Movement Practice part 4: Comparing The Dedicated Mover and Over-Identifier Archetypes

Aaannnd I’m back again. Today we look at the next two archetypes: The Dedicated Mover and The Over-Identifier.

In part 2 we looked at The Indoorsman and The Exerciser. In part 3 we painted a portrait of The Integrator, our most balanced, stable character in the Movement-Lifestyle Atomic-Model (MLAM) saga.

Today, we look at the two least stable characters, one of whom (The Over-Identifier) I have been for many years- Maybe you knew me in those years? Man have I changed…

The Dedicated Mover, in hindsight, seems a missed connection to me. I can see now how a few small choices I made escalated and paved the path towards an egocentric movement relationship derailing what could have been a healthy, balanced dance career. It seems as if a few small choices are enough to create a vast chasm separating the Dedicated Mover from the Over-Identifier.

The flap of a butterfly’s wings. The “toaster effect”, if you will.

But I’m not bitter about that (anymore). And I’ll share more about that story in subsequent installments.

Let’s get into today’s archetypes.

Shell 4: The Dedicated Mover

Committed to yet dependent on movement for a living, The Dedicated Mover is a professional mover of some designation. She is the unsexy, unglorified, underrated cousin of the Over-Identifier (who we will meet next). She is everything the Over-Identifier needs to be more like but is in denial of.

The Dedicated Mover excels at living dichotomously. She walks the edge of a precipice: On one side the ground fully supporting her, and on the other a sheer drop into the spiraling, melding, confusion of her identity with her movement endeavor. For The Dedicated Mover, this identity melding is unavoidable, but manageable.  In a fine balance she keeps one foot on firm ground, the other dangling over the edge, and she enjoys the thrill and challenge of it.

As an athlete or performer, her livelihood depends on her body’s ability to move and perform in a particular way. As hard as she works at her movement form, she works equally hard at maintaining the balance in her life, and this equal placing of value in life-balance and movement is The Dedicated Mover’s defining characteristic.

The fine balance between dependence on and dedication to. Attachment to versus freedom from. Inspired performance versus pursuing status. Joy of movement versus pride of winning.

Her ability to manage the deluge of successes and struggles on her path will place her at a point on a spectrum somewhere between these two poles. This point  is bound to bounce around from week to week, even day to day depending on the demands placed upon her and her ability to cope. This inevitable fluctuating state of existence and perpetual seeking of balance is what gives her her place at shell four, a less stable shell in the MLAM than The Integrator.

As a professional mover, she is aware of the need to actively work at retaining a healthy sense of “I am not my career, I am not my body”. She can take a step back from her professional career and say, “There is this part of me that I love and nurture that has nothing to do with my sport or what my body looks like. I have hobbies and interests and skills that I enjoy developing outside of rock-climbing/circus-performing/football, and I know I won’t be able to use my body for my livelihood forever. I am ok with this and am prepared to make this transition”.

Part of the instability of her place on shell four comes from the unpredictable nature of when this unavoidable transition will take place. However, because The Dedicated Mover’s transition is on the forefront of her mind, it does not hit her like a Talebian Black Swan* as it will for the Over-Identifier, but as a conscious decision met with grace at the appropriate time.

*A Black Swan (referring to the bird, not he ballet), as described in the book by the same name by the statistician and former trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb, is a rare, unpredictable event (good or devastating). Those who know they cannot predict a Black Swan event, but recognize the potential for one are at an advantage as they are able to bolster themselves against the devastating effects should one happen. However, those who are most susceptible to a Black Swan are those who think they can predict the future, think bad things can’t possibly happen to them, and ignore the potential risk because it is so small. For example, if you live in Seattle, a city on a fault line, you are at risk at any time for a massive earthquake to destroy your home. This earthquake is a Black Swan event- A rare, unpredictable event that is impossible to protect against completely. It may happen tomorrow, it may not happen in your lifetime. But it is possible to minimize its catastrophic impact on you by knowing about its potential impact. Bolstering against the earthquake could include a. Moving away or living only a few months of the year in Seattle, b. Educating yourself on safety procedures should there be an earthquake, c. Not owning anything that you know you would hate to lose, etc. None of these are perfect- There is no perfect protection from a Black Swan by its very nature, but with our knowledge that one is possible we can minimize our fragility to one.

