t met our standards. But there’s a difference between saying we didn’t perform well and deciding that we aren’t good enough as human beings. A poor performance tells us something about what happened in a particular situation. It doesn’t tell us everything about who we are.
The Difference Between a Role and a Value
I’ve never been particularly interested in identifying myself primarily through titles. I’ve been a coach, mentor, and leader, among other things. Those roles have been important to me, and I’ve worked hard to fulfill their responsibilities. But I don’t think of them as the qualities that define me.
I try to approach what I do with a servant’s heart. I want to be kind. I enjoy seeing other people accomplish things that matter to them. I love encouraging people, helping them recognize their potential, and putting them in positions where they have opportunities to succeed. I just happen to express those qualities through coaching, mentoring, and leadership.
And I think that’s an important distinction. A coaching position gives me an opportunity to teach and encourage athletes, but I don’t need the title of head coach to care about someone’s development. A leadership position gives me an opportunity to help people succeed, but I don’t need a particular job title to support someone who needs help. Those opportunities might look different depending on my circumstances, but the values guiding my behavior can remain.
After I was dismissed as the Girls head coach, I decided to stay at the school and join the Boys’ coaching staff. I was excited about that opportunity, but I still cared about the girls I’d coached, so I continued supporting them. I became one of their biggest cheerleaders. When appropriate, I’d talk with some of the players, encourage them, and let them know I was rooting for them.
At the same time, I made a conscious effort not to get too involved. The girls had a new head coach, and I wanted her to have the opportunity to establish her own relationships, expectations, and direction for the program. My role had changed, and I needed to respect what that meant. But I could still care about the players and support their success.
Research on identity development suggests that our identities aren’t necessarily fixed descriptions that remain unchanged throughout our lives. A systematic review examining identity work among athletes explored how people develop, maintain, and revise their understanding of themselves through experiences, relationships, and major transitions.⁴
I find that useful because I don’t think maintaining a sense of identity means we have to remain exactly the same person forever. We learn, we change, and our responsibilities evolve. Sometimes our priorities do too. But, perhaps understanding what we value gives us some continuity through those changes. The title might change, the circumstances might change, and the opportunities available to us might change, but we can still ask ourselves how we want to behave within those circumstances, and then try to act accordingly.
What Happens When We Don’t Live Up to Our Values?
There’s a complication here, though, and I think it’s an important one. If I say that kindness, service, and helping others are central to who I am, what happens when I fail to act that way?
Because I certainly have.
In fact, one of the most important lessons I’ve learned about coaching happened during my very first coaching job, when I was still in high school. I was coaching my sister’s eighth-grade softball team. We had a pretty good group of girls, and one day during practice, we were scrimmaging. I was umpiring near second base when our shortstop missed a routine pop fly, and I yelled at her.
I don’t remember every word I said, but I remember her reaction. She immediately started crying, became very upset, and walked off the field. I felt absolutely awful. All these decades later, I can still picture her face.
It was one of those moments when you recognize almost immediately that you’ve done something you wish you hadn’t done. I was trying to coach a team, and I wanted our players to perform well. But in that moment, my reaction hurt someone I was supposed to be helping.
Fortunately, the story doesn’t end there. We maintained a relationship over the years, were close during our twenties, and still loosely keep in touch today. We can laugh about the incident now, but I haven’t forgotten it, and I don’t want to forget it, because it taught me something important about the responsibility that comes with coaching.
I learned that there was a limit to how hard I should push players, and that I needed to recognize when I was approaching it. That didn’t mean I stopped demanding effort or holding athletes accountable. I’ve had plenty of moments since then when I’ve pushed players hard, sometimes right up to that edge. But I’ve become much more conscious of making sure they know I care about them.
There’s an old saying in coaching that players don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. I think there’s a lot of truth in that. As I’ve continued coaching, it’s become increasingly important to me that players understand something: I want them to become excellent athletes, but them being a good person matters more.
Now, here’s what makes this relevant to identity. If I think of myself as someone who values kindness, does that mean I stop being that person the moment I behave unkindly? It’s not quite that simple. But I also don’t think we should use our good intentions as an excuse for behavior that hurts people.
Saying “I’m a kind person” doesn’t erase the fact that I yelled at that young softball player. I did it. It hurt her, and I was responsible for what happened. What mattered afterward was what I did with that experience.
Taking Responsibility Without Condemning Ourselves
There’s research that I think helps us understand this distinction. In a series of experiments, researchers Juliana Breines and Serena Chen examined how self-compassion influenced people’s motivation to improve after mistakes or personal shortcomings. They found that responding to failures with self-compassion could increase motivation to make amends, address weaknesses, and improve future behavior.⁵
I find that interesting because we sometimes assume that being hard on ourselves is necessary for accountability. We might believe that if we don’t criticize ourselves severely enough after making a mistake, we’re somehow letting ourselves off the hook. But recognizing that we’ve done something wrong doesn’t require us to conclude that we’re fundamentally bad people. We can take responsibility for an action without turning that action into a permanent judgment about our identity, and we can learn from a mistake without pretending it didn’t matter.
