When Performing Becomes Protection
There is a kind of leadership that isn’t about leading at all—it’s about surviving. And the one who survives best? The Performer. She’s polished. High capacity. Always on. Always available. And often, quietly unraveling.
In my recent conversation with Marie on the She Don’t Work Like That No More™ podcast, we unpacked the truth behind the ego-driven performer: how she forms, why she thrives in toxic systems, and what it costs her to keep proving her value.
Marie shared from the depths of her lived experience: as a creative, a mother, a founder, and someone who’s navigated the pressure cooker of performance-based leadership while trying to stay whole.
This blog post is for the woman who has led in mission-driven spaces, built her own business out of necessity or burnout, and is now realizing she’s been performing for survival not leadership. It’s for the woman who feels like the tectonic plates of her identity are shifting beneath her feet. Like she’s birthing something new painfully, beautifully from the lava of everything that’s cracked.
This blog is also in dialogue with two powerful texts: The Mountain Is You by Brianna Wiest and The Art of Self-Awareness by Patrick King. Because to understand the ego-driven performer, we must look not only at who we are but at the layered sediment of what we were trained to survive.
Also? If you catch a side eye or two in here, it’s intentional. A little cackle never hurt a healing journey.
The Ego-Driven Performer Is Not a Villain. She’s a Survivor.
Marie named it perfectly: the slide decks, the typos we triple-check, the emails we respond to within 3 minutes these aren’t just habits. They’re defense mechanisms.
For so many women across industries especially those who have been underpaid, underestimated, or expected to hold everyone together performance becomes a survival strategy. We live in a culture that rewards perfection and penalizes pause. Many of us learned early that our visibility was tied to our capacity. Our worth, we believed, was conditional.
“I had to make sure everything was perfect. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be seen as valuable. As worthy. As enough.”
Patrick King writes that ego uses defense mechanisms like perfectionism or urgency to protect us from emotional threat. These patterns aren’t flaws. They are functional adaptations that become overused until they bend reality. Until we lose ourselves in the role.
And listen… some of us didn’t just perform at work we were out here giving Broadway-level monologues in the staff meeting. Cue dramatic sigh. Cue tight smile. Cue that one eyebrow twitch that says, “If one more person calls me ‘intimidating’ I swear…”
Perfection as a Cage, Not a Credential
What Marie and I both recognized is how performance culture even in spaces that talk about healing, equity, or sustainability can still reward harm.
“People use the language of equity to perform equity,” Marie said. “Words on your website don’t change culture. Hiring a woman to lead doesn’t mean you’re empowering her especially if you don’t give her the structure, support, or space to lead.”
We’ve watched women leave harmful organizations only to recreate the same systems inside their own businesses. Because what we inherited is more than a management style it’s a wound. The Performer doesn’t just act the part. She builds structures around herself to prove she belongs. But every slide deck, every late night, every self-abandoning yes reinforces the lie that our worth lives in our output.
In The Mountain Is You, Brianna Wiest writes: “Self-sabotage is simply the presence of an unconscious need that is being fulfilled by the behavior.” For the ego-driven performer, the behavior is excellence. The unconscious need? Belonging. Control. Safety.
“If I stop performing, I disappear.”
That’s the unspoken fear. That’s the lie ego tells. And that’s what drives burnout.
Also? Shoutout to the 17-tab-overachievers. You know who you are. You haven’t closed a browser window since 2020. And don’t even act like you’re not responding to this blog in your head while stirring your oat milk latte with a goal-planning pen. You deserve better.
When Awareness Feels Like Earthquake
Marie said something that stopped me cold:
“Our defense mechanisms were designed to help us. But just like any other police force, they can become abusive.”
What happens when the structure that once kept you safe becomes the thing that holds you hostage?
This is the moment many women find themselves in right now especially post-pandemic, post-political rupture, post–Executive Orders on DEI. We left institutions, started our own work, and are now realizing that the same armor we wore in corporate is still sitting heavy on our bones.
It’s disorienting. Like standing on shifting ground. Like realizing the mountain you’ve been climbing… is you.
Wiest reminds us: “You are not committing to your healing and your coping mechanisms at the same time.” Awareness isn’t the finish line. It’s the first tremor. The first crack in the mask. And it’s sacred.
So yes, you’re trembling. Yes, you’re staring into the mirror asking, “Who even am I without this spreadsheet?” You’re not losing it. You’re finding it.
When Beauty and Violence Live in the Same Birth
This work… this shift from ego-driven to wholeness-centered leadership… is not gentle.
It’s not a quiet retreat. It’s a rupture. A breaking. A release that feels, at first, like destruction.
The violence of it isn’t necessarily external. It’s interior. It’s in the tension of letting go of a version of yourself you were praised for. The version that got you the job. The version that kept you safe in rooms that didn’t know how to hold your fullness. The version that overfunctioned, performed, protected, endured.
Violence looks like sobbing on the bathroom floor when you realize you’re not just tired you’re done.
It feels like shaking through a boundary you finally set, but still worrying you’ll lose everything because of it.
It sounds like silence from people who used to clap when you performed.
And yet… even in that violence, there is formation.
Just like volcanoes don’t simply destroy they shape new ground this kind of leadership shift reshapes everything beneath you. It is the collapse of what was and the fragile forming of what can now be.
It’s grieving the persona you once needed. Mourning the image you carefully curated. Holding space for a self that’s still unnamed.
There is violence in becoming. And beauty too. And sometimes they are so entwined it’s hard to know which is which.
When women finally stop performing when they collapse the persona, stop overfunctioning, choose truth over image it can feel like rupture. And it is. But it’s also rebirth.
And if someone calls you “too sensitive” while you’re birthing yourself out of a leadership identity that was basically held together by recycled affirmations and dry shampoo? Give them the side-eye, bless them, and keep it moving.
This Ends With Us
Before we close, I want to offer something personal.
I’ve always loved the stars. Their silence. Their insistence on existing, even when no one is looking. Their ability to rupture and shine at the same time.
I believe we are like that worlds within worlds. Volcanic and luminous. Capable of holding contradictions: survival and softness, eruption and elegance, fear and fire.
Sometimes the same force that cracks the earth births new terrain. Sometimes the explosion we feared was actually the universe remaking us. Not punishing. Just forming. Just pressing truth to the surface. Just like stars, we expand and collapse. And in that collapse, something sacred is made.
We don’t want to keep replicating the leadership we inherited. We don’t want to raise teams, children, or future selves inside systems built on performance and fear.
We want to lead with permission. With pause. With pattern-awareness.
And that shift doesn’t happen by accident. It’s not clean. But it is possible.
It starts with asking: Who am I when I’m not proving anything?
It starts with listening: to your exhaustion, your boundaries, your truth.
It starts with telling the ego: Thank you for your service but I don’t work like that no more.
This ends with us. And something new begins.
Resources + CTA
- Listen to Marie’s full episode:
- Take the Leadership Pattern Assessment
- Read: The Mountain Is You by Brianna Wiest and The Art of Self-Awareness by Patrick King
- Download: Leading Beyond the Spotlight (Ego-Driven Performer workbook)
“You’re not performing leadership anymore. You’re living it.”
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