Transcription
When someone defines themselves entirely by their role, they become brittle, and any threat to the role feels like a personal attack. 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 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 flat when the conversation moves on. That's not confidence at all. It's the title doing the load-bearing work for an entire personality.
Identity control theory describes it as when a role becomes central to your self-concept, the brain [music] stops distinguishing between your strategy needs work and you need work. This becomes particularly obvious with founders who've built something successful. 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.