I don’t know that I would describe my reaction to the softball incident as self-compassion. I felt terrible about what happened. What I remember most clearly is how strongly I wanted to avoid making that same mistake again, and over time, that experience influenced how I approached coaching. It helped shape my understanding of what it means to push players while still caring for them as people.
I think that’s an important part of identity that we sometimes overlook. Who we are isn’t simply a collection of qualities we claim to possess. Our identity also involves how we respond when our behavior doesn’t reflect those qualities, and sometimes those uncomfortable moments reveal something we need to work on.
Interestingly, the research on contingencies of self-worth includes moral virtue as one of the areas where people may stake their self-esteem.⁶ In other words, someone who bases their worth on always being a good or virtuous person may experience a significant threat to their self-image when they make a moral mistake.
That’s worth thinking about. If we decide our identity depends on always being kind, always being generous, or always making the right decision, we may simply have replaced one impossible standard with another. We’re human beings, and we’re going to make mistakes. We’re going to have moments when our behavior doesn’t reflect our best intentions, and we should take those moments seriously. But perhaps a more useful approach is to understand our values as something we’re continually trying to practice, rather than qualities we’ve permanently mastered.
Values Are Something We Practice
One area of psychological research that connects to this idea is psychological flexibility. Psychological flexibility involves, among other things, being able to recognize our thoughts and emotions, respond to the circumstances in front of us, and continue taking actions that reflect what matters to us.
Research on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy has examined how developing psychological flexibility relates to well-being and psychological distress. A systematic review and meta-analysis found improvements in psychological flexibility following these interventions, with those improvements associated with reductions in distress.⁷
This doesn’t mean that having strong values automatically protects us from disappointment, failure, or difficult emotions. And the research doesn’t establish that people who identify with their values will always navigate major Life changes successfully. But I think it offers a useful way to understand the relationship between identity and action.
When I lost my Girls coaching position, I was sad. I didn’t need to pretend otherwise. I cared about the players and the opportunity I was losing, but I could still decide how to respond. I could accept the school’s decision, continue coaching in another capacity, and support the girls without interfering with their new coach.
When I yelled at the softball player, I couldn’t undo what had happened. I couldn’t go back and catch the words before they came out of my mouth. But I could learn from the experience and become more conscious of how I treated players in the future.
In both situations, the circumstances were different, but I still had choices about how to act. And I think that’s where our values become especially meaningful.
It’s easy to say we value kindness when everyone is treating us well. It’s easy to say we value accountability when everything is going according to plan. It’s easy to say we want to help others succeed when we’re in a position that allows us to do exactly that. The more difficult moments come when those values are tested.
Maybe we’re disappointed or frustrated. Maybe we’ve lost an opportunity, made a mistake, or watched someone else receive the position we wanted. Maybe we have to support someone who’s taken over a role that once belonged to us. Those situations can be uncomfortable, and we won’t always respond as well as we’d like, but they also give us opportunities to practice what we say matters and to learn from the times when we fall short.
Caring Deeply Without Losing Ourselves
I don’t want this Foundation to suggest that we should stop caring about performance. Quite the opposite. I believe we should pursue excellence, set demanding standards, prepare thoroughly, compete hard, and take responsibility for what happens.
If we’re coaches, we should care about whether our players improve and whether our teams succeed. If we’re athletes, we should care about our development, preparation, and performance. If we’re leaders, we should care about the people who depend on us and the results we’re responsible for producing.
Those things matter, and our roles can become meaningful parts of our identities. There’s nothing wrong with taking pride in being a coach, an athlete, a parent, or a leader. But I think we have to be careful about allowing those roles, or the results associated with them, to become the complete measure of who we are.
Because eventually, something is going to change. An athlete’s playing career will end. A coach will lose a game, perhaps even a job. A business owner will experience a setback. A leader will make a decision they regret. And all of us will have moments when we don’t live up to the standards we’ve set for ourselves. If our entire identity depends on consistently producing favorable outcomes, those moments can become devastating judgments about our worth.
But what if we understand ourselves more broadly? What if we recognize that we’re people who happen to perform certain roles, pursue certain goals, and possess certain abilities? What if we can acknowledge our accomplishments without allowing them to define our entire value, and acknowledge our failures without allowing them to define us, either?
I think that gives us a healthier way to approach competition and performance. It allows us to care deeply about what we do while remembering that we’re more than the results we produce.
Who Are You Without the Title?
When I think about losing my position as the Girls head coach, I still remember the emotion of that conversation with our Athletic Director. I remember the disappointment of knowing I wouldn’t be working directly with those players anymore, and I remember how much I appreciated the opportunity to join the Boys staff and continue contributing to the school.
But the most important part of that experience, at least as I reflect on it now, isn’t that another coach wanted me on his staff. It’s that I didn’t need another coaching position to continue being someone who cared about helping people. The opportunities changed, but I could still act on the things that mattered to me.