Can you identify a Dedicated Mover in your life? They are rare. Too, we don’t hear much about them in the news and media. The Dedicated Mover’s life wouldn’t make an exciting movie. If she wrote a book is would be titled: How Consistent Hard Work, Healthy Choices and Foresight Lead to a Successful and Moderate Life. Contrast that with The Over-Identifier’s best-seller: How to Push Through Pain and Win.

She considers the question: “Will the choices I make today help me succeed for just the next competition? The next few months? Or for the next five years?”.

One of her superpowers is foresight: “Should I take the next three months to recover from this injury now and not compete tomorrow? Should I do the healing I need to do now so that I can compete when I am ready, and have a sustainable, albeit less glorified career?”

When it comes to the unpleasant topic of aging, The Dedicated Mover has a realistic, embracing mindset towards the process, whereas the Over-Identifier meets it with an inner (or outer…) anger and chooses to live in denial, aging signifying the end of “glory days”. The Dedicated Mover thinks of success as sustainability. Success is the fact that she is one of the few who can make a living doing something that brings her joy, versus success as winning and being the best. She thinks long-term, treating her career as a journey, with a higher priority on enjoying it for as long as she can than on surviving for the next competition, game, or performance.

She knows that as she ages things will feel different in her body, but that this is not necessarily better or worse than when she was younger, just a new phase that will require a reframing and a continuously evolving investigation of what that means. When the time comes for her to step back from her professional or competitive career, she will do so with acceptance, and will probably transition smoothly into a support or coaching role, working with younger athletes. Or, she may decide to do venture into an entirely different arena, wishing to engage her other skills and interests that she was not able to while committing her life entirely to her movement form.

There is no denying that The Dedicated Mover will suffer physical and emotional pain as part of the sacrifice she makes for her chosen movement endeavor. Injuries are par for the course with a life committed to movement. But for her, its worth it. She is able to see physical injuries as opportunities to work on her weak areas, as avenues for personal development, and come back stronger than before with a new understanding of herself and her body.

Daily, she is faced with an onslaught of judgement and comparison. Daily, she battles the tendency for fear of failure to serve as motivation. But she is gifted  with the ability to make two seemingly mutually incompatible traits work together: A determination to put herself and her health first, and a blazing passion to excel at her movement form. She puts her needs as a human before her needs as an athletic identity. She compares herself more to who she was yesterday than to others. One foot on solid ground, one foot over the precipice.

Balancing work and other areas of life is a challenge for The Dedicated Mover, for whom work is her life. Movement and training are her priority and livelihood, but she is often successful at maintaining quality relationships with herself and others in her life. Through training for her sport she has learned respect, honesty, and how to listen to her body, enabling her to use these characteristics in all life interactions. She doesn’t see herself as better than her non-athletic, non-mover friends, just that she’s chosen a different path, and is equally admiring of the people in her life who are dedicated to their own form of personal and professional mastery, whether physical or not. Her sport is almost everything to her- Almost, because she can detach when there is a true need to prioritize something that will affect her personal moral and ethical codes for living, and her overall well-being.

The Dedicated Mover at a glance:

Superpowers: Physical prowess, self-healing, foresight, dedication.
Kryptonite: Injuries, balance, judgement, competition, comparison.
Vitality: Physically healthy yet perpetually healing some degree of physical injury
Relationship with movement: Dichotomous: Passionate yet grounded, joyous yet serious, dedicated yet dependent.
Attitude towards the stairs: Takes the stairs most of the time depending on the need to preserve energy- Whether today was a heavy or light training day, or whether she had a competition.

Shell 5: The Over-Identifier

Finally we meet the much-alluded to,  most unstable of our characters (and the archetype I have personally identified with for nearly one third of my life), The Over-Identifier, who sits on the outermost shell of MLAM.

He takes two primary forms:

1. The serious amateur athlete aspiring for admiration and recognition, to make it big (at least in the eyes of his Instagram followers).
2. The professional athlete who’s sense of identity is inextricable from whatever form of movement or sport he has made it his life’s mission to master.

In either type, The Over-Identifier’s distinguishing characteristic is his ego-centric, unbalanced, often unhealthy relationship with movement: The using of it as a means to seek recognition for his physical superiority; his wrapping up of personal identity to his body and his chosen movement endeavor. To separate him from his sport is to tear his world, as he knows it, apart. This fragility to the surety of injury, age, and emotional stresses to erode his career (as is normal) makes him a living, breathing Black Swan event waiting to happen, and is what puts him on shell five, the most unstable shell, of the MLAM.

The Over-Identifier’s life revolves around training and competitions. He is usually a perfectionist. Type-A personality. Obsessed with his exercise and movement forms. Success for him means being the best. 

