Our roles

We all have roles to play in our lives and these change as we move through it. In the last chapter we considered the different life stages that we can go through and as well as each having their own priorities they may also demand us to play new roles.

We all start as a son or daughter, maybe then add to that the role of sister or brother, then friend, pupil, team-mate, student, girlfriend or boyfriend, candidate, employee, colleague, partner, husband or wife, manager, father or mother, aunt or uncle, godparent, grandparent…the list goes on!

Just reading that list may have conjured up some images in your mind of what each of those means to you. You will have some kind of perception of each of them, how to behave or not to behave in that role. Relaxing with old school friends over a few drinks will suggest a different way to behave than if you were with your boss or your young niece or nephew.

A role, according to the dictionary, is what you are expected to do, or your function. As the Shakespeare quote above suggests, all the players have their assigned role with prescribed directions which are set out in a script. The actions they take are the ones that the other players expect them to take, they have to stay in role in order to relate to the other players who are also in role. And over time each person will have many roles or parts to play.

Consider a typical week of a father who works. He wakes up as the husband next to his wife, he gets up and wakes up his children in the role of father. He has breakfast as father and husband and then walks to the station or his car and performs the role of commuter.

An hour later, he is performing the role of employee, or manager, or engineer, or accountant, or whatever. In the evening he again practices his role as a commuter and during the journey gets out of his role as employee, just in time to return home as father and husband.

The weekend will usually be much more father and husband and less employee. Meeting up with the wider family for Sunday lunch for example will put him into a different set of roles, perhaps uncle or nephew – or son once again.

Playing roles is necessary in order for society to operate smoothly – everyone has “their exits and their entrances”. The role is about one’s function in that relationship and having it defined within a broad area of agreement provides some security for each person entering into that relationship. A feeling of certainty as to what to expect. An unspoken but yet agreed way of operating which enables the interaction between the parties to be more efficient and skip many of the steps otherwise needed to build up a relationship.

Role conflict

One of the challenges with having multiple roles is that there is no reason why these should all be compatible. Indeed it is unlikely that they will all be. For example to succeed in the role of mother you need to spend quality time with your children. Yet to succeed in the role of employee you need to be at work, showing commitment to that role too. It is possible that a tension can arise between doing both to the level that the individual may wish. It can leave a parent feeling guilty for not being there for their children or maybe to a rushed and stressful time at work so that they can go and collect the children on time. There are many combinations of roles that may result in conflicting demands that are difficult to meet.

If we are constantly playing roles, we are always doing what we are expected to do – whether that is what others expect of us, or what we expect of ourselves, according to the label on the role that we are playing at that time. By definition these roles cannot be the true us.

So if you were to spend your life playing roles, as most of us do, when do we get the opportunity to be ourselves? When does the actor get to put aside the script, take off all the grease paint and be themselves?

Our identity

It is very easy when juggling multiple roles, or intensely living one role for a time, for these roles to become our identity. We identify with a role so much that it feels like it is us.

If the actor never gets to take of the grease paint then he will inevitably lose touch with himself and identify more and more with the role.

Roles require us to be only a part of ourselves and they may require us to be something that we are not. The more we do things, the more they become a habit and the more that we think in the same way, the more these patterns of thought and behavior become our identity.

The roles that we play can give us strength and self-confidence. For example if you play a technical or professional role at work, you may find that you derive a great deal of satisfaction from that role. People come to you for advice and guidance, they listen to what you say, you’re the expert, you are needed. Your feelings about yourself, your self-confidence can come from that role and not from yourself.

When our identity is derived from these external roles, our true identity gets forgotten and we believe the lie that we are our roles.

If we get used to wearing a mask of one type or another, interacting in a safe, predictable way with others, we can feel secure and more certain about our life. The more that we depend on the masks and the safer that we feel as a result of wearing them, the greater the risk and uncertainty we feel of taking off our mask and interacting openly, honestly and authentically.

Feeling lost

When we identify with an external role, our identity is taken out of our hands. Our identity exists only as long as the role exists. So if it is a job role for example, an unexpected redundancy comes as a huge shock. It is not just the practical difficulty of finding a new job, it is a loss of a sense of self, a loss of a range of comforting feelings such as self-confidence, purpose and status.

This sense of feeling lost can occur with the end of a variety of roles – when children leave home, a relationship break-up or divorce, a redundancy or retirement. All of these can feel like a loss of identity when the roles made up such a large part of life and of our identity.

Personality and ego

What we describe as our personality is probably taken as a given by most of us, it is what – or who – we think we are. Psychologists have described it as the Ego (meaning “I”) – it is our sense of self. However the more one tries to examine what personality really is, the more it seems to elude us. For example you can hear the confusion in people’s language – “she has a nice personality” – which must mean that she and the personality are different. However if the personality is our sense of identity, but is not us, then who are we?

Our personality is partly nature and partly nurture, it is partly a given from our DNA and partly developed from our experience of the world, which starts as early as the fourth month of our existence whilst still in the womb. The part of our personality that evolves during our life does so because it is of use to us. The brain comes with little or no hard-wired templates about how things should be and so it has to learn through experience, through relationships with those around us and from the feedback we receive.

Our personality can then become a given or continue to evolve. It seems reasonable to assume that once we have been in contact with most of the situations that we will experience in life, that we have got a reliable rule-book to follow. It worked last time and so it should work this time. For example I related successfully to my parents – my early authority figures – in this way and so I will relate to all authority figures in this way. However the authority figures, such as an employer or policeman may not respond like the parents did – there is no reason why they should – and so the rulebook either needs to be updated or life become stressful, puzzling and potentially self-destructive.

Our personality is like a piece of armor which is at the same time our greatest shield and also potentially our greatest prison. It enables us to deal with the outside world, but it can also insulate us from it – and from other people.

The process of increasing our personal awareness helps us to see our personality for what it is and to enable us to choose to update the rule book.

Internal identity

Practically speaking we have to play roles to operate effectively in society, but these can dominate our sense of identity and we can end up feeling lost when they end.

The solution is to find a way of playing the roles without them becoming our identity. We need to find an internal source for our identity, not an external one. When we have found an internal source for our identity we can pick up roles and play them with confidence, knowing that they are not us, just a role we play and that when we step out of role we come home back to ourselves, we do not feel lost.

Getting back in touch with who and what you really are – finding yourself – opens up the possibility to play roles and move in and out of them with freedom when you like.

Conclusion

We all perform roles in life, yet we are not our roles and if we identify too closely with them we may feel safe – but only temporarily. We are also not our personality, which has in large part been forged as a result of the experiences of surviving and protecting ourselves in the real world.

Getting back in touch with who you really are is about becoming aware of the rules in the rule book that you have acquired during your life – and identifying the ones that do not fit the real you. This journey has to start with self-awareness, which we will look at in the next chapter.