The Story I Told Myself
I've always believed I was intrinsically motivated. I train because I love it. I compete because I want to test myself. I work hard because I have standards. I do it for me.
That's the version I tell myself. But it's not the full truth anymore.
The more honest version is that a big part of what drives me has always been external. The attention. The recognition. The feeling of being the guy people watch and respect. I go to the gym partly because it's where I wanted to be seen. I perform partly because I need the crowd to confirm that I'm good. I've been measuring my value by whether other people notice it.
That's not comfortable to write, and I don't really like admitting it because it sounds needy. But it's true.
And I think a lot of men are running the same system without naming it.
"I didn't want connection. I wanted an audience. And that moment made me think about something I'd been avoiding for a while."
How Sport Taught Me that I needed an audience
In sport, it was obvious. I didn't just want to win. I wanted to be the one on the field who made the difference. The guy people talked about after the game. I was drawn to pressure moments — not only because I was competitive, but because those were the moments when everyone was watching and I could prove something to them. And when they were watching and I delivered, something clicked. I felt right. Like I existed fully and I mattered.
Don't get me wrong, outside validation is not always wrong. It can give you energy. Recognition can feel good. Wanting to be respected for your work is human. Wanting to perform well in front of others is not automatically unhealthy.
But there's other moments I keep coming back to.
I'm at the gym. I see a bunch of familiar faces, school acquaintances, people I used to be around more. People connected to an older version of my life. And suddenly it did not feel like just a workout anymore. It felt like I was visible again. We nod. Maybe a quick hey. That's it.
And when I'm walking out, I notice something I'm not proud of. I caught myself wanting them to notice me. Not in an obvious way. Not like I wanted to walk around and show off. But I wanted them to realize that I am still here and putting in the work. That I am doing something. That I have become someone. That my life is not boring or irrelevant. I feel like I missed the opportunity to be seen by them.
If I was only doing it for myself, why did it matter so much whether other people saw it?
The problem starts when the audience becomes the reason you feel valuable. I didn't want connection. I wanted an audience.
When performance becomes proof and identity
I think I have often used performance as proof. A good game does not only feel like a good game. It feels like confirmation. A bad game feels like personal failure.
Not playing does not only feel like missing sport. It feels like I am disappearing from the only place where I normally know who I am.
Logically, I know this sounds too extreme.
It is just sport. It is just a gym session. It is just a game. Most people would probably not understand why it can feel this deep.
But emotionally, it does. Because sport was never only sport for me.
It was a role. It was a place where I knew how to be useful. It was a place where I could be respected without explaining myself. It was a place where I could turn effort into something visible. It was a way to feel like I mattered.
Psychologists have a name for what happens in those moments. It's called social facilitation theory, an effect where the presence of an audience increases arousal and sharpens performance on tasks you've already mastered. Research by psychologist Robert Zajonc showed that being observed activates a drive state in the brain that genuinely improves performance on familiar skills. So needing an audience to perform your best isn't weakness. Biologically and psychologically, it's actually quite normal.
But here's where it gets more complicated.
When your performance becomes your identity, unable to separate performance from who you are, you've built something fragile. Psychologists call this athletic identity foreclosure: the state where an athlete is so committed to their role that they never really explore who they are outside of it. Research consistently shows that athletes with high athletic identity and low identity exploration outside sport are significantly more vulnerable to anxiety, depression, and psychological distress when sport ends, or even during a long off-season.
I knew this feeling without knowing the term. When I wasn't playing, or wasn't training, or wasn't visible somewhere, I spiralled. Not dramatically. Just quietly. A flatness. An edge of restlessness. The sense that I wasn't quite myself and something was missing.
It's not logical. I know that. Most people wouldn't understand it. "It's just sport." But it's not just sport if sport is the main place where you feel like a real person.
"When your performance becomes your identity, you've built something fragile."
Why We Need to Be Seen
The need for external validation isn't a character flaw. It's built into how humans work.