He is known to post videos of himself daily, probably multiple times per day, on social media, using hashtags such as #nopainnogain, and #beastmode. Even the seemingly innocent and healthy #movedaily slogan becomes unhealthy for The Over-Identifier, who blows both “move” and “daily” out of proportion. Intended to be a gentle, achievable process goal, suitable for The Indoorsman’s foray into a movement infused lifestyle, “move daily” is gospel taken to the extreme for the Over-Identifier. If he cannot commit to a minimum of two or three hours of training daily to his schedule, then he has not gotten his “move” on for that day. The day is now a waste. He is a waste. Woe is the Over-Identifier who takes a rest day. (Yes, in the case of professional athletes, they must train long hours most days, but even professional athletes need rest days, something the Over-Identifier sees as weakness and puts him into existential turmoil).

His identity is defined by how his body moves and looks and his value for competition permeates all areas of his life. To be the best and to win is his all-pervasive mindset. If he fails to perform at the high level he expects of himself or loses in a competition, the feeling is not that he has failed, but that he is a failure. The Over-Identifier experiences a near debilitating frustration if for some reason he cannot accomplish a movement goal or skill within a short time-frame, and a deep shame if his body does not look the part (not thin enough, muscular enough, tall enough, etc). If his livelihood is financially wrapped up in his practice of movement and his looks, in the case of a professional or sponsored athlete, the urgency of his need to fit into an aesthetic role increases. Due to the pressure he puts on himself he is prone to eating disorders, anxiety, depression, and other mental illness.

Fear of failure provides impetus for The Over-Identifier’s movement practice. Often resting just below conscious awareness, this fear makes him work hard, and his dedication is seen as admirable to those spectators on the outside who cannot see the truth of how unhealthy his motivating forces are. His unwillingness to give up, to keep pushing, can be so intense that he is likely to become injured before admitting that his relationship with movement and exercise is unhealthy. His attitude is that nothing can slow him down. Sickness and injuries can’t stop him from showing up for training, and if they do, he feels immense guilt for missing a training session, competition or performance. There is a bizarre sense of pride he gains from showing up for training injured or ill. It shows his commitment to his lifestyle, even if he knows he won’t be performing his best, to him it’s better than not showing up at all.

The Over-Identifier feels blissfully, ignorantly invincible. In the dance world there is term to describe this feeling:The indestructo phenomenon. Coined by Sally Fitt, author of Dance Kinesiology, it refers to how “Dancers who have never had a serious injury can fall into the trap of assuming their bodies are indestructible, that they can never become injured.” (Been there, done that.)

Due to this extreme, indestructo attitude, The Over-Identifier is likely to succumb to the over-training effect, the cognitive and emotional side-effects of which are the first to set in. Sooner or later (often sooner) he finds himself depressed, chronically fatigued, and in a brain fog for weeks on end. Then, as if by some stroke of bad luck, he suffers three injuries in a row. Probably while doing seemingly mundane, low level task, like sneezing, tying a shoe, stepping off a curb. Of course, this isn’t bad luck, but a recognizable pattern in hindsight- A direct result of his inability to honestly listen to his body and treat it with respect (he struggles with honesty, listening, and respect in other areas of his life, too). Where the Dedicated Mover has foresight as a superpower, the Over-Identifier must rely on hindsight, although these lessons from the past don’t always stick the first time.

Movement is his priority 100% of the time, making him the polar opposite of The Indoorsman. An admirable value that, again, many observers on the periphery of his life view as healthy, and aspire to be like him. He is likely to put his movement practice before school, work, and relationships, and these three areas of his life may suffer as a result.

In the real world, perhaps you know an Over-Identifier in the form of a Cross-Fit athlete who is obsessed with his workouts, and schedules his social life around them, alienating friends who don’t have the same commitment to the sport as he does; not wanting to commit to any social situation that is not “paleo”. We  could be painting the portrait of a professional dancer who works part-time as a bartender because nights are the only time she has to do anything else, and has no time for friend, family, and ironically, for herself- She is always working to support her movement based lifestyle, not to support herself. This could even be the description of personal trainer who feels his livelihood and identity is dependent on how his body looks, and selling his personal training dogmas and routines has become more important than educating himself on what is truly best for each individual client.

The common denominator of these three portrayals is that The Over-Identifier will do what he feels is necessary to maintain his illusory image, his fleeting feeling of success, no matter if he is hurting himself and sacrificing other areas of his life in the process. 