And when I think about the young softball player who cried after I yelled at her, I remember something different. I remember that wanting to be a good coach didn’t automatically make me one in that moment. My intentions weren’t enough. My behavior mattered, and I had to learn from what happened.
Those two experiences remind me that our identity is shaped by more than our titles, accomplishments, and performances. It’s also shaped by the values we try to live by, the relationships we build, the choices we make, and our willingness to grow when we fall short.
I don’t think that means we arrive at some permanent, finished version of ourselves. I certainly haven’t. There are still things I’m learning about coaching, leadership, and how I interact with people. There are still situations I could handle better, and I’m sure there will be experiences in the future that challenge how I understand myself.
But I know the kind of person I’m trying to be. I want to be kind. I want to serve others. I want to celebrate their accomplishments and help them recognize what they’re capable of doing. I want to contribute where I can, whether or not I have a particular title.
And I want the athletes I coach to understand that their worth doesn’t disappear when they miss a shot, lose a game, or stop playing basketball. Their performance matters, their effort matters, and their decisions matter. But so does the person they’re becoming.
Maybe that’s one of the most important things we can help people understand about competitive performance. We can give everything we have to something that matters without allowing it to become everything we are.
Because one day, the game will end. The position will change. The opportunity will pass. And when that happens, we’ll still have to decide how we want to live, how we want to treat people, and what kind of person we’re continuing to become.
What we do matters. How we do it matters. But who we are is bigger than any single performance.
Notes & Further Reading
1. “The Athletic Identity Measurement Scale: A Systematic Review with Meta-Analysis from 1993 to 2021” (2022).
This systematic review and meta-analysis examines the relationships between athletic identity and a range of psychological characteristics and outcomes. The findings help explain why identifying strongly as an athlete can provide motivation and commitment, while also raising questions about potential difficulties when that identity becomes overly central to a person’s sense of self. Most of the evidence is correlational, so the findings should not be interpreted as proving that athletic identity causes particular outcomes.
2. Brewer, B. W., & Petitpas, A. J. (2017). “Athletic Identity Foreclosure.”
This scholarly review explores the concept of athletic identity foreclosure, including the potential consequences of committing strongly to the athlete role without adequately exploring other identities. It provides context for understanding why athletes may experience difficulties during retirement, injury, or other transitions. The authors also discuss limitations in how the concept has been measured and studied.
3. Crocker, J., & Wolfe, C. T. (2001). “Contingencies of Self-Worth.” Psychological Review, 108(3), 593–623.
This influential theoretical paper proposes that people’s self-esteem can fluctuate according to successes and failures in areas where they have invested their sense of worth. It provides a framework for understanding the difference between evaluating a performance and allowing that performance to determine one’s overall value as a person.
4. “Identity Work in Athletes: A Systematic Review of the Literature” (2023).
This review examines how athletes develop, maintain, and revise their identities through experiences, relationships, and significant Life transitions. It helps explain why identity can evolve over time and why changes in professional or athletic roles may require people to reconsider how they understand themselves.
5. Breines, J. G., & Chen, S. (2012). “Self-Compassion Increases Self-Improvement Motivation.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(9), 1133–1143.
Across four experiments, the researchers examined whether self-compassion after mistakes or shortcomings influenced people’s motivation to improve. Their findings suggest that responding to failures with self-compassion can encourage people to make amends and address weaknesses. The research supports the distinction between accepting responsibility for a mistake and condemning one’s entire identity because of it.
6. Crocker, J., Luhtanen, R. K., Cooper, M. L., & Bouvrette, A. (2003). “Contingencies of Self-Worth in College Students: Theory and Measurement.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(5), 894–908.
This research identifies several domains in which people may base their self-worth, including academic competence, competition, approval from others, and virtue. It introduces an important complication to the idea of values-based identity: even identifying as a good or virtuous person can become a source of harsh self-judgment when someone fails to live up to that ideal.
7. Macri, J. A., & Rogge, R. D. (2024). “Psychological Flexibility and Inflexibility as Treatment Mechanisms in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.”
This systematic review and meta-analysis examines changes in psychological flexibility and inflexibility during Acceptance and Commitment Therapy interventions. Its findings provide context for understanding how people can respond to difficult experiences while continuing to take actions aligned with their values. The research primarily concerns clinical interventions and should not be interpreted as direct evidence that values-based identity prevents distress during athletic or professional transitions.
FOUNDATION 08 MINDSET MESSAGES
WHO ARE YOU WHEN PERFORMANCE IS REMOVED FROM THE EQUATION?
Our roles, accomplishments, and performances can become meaningful parts of our identity, but they don’t have to define our worth. Whether we’re athletes, coaches, or leaders, the titles we hold and the results we produce will eventually change. Understanding what we value, how we treat others, and how we respond when we fall short can help us continue growing, regardless of our circumstances.