ISSUE No. 09
I once received a performance review that used the word relentless seventeen times.
I counted.
Two pages. Seventeen times. It was my first review in a new position, and the message was clear: I needed more of it.
I didn't disagree. I knew the gap was real.
But I went after it the wrong way.
I turned relentless into intensity. There was a Sunday I sat at my daughter's game answering emails on my phone, present on the phone and nowhere else. I told myself that was relentless. From the outside it looked like drive. From the inside it was closer to smothering, holding on so tight nothing could grow underneath it.
Looking back, I was wearing it. Not becoming it. The new title needed someone relentless, so I put on the version of myself that looked the part before I'd actually grown into it. That's what a mask does. It lets you perform the identity before you've rooted it. And nothing good grows under a mask, because the whole point of a mask is to keep from being seen, including by yourself.
Researcher Robert Vallerand has spent years studying this exact split, and he found something worth sitting with. Two people can look equally driven from the outside, and only one of them is sustainable. He calls it obsessive passion versus harmonious passion. Obsessive passion is fused to identity. Stopping feels like failing, so you can't. Harmonious passion is chosen and connected to the rest of your life, not walled off from it. Same intensity. Completely different root system.
I had the first kind. I was calling it relentless. It was actually fear wearing the mask of ambition.
Here's what I've come to believe: relentlessness is not a personality trait. It's a posture, and the question that matters isn't whether you have it. It's what's holding it up.
Something is always shaping you. The pressure of a new title. The approval you're still chasing. The identity you built around never stopping. All of it is forming you, whether you've chosen it or not.
The untrained leader gets shaped by whatever's loudest. The rooted leader chooses their formation.
That's the difference between relentless and sustainable. Between the mask and the root. Between a review that names the right word and actually building the thing underneath it.
I'm still learning the difference. But I know now the goal was never to be less relentless. It was to take the mask off long enough to grow a root that could actually hold it.
What is shaping you right now? Not what you wish were shaping you. What's actually doing it?
THIS WEEK'S FIELD TOOL
Write three things that are currently shaping how you lead.
Don't filter. First three that come to mind.
Then ask: did I choose these, or did they choose me?
One of those three is worth a longer conversation with someone you trust. You'll know which one.
— Jason