Self-Determination Theory, developed by psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, identifies three core psychological needs that drive human motivation: autonomy (feeling in control of your choices), competence (feeling effective at what you do), and relatedness (feeling connected to others). When these needs are met, motivation becomes more internal and sustainable. When they're not, we reach outward for approval, recognition, and acknowledgement to fill the gap.
Sport, for a lot of men, becomes the primary arena where all three of those needs get met at once. You feel in control of your effort. You feel competent when you perform well. And you feel connected to teammates, to a crowd, to a shared moment. It's a powerful combination. It's almost designed to make you dependent on it.
The problem is that extrinsic motivation, doing things for external rewards like recognition, status, or admiration, produces shorter-term results and is less stable over time. It works while the audience is there. When the audience leaves, so does the feeling.The main place where you feel like yourself gets taken away, through injury, not playing, aging, work, retirement, or just life changing, it can feel like you do not know who you are anymore. That is what scared me and created an emptiness inside of me.
This is sometimes called contingent self-worth: the idea that your sense of value is conditional, it only exists when certain external things are confirmed. For athletes, it often looks like this: I am worth something when I perform well and people acknowledge it. Remove either part and the whole thing collapses.
A 2025 longitudinal study following 138 retiring elite athletes found that athletic identity dropped sharply in the first three months after retirement, and mental health symptoms peaked at the same time. The athletes who recovered fastest were those who had other sources of identity and value outside sport.7
What It Costs
The cost of running on external validation for years isn't always obvious until you look back. The question is not only: am I still a good athlete?
The deeper question is: am I still someone without this?
Who am I without sport? Who am I without the gym? Who am I without being disciplined? Who am I without the body, the role, the performance, the reaction from others?
And maybe that is why this reflection feels important.
You start optimising for visibility instead of meaning. You choose the thing that will be seen over the thing that matters to you privately. You go to the gym partly to train and partly to be in a room where people might register your existence. You refresh your phone not just to stay informed but to check whether anyone noticed something you did.
And underneath all of that is a question you keep not answering: who are you when nobody's watching?
Because I do not think the solution is to pretend I do not care what people think. That would not be honest. I do care. I think most people do. We want to be seen. We want to matter. We want our work to be recognized. We want people to be interested in our lives.
That's what happens when you spend years building your sense of self on a foundation that needs an audience to function.
"You start optimising for visibility instead of meaning."
What You Can Actually Do
Here's what I'm not saying: stop caring what people think, become completely self-sufficient, need no one.
That's not realistic and it's not even healthy. Humans are social by nature. Wanting to be seen, to matter to people, to belong somewhere, those are legitimate needs.
What I am saying is this: when external validation is your only source of self-worth, you're building on unstable ground. The goal isn't to eliminate the need. It's to build something alongside it, something that holds when the audience is gone.
I do not want to become less ambitious. I do not want to stop caring about sport. I do not want to pretend that performance does not matter.
I still want to play well. I still want to train. I still want to be sharp. I still want to deliver when it matters.
But I want to stop needing performance to answer the question of whether I am worth something.
That is the difference.
I want performance to be something I do, not the whole proof of who I am.
That is a process, not a switch. But there are concrete places to start.
1. Name what's actually driving you
Most men never audit their own motivation. The first step is honest observation, not judgment, just noticing. Before a workout, a game, a post, or a social situation, I want to ask myself one honest question: what am I actually doing this for right now?
Improvement? Attention? Connection? Status? Proof? Escape?
If part of the answer is “attention” or "to be seen", its okay to admit that. If the answer is “Connection”, I can notice that. If the answer is proof, I can ask why I need proof so badly today. I won't deny it but acknowledge it. You can't change what you haven't named.
2. Deliberately separate performance from identity
Before games, I can still use the pressure. But if I need the audience to feel valuable, that is different. It was key to be aware of that.
Athletic identity foreclosure happens because sport becomes the only domain where identity gets explored. The practical fix is intentional identity expansion: building other areas of your life where you feel competent, connected, and autonomous, areas where the feedback loop is internal.
