WHY YOUR TITLE IS A TRAP

08 April 2026

I love what I do.

I love the teams we’ve built, the businesses I’ve started, and the mission we have at On Purpose Adventures and Cohesion Culture™ . If you’re a founder or a leader, you likely feel the same way. We pour our sweat, our late nights, and our creative energy into our work.

But there is a dangerous line between loving your work and letting your work define your worth.

I’ve seen it happen too often: a leader’s business hits a rough patch, a project fails, or a transition occurs through no fault of their own, and suddenly, they are spiraling. They don't just feel like they had a bad quarter; they feel like they are a bad person.

That is the Identity Trap.

Your Foundation Outside the Office

To Lead On Purpose, you have to have a foundation that exists entirely outside of a LinkedIn profile and business card.

For me, that foundation is built on things that no market shift or business failure can touch:

Faith & Values: The internal compass that stays North regardless of the economy.
Adventure & Travel: The reminder that the world is much bigger than my desk.
Family & Friends: The people who love Ben-Jamin the person, not Ben-Jamin the Owner.

I love the businesses The Lord has allowed me to create and I deeply value my staff, but I don’t love my life only because of my work. I love my life because it is full, varied, and grounded in things that don't have a profit-and-loss statement.

When you know who you are without the title, you become a better leader. You lead from a place of security rather than a place of fear.

A Stark UH-OH Realization

When that foundation is missing, the consequences are personal.

Troy Hall, PhD I-CUDE and I recently spoke with Garrett Wood for our latest podcast episode, and he shared a story that stopped me in my tracks. He witnessed a leader who had given 20 years of his life to a company, only to be replaced in a two-week window. Because that leader’s entire identity was wrapped up in his title, losing the job meant losing his reason to keep going.

It led to a massive UH-OH that changed Garrett’s entire approach to leadership and burnout. We talked about:

The physical toll of living and dying by a spreadsheet.
How to recognize when your nervous system is redlining.
Why the most successful leaders are the ones who know how to fall correctly.

"Leadership isn't perfect and pretty. Life is messy sometimes... If we don't understand the emotions behind the data, we're only looking at one-third of the problem." — Garrett Wood