When Faith Mediates Your Entrepreneurial Identity

It’s no secret that the entrepreneur’s life is full of high highs and low lows, with very little predictability. The market falls, employees quit, funding suddenly dries up, and stress piles up spilling into our personal lives. We also have great days, making the sale or closing the round, and everything feels amazing. And some combination of those things happen on repeat, month after month, week after week, and even moment after moment. Facing highs and lows of entrepreneurship can skyrocket and plummet our entrepreneurial identity (EI). Simultaneously, as believers, we know our identity is secure in the Lord. So, how do we navigate the unpredictable chaos of threats to our identity—even the good kind—in light of our identity as both children of God and entrepreneurs?

When our identity as entrepreneurs is challenged, our relationship with God—the rootedness and permanence of what it means to be a child of God—and all that comes with it, can moderate how we view all of our other (sub) identities, especially our EI. And it is the thing that reliably brings us back to a healthy mental and emotional state, lifting us up in the wake of entrepreneurial failure, and keeping us humble in the glow of success. But living that out isn’t always simple, and it certainly isn’t a “one and done” activity.

Recently, the L.I.F.E. (Leading the Integration of Faith and Entrepreneurship) Research Lab at Miami University completed a study on how Christian entrepreneurs across a variety of industries navigated the highs and lows of entrepreneurship. We took years of primary and secondary interviews to understand the mindset and practices of business leaders, coaches, and creatives facing the roller coaster of entrepreneurship. Our study revealed incredibly interesting concepts that may not be foreign to the mind of a faith driven entrepreneur, but to put those concepts into practice was another thing altogether.

When it comes to things like community, church, and family, it’s not terribly difficult to think about ourselves as beloved children of God, recipients of His adoption, able to communicate with Him and hear from Him. But it’s not as easy to remember when it comes to entrepreneurship, especially when we face the extremes of work—success or failure—which we describe as “identity threats.” When threats occur, we can forget that our identity is not contingent on our achievement (or lack thereof). In failure, we tend to lose ourselves to lies of worthlessness, that we’ve somehow become less than because of a business outcome. In success, the pendulum swings dramatically the other way and we have a tendency to become prideful and elevate ourselves in the wake of professional accomplishments.

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It isn’t much of a stretch to consider that failure poses a threat to our identity as entrepreneurs. When we have poured time, talents, and treasures into a venture only to watch it crash, it’s understandable that we start questioning the validity of our claim to be “entrepreneurs.” On the other hand, entrepreneurs also faced identity threats in the face of extreme success, where they were tempted to view their entrepreneurial success—and therefore their entrepreneurial identity—as preeminent, tending dangerously toward pride.

Our findings revealed one crucially important component of these entrepreneurs’ faith that served as a counter-balance that stabilized their identity in the face of threats: a personal relationship with God (and identifying via that relationship). Recognizing their relational identity with God and choosing to identify with it was the difference for each of our interviewees. In short, a relational identity with God allowed entrepreneurs to mitigate how the highs and lows of entrepreneurship affected their identity.

Our respondents described two distinct phenomena that helped regulate entrepreneurial identity threats in the wake of success and failure: humbling and affirmation. Humbling refers to an entrepreneur’s conscious acceptance of his or her relational identity with God as the ultimate victory. Entrepreneurs explained that their process for remaining humble included a reframing of their definition of success to be about obedience rather than financial or reputational gain, attributing their success and opportunities to the Lord rather than themselves, and choosing to give God the glory for the outcome.

On the other end of the spectrum, enduring and recovering in the wake of entrepreneurial failure necessitated identity affirming. Entrepreneurs used their relationship with God to affirm their identity by redefining failure, acknowledging that sometimes the Lord had protected them from success (eg. “I would not have been able to handle [success], I wasn’t ready”), and by looking back and remembering the past provision of the Lord and His faithfulness to support and care for His children.

Both of these strategies serve to take the focus off of the entrepreneur and the outcomes of our work and to shine the light on the glory and love of the Father. But affirming and humbling are not “one and done” practices; entrepreneurs constantly evaluate and engage in both, as often as needed to navigate the chaos of entrepreneurship.

The truth is, our identity is secure, received rather than achieved and rooted in the work of a God who chose us and calls us His children, His masterpieces. And yet, the temptation to rely on our entrepreneurial—work-based—identity can be incredibly strong. We believe that understanding and relying on our relational identity with God can serve as a counterbalance or countervailing force for entrepreneurs to regulate their identity. Given that reality, we were interested in how Christian entrepreneurs of various fields understood and engaged their relational identity with God in the high highs and low lows of entrepreneurship. Relying on our identity as beloved children of God reminds us that regardless of our professional endeavors—or any other for that matter—our worth, value, and status are unchanging. Being adopted into God’s family invokes an identity that is received rather than achieved and therefore, is unconditional and unchanging. From this place, out of this permanent relational identity, we can press on toward the goal and run the race set before us, rooted in a love that we never have to earn but are blessed to walk in with great, humble confidence.

Image used with permission