I needed to ask myself who I am outside performance.
You need to answer the following questions as specific and practical as possible: Who am I as a friend? As a brother or son? As a teammate when I am not the one deciding the game? As someone who creates? As someone who works? As someone who listens?
If you cannot answer that yet, it does not mean you failed. It means this is where you can start to improve and build a new identity around.
3. Change the post-game review
After each game, I was either happy or devastated depending on my own performance. Nothing in between, and the worst part: it didn’t even matter if we won or lost. I needed to confirm immediately if I was good enough.
I’ve been replaying scenarios in my head where I made mistakes. I checked my game stats and had the same recurring thoughts: “I could have scored more points, more goals, better defence tackles, ...”
But these questions can become dangerous if they are the only questions.
I needed to shift my mindset and perspective. I want to add better questions:
What did I control today? Where did I stay present? Where did I help the team? What did I learn? What would still be true about me if I had played badly?
That last question matters because it forces me to separate performance from identity.
4. Deliberately do things no one will see
Pick one thing each week that you do completely privately. Build something and tell no one. Help someone without mentioning it. The point is not to become secretive. The point is to practise deriving satisfaction from the thing itself, not from the acknowledgement of the thing. This is one of the most practical ways to begin shifting the source of motivation.
I started doing mobility, journaling, sleep, rehab, or boring work because it actually helps, not because it looks disciplined.
Invisible effort reminds me that something can still be real even when nobody validates it.
Ask what you actually value, not what looks valuable.
Take one hour. No phone. Write down the things that have mattered to you in your life, not because they impressed anyone, but because you felt something real. If the list is short, that's okay. That's information. Start building toward those things.
5. Replace admiration with connection
There are moments where I say I want to be admired, but what I actually want is connection.
Being admired and being known are not the same thing.
So when I feel the need to be seen, I can try something smaller and more direct: message one person, ask how they are doing, meet without trying to impress them, say one honest sentence instead of performing a version of myself.
I started this blog to find connection and answers; I also started other activities, like gym group fitness classes, where competitive performance is not the focus.
Something where you know you've done it well because you know, not because someone praised you.
6. Talk to someone
This is the one most men skip. If the pattern described here feels familiar, if the identity question feels heavy, if you feel genuinely flat when the performance context disappears, that's worth talking through with someone who knows what they're doing.
A therapist or sport psychologist who works with athletes understands this territory specifically.
This isn't about something being wrong with you. It's about not having to do the hard part alone.
7. Prepare for what comes after performance
This is one of the hardest parts for athletes. I needed to think about who I would be if I could not play anymore. Could be a break, an injury, or the end of my career. Not because I wanted that to happen, but because sometimes the decision is not in your hands. You need to be prepared for the one thing that has defined your whole identity to completely fall apart from one day to another. I learned the hard way that your value should not depend on when everything goes well.
If I could not play for six months, what would give me structure? What would give me connection? What would give me meaning? What would help me still feel like myself?
Those answers are not backup plans. They are part of becoming a more resilient and complete person.
I still want to perform. I still want to compete. I still want to be good at what I do. But I do not want my whole value to depend on being good.
I want to know who I am when nobody is watching.
External Citations
- Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. The American psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. https://doi.org/10.1037//0003-066x.55.1.68
- Zajonc, R. B. (1965). Social Facilitation. Science, 149(3681), 269–274. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1715944
- Brewer, B. W., & Petitpas, A. J. (2017). Athletic identity foreclosure. Current opinion in psychology, 16, 118–122. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.05.004
- Enoiu, R. S., & Aidar, F. (2025). Career Termination in Athletes: Identity Loss and Mental Health Strategies. Health Nexus, 3(4), 1-10. https://doi.org/10.61838/kman.hn.3.4.7
- DeFreese, J. D. et al. (2021). Athletic Identity Foreclosure and Poor Athlete Mental Health — ResearchGate
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