At 40, I became a failure.
That’s how it felt. From an Irish Catholic background where divorce carries a particular weight, the end of my marriage wasn’t a private grief. It was a public result. And I had spent years building an identity entirely on results. Title, accolades, the need to be liked and approved of – what I now call a Mulga Bill’s bicycle: an enormous front wheel of external performance, a tiny back wheel of actual purpose. When the marriage ended, the result was in. And for someone whose entire sense of worth was built on performing well enough to be validated, a public failure of that magnitude asks a question you can’t avoid: who are you when the performance stops and the verdict goes against you?
I didn’t know. That was the problem.
I spoke recently with Maz Farrelly for the Performance Intelligence Podcast. Thirty years in television. Big Brother. The X Factor. Celebrity Apprentice. More than 20,000 casting interviews. When we met on a Zoom call before recording, she had a few minutes with me: my top half. By the time we sat down to record, she’d already formed a read. She told me I was confident but not overbearing. That my friends would love me. That I’d be loyal, that I’d put myself out more than most for the people I cared about. And then she said something specific: that probably in the last five or ten years, I’d started to say “I love you” more. That I might have been more reserved before that.
She was right. And what she’d read wasn’t the breakdown. She’d read the rebuild.
What Failure Does to a Performance Identity
The reason the marriage ending felt like failure wasn’t just cultural, though the Irish Catholic weight of it was real. It was that my entire identity was built on performing well enough to be approved of. Liked. Validated. And marriage, in that framework, is a performance you’re supposed to be able to sustain. When it ended, it didn’t just change my circumstances. It collapsed the framework I’d been using to tell myself I was okay.
This is what a heavily external identity does. It works beautifully right up until it doesn’t. And when it breaks, it breaks completely, because there’s nothing underneath it. No internal sense of worth that exists independent of the outcome. No back wheel.
I’ve seen this in leaders I work with. The executive who is brilliant under pressure but falls apart when the role disappears. The high performer who can’t tolerate being wrong because being wrong punctures the identity, not just the outcome. The leader who works relentlessly to be liked and is exhausted by it, because the need for external validation doesn’t diminish with success. It compounds.
The front wheel gets bigger. The back wheel stays small.
What Maz Was Actually Reading
When Maz described what she’d read in me, I told her I felt exposed. She laughed and said everyone can do what she does. Most people just haven’t decided to.
What she was reading wasn’t the marriage breakdown. She didn’t know about it. What she was reading was the evidence of the work I’d done in the years since. That I’d become more open. More willing to be seen. More able to say what I actually felt to the people I cared about, without needing something back. She’d read the shift from reserved to present, from performing to being, and estimated it had happened roughly in the last decade.
She was precise. And she did it from a few minutes of a Zoom call.
This is Maz’s central insight from 20,000 interviews: people are always legible. The internal reality surfaces whether you intend it to or not. You can perform a version of yourself for the first week in the Big Brother house, maybe two, but eventually the real thing leaks through. What’s underneath shows up in how you hold yourself, how you receive feedback, whether your confidence is earned or performed, whether your warmth is given freely or deployed strategically. Audiences feel it before they can name it. Colleagues feel it. The people who work for you feel it.
The Mulga Bill’s bicycle is visible. Leaders just assume it isn’t.
The Cost of the Front Wheel
There’s a specific failure mode I see in high-performing leaders that connects directly to this. Leaders with heavily external identities become very good at performing confidence, capability, and certainty. They get results. They build careers. And they develop an implicit belief that the performance is working. That people see the front wheel and take it at face value.
What’s actually happening is that the people around them are feeling the gap. They can’t always name it. They describe it as: he’s hard to connect with. She doesn’t really let you in. There’s something slightly off I can’t put my finger on. The performance lands. The person doesn’t.
And in organisations, that gap accumulates. It shows up in whether people bring their full thinking to the room. Whether they’re honest with you about problems. Whether they stay. A leader who has built a large front wheel and a small back wheel creates a culture that mirrors it: externally impressive, internally fragile.
Building the Back Wheel
In the years after the marriage ended, I started building the back wheel. Some of it was uncomfortable. Sitting with the question of who I was without the external markers to answer it. Learning to tell friends I loved them without needing them to say it back. Investing in relationships that had no professional dimension. Learning that being wrong didn’t mean being worthless, which sounds obvious and took years to actually internalise.
The rebuild was more deliberate than people might expect. I saw a psychologist, Jill Macnaught, over several months. We worked through the limiting belief that had taken hold: that failing at marriage meant failing at everything. That no one would take me seriously. That I had let my kids down. Jill introduced me to the idea of internal storytelling – that at the hardest moments, you have to actively rewrite the narrative rather than let the loudest version of events become the permanent one. Alongside that, I built structure. The MatchFit program grew directly from this period: a systematic approach to rebuilding physical and mental capacity when you’ve let both slide.
The question I had to sit with – and the one I now ask leaders who are running hard on external fuel – is simple. Strip away the title, the results, the approval. What’s left? Because whatever is left is what will hold when the result goes against you. And at some point, for every leader, it does.
Maz’s ABCDEF framework for reading people in the first minute – Attire, Body language, Conversation, Delivery, Entertainment factor, Friendliness – is worth applying deliberately. But the deeper point underneath it is this: the most important thing about being readable is being worth reading. When your internal and external identity are aligned, when what drives you matches how you show up, people feel it. They trust it. They follow it.
That alignment doesn’t come from better impression management. It comes from doing the harder work of knowing who you are when the performance stops, and choosing to lead from there.
The front wheel matters. I’m not suggesting otherwise. But without a back wheel, the first serious bump sends everything sideways.
I know. I’ve been sideways.
The question worth asking isn’t how well you’re performing.
It’s what’s there when you stop.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew May is a performance scientist, author, and keynote speaker. As founder of Performance Intelligence, he works with senior leaders and organisations across Australia to build the systems, culture, and mindset that make high performance sustainable. He is the author of MatchFit and The Ripple Effect, and host of the Performance Intelligence Podcast.
REFERENCES
Willis, J., & Todorov, A. (2006). First impressions: Making up your mind after a 100-ms exposure to a face. Psychological Science, 17(7), 592-598.
Gladwell, M. (2008). Outliers: The Story of Success. Little, Brown and Company.
Epstein, D. (2019). Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. Riverhead Books.
All other content based on direct transcript observations and Andrew May’s coaching experience.
