Transcription
There's a type of person we'd all probably recognize. Everything they are is tied up in what they do for a living. Their title, the company, and their role. If you remove that, there's not much left holding things together. You see it in how they react to feedback. Something small and perfectly reasonable lands as something much bigger, and the conversation becomes difficult really quickly.
I'm Paul Russell, consumer behavior psychologist and co-founder of Luxury Academy. And this is one of the most limiting patterns that I see in otherwise incredibly capable people. It's not a lack of skill, but a lack of separation between who they are and what they do.
When someone defines themselves entirely by their role, they become brittle. And any threat to the role feels like a personal attack, which means that they overreact to criticism. They're resistant to change and they become defensive in situations that just don't warrant it. I see it a lot with funders and senior leaders. The business and the individual become the same thing. You say something like the website isn't working and they hear you're not working. That fusion makes them very challenging to advise and frankly quite exhausting to be around.
You'll hear a lot of language used to explain this terms like ego attachment or identity insecurity. These are all thrown around. Those are madeup terms. But the behavior is real. It's called identity fusion where someone's sense of self gets so tangled up with their role that they can't tell the difference between criticism of the work and criticism of them. The founder who can't let an employee present without stepping in as one example. The person who says we when things go well and they when things go badly. The one who asks for honest feedback and then argues every point. And it's not because the feedback's wrong, but because receiving it feels like being attacked.
The tell I find most revealing is how people react to their own title. They light up when they're introduced with it. Then they go faintly flirtat when the conversation moves on. That's not confidence at all. It's the title doing the loadbearing work for an entire personality. Identity control theory describes it as when a role becomes central to your self-concept, the brain stops distinguishing between your strategy needs work and you need work. Both register as a threat. The defensive response is automatic. It's invisible to the person doing it. but painfully obvious to everyone else.
This becomes particularly obvious with founders who've built something successful and then can't evolve past it. When the market shifts and the business needs to change, they can see it. But changing direction feels like admitting the original version wasn't perfect, which feels like admitting they themselves weren't perfect. So, they double down on the old identity while everything around them moves on. It's a particularly cruel trap because the thing that made them successful, conviction, certainty, refusal to compromise, is the same thing that now prevents them from adapting. There are so many examples of this. Nokia, Blockbuster, MySpace, and if I'm honest, quite a few luxury hotels are still trading on past glory.
You see it show up in conversation as name dropping pen. The moment someone starts listing who they know, where they've been, and what they own, they're not communicating confidence. What they're doing is looking for validation. The psychology behind it is compensatory self-enhancement. Basically, you talk yourself up because you don't feel secure enough to let people figure it out on their own. My father said something to me years ago that stayed with me. It's all very well that you know them, but the more important question is, do they know you?
Overjustification is another one. Explaining at length why you made a decision rather than simply stating it. Secure people don't explain their choices to strangers. And the one I find most revealing, asking a question and then answering it yourself. Shall we go with option A? Yeah, I think option A is good. Yes, let's go with option A. That's someone who can't tolerate the vulnerability of an open question.
Not everyone operates this way, though. You see a very different approach in sudden high netw worth environments. There's a particular type of very wealthy person whose answer to what do you do is deliberately vague. Various things I keep busy. Their identity is anchored in family taste and social world or personal interests rather than what generates the money. The money tends to be a byproduct rather than the identity itself. And this changes how they present themselves entirely. Contrast that with people whose entire identity is built around what they do and every conversation loops back to it. Neither is better or worse, of course, but they behave very differently as clients and they need to be handled very differently.
This isn't just something that you observe in other people. It's worth turning it in on yourself as well. This isn't about dropping your title or pretending your work doesn't matter. It's about noticing where it's doing too much work and where it's being used as a shield rather than a description. A simple way to see it is how you introduce yourself. If the first thing you reach for is your role, that's usually a sign of how central it is. Change that occasionally and you'll feel the difference immediately. That discomfort is useful. It tells you how much of your identity is tied up in it.
The other thing that helps is doing something where your role carries no weight at all. A completely different environment where you're a beginner again and there's no status attached to it. Being valued for something unrelated to your work changes how tightly you hold on to it.
When identity and role collapse into the same thing, everything becomes harder than it needs to be. Feedback feels like a personal attack. Change feels like a threat. And conversations that should be straightforward become minefields. None of that is about capability. It's about where the sense of self is sitting. Create a bit of separation and everything else gets easier. It also makes you considerably more interesting at a supper party, which given some of the supper parties I've been to would be a considerable public service.