Identity, Not Costume | The Right Call S1E2

Have you ever poured yourself into leading well, listening with empathy, chasing engagement, building consensus, talking about values, and still gone home drained, cynical and lonely? Like no matter how much you served, it was never enough, and it never quite felt like you?

In nearly thirty years of training leaders, I've heard that over and over from people doing all the servant leader things. What if the missing piece isn't more technique? What if we've been treating servant as a costume we put on, instead of the identity we already have?

The towel comes off

When I was about five, I tied an old, worn, light green bath towel around my neck and ran around the backyard as Superman. I felt unstoppable. Kids still do it every Halloween. Researchers even call it the Batman effect: in a 2017 study, four- to six-year-olds dressed as a hero stuck with a boring task far longer than kids doing it as themselves.

The key is that it was temporary. When the cape came off, they were still kids. The towel always comes off eventually.

As adults we just wear different costumes. We put on work clothes, and with them come expectations. As leaders trying to honor God at work, we're handed the servant leader costume too. We smile through frustration. We nod empathetically when we're exhausted. We chase consensus when the mission is stalling and we know what needs to be done. Researchers call this surface acting, putting on the calm, supportive face while the real feeling stays the same inside, and decades of studies link it to emotional exhaustion and burnout. The inside doesn't match the outside, and keeping up the act drains us. It's like running a marathon while pretending we're not tired.

Then we get home, one costume comes off and another goes on. We vent, we get short with our spouse or kids, or we veg on the couch. Constantly switching costumes, we never get a break.

The second skin

There's a deeper costume most of us never notice. Fish don't know they're in water. In the West, culture hands us the costume of independence: I'm in charge of my own destiny. I'm a self-made man. I know what's best for me. (That last one sounds familiar. We've been saying it since the beginning.) Wear it long enough and it fits like a second skin.

Underneath, we find something different. We're deeply relational beings, wired for connection. Deeper still, we're looking for something worthy of our devotion. Viktor Frankl called it the will to meaning. Earl Nightingale defined success as the progressive realization of a worthwhile goal. One of Dale Carnegie's most powerful principles is to appeal to a person's nobler motives, because we all respond when invited to attach ourselves to something greater.

Whether we call it a goal, a dream, a deadline or a job, we're always serving something. Servant is what we are. It's the chassis we're built on, and everything else is just a different vehicle wrap. If servant is inescapable, then choosing the right master is the real freedom.

This week

• Look past the surface question, "Where is my time, energy and attention going?" Ask the deeper one: "Who or what am I really responding to? What master is pulling those strings?"
• Then ask whether it's truly worthy of our devotion. Is it giving life, or draining it? No pressure, no judgment, just honesty.

Recognizing that servant is who we are isn't a loss of freedom. It's the beginning of it. When we stop fighting our identity and start choosing masters worthy of our devotion, life gets lighter, not because we suddenly get everything right, but because we stop pretending we can be self-contained islands. We were never built to be islands.

A question to sit with

Who or what am I really serving right now, and is it worthy of my devotion?

This is Episode 2 of The Right Call: Wisdom Simply Applied.