His life is a sunk-cost fallacy. A part of him may recognize the need to let go in order to feel at peace and truly enjoy his life, because there must be something more to this existence than being the best. Or is there… He’s invested so much time and energy in this identity, and he’s so close to “success”, so why stop now? He represses this ominous feeling of internal dissonance.

If for some reason he is forced to let go of his attachment to his physical identity, as in the case of an injury or other major life event like an illness or having a baby, he will lose his sense of “self”, and will enter a strange and tumultuous transition as he is forced to figure out, “who am I if I cannot do X, and do not look like Y?” Unlike the Dedicated Mover, this transition will be abrupt and crushing to his ego. However, the upside is that this unexpected transition will alter the trajectory of his life in what is likely to be a salubrious direction. He is then free to discover something more to life than being the best, to see his path more clearly, and to develop a sense of compassion and an interest in helping others. With no other options, in the time necessary for him to take, he learns to let go and jumps to a different shell of MLAM.  

The Over-Identifier at a glance:

Superpowers: Physical prowess, excellent body, ability to push through pain.
Kryptonite: Competition, perfectionism, losing, over-training.
Vitality: Appears outwardly physically healthy yet may be physically and mentally unwell.
Relationship with movement: Obsessive, excessive, dependent: Unhealthy and unbalanced.
Attitude towards the stairs: Similarly to The Dedicated Mover, takes the stairs sometimes, depending on whether today was a heavy or light training day, or whether he had a competition.

Why Are We Drawn to the Extremes?

Something interesting came up as I wrote this chapter: It was so much more interesting and enjoyable for me to write the description for the Over-Identifier than for the Dedicated Mover. I had fun with it. I giggled to myself as I wrote it. The Dedicated Mover on the other hand was a dry effort (though I tried to make it interesting enough, for your sake). It made me wonder, why? Are we as a species hardwired to prefer the extreme over the moderate? What makes moderation so difficult?

Look no further than social and mass media sources to witness the popularity of hyped-up, extreme ways of living, having, being, and doing. The extreme end of any spectrum is the one most often reported on and glorified from beyond the screen, making us feel like this is reality and we don’t belong. The expectation and pull to live in accordance to these portrayals is strong, sucking us in, or causing us to hide like a turtle in its shell.

And when pull turns to push, in my experience, being extreme is easier: To hide or to throw ones self into something. Not easier in the sense of physical effort, but in the sense that extreme behaviour is a cop out. A way of avoiding important self-investigation by engaging in a distracting activity or limiting thought process. Avoiding inhabiting an issue by staying busy and moving around it, sometimes quite literally with movement (in the case of The Exerciser and The Over-Identifier).

I was an Over-Identifier in the days when I was training to be a professional dancer. I had heaps of destructive habits. But to face them was a challenge beyond any physical feat you could have asked me to attempt. Stand on my head on stage? No problem. Address my fears and limiting behaviours? No thank you. So I opted to use movement, use my body, as an escape. This strategy only lasted so long. Remember that seemingly random mundane injury typical to the Over-Identifier? Mine was to my neck as I lay in bed by just turning my head to the side, still half asleep. I blamed the way I slept. I blamed randomness. I blamed everything but myself and my inability to take an honest look at how I was living my life. I was trying to keep up appearances (look like a dancer, move like dancer, act like a dancer). Trying to fit in. Trying to be the best. Trying to avoid the truth. It was exhausting, but it was easier than facing facts.

I suspect there is a cyclic interplay reinforcing this unbalanced way of living with what censored versions we see of the lives of others. We avoid, we numb , we escape, and then we are presented with even more portrayals of extreme behaviours framed as desirous, entertaining, or “normal”. It feeds into our own avoidance habits. And at the end of the day, what more do we want than to feel like we are normal and that we belong? 

What about those who do the hard work of inhabiting the challenging ground in middle? What about The Integrators (and to an extent The Dedicated Movers)? We don’t see them portrayed as frequently to be role models in the media, and by their very nature, they prefer not to seek recognition for their way of life. Their humility keeps them a secret from those who need their example most.

Moderate isn’t entertaining. Integrative living isn’t a good avoidance activity. No one wants to see an Instagram post of your meditative afternoon in your backyard, touting the virtues of your push-mower. The Olympic athlete with the healthy balanced mindset, diet, and training practice doesn’t make the headline. We’ll only hear about the athlete who injures himself or is involved in a drug scandal.

Action sells. Excitement. Physical prowess. Extremes. To watch someone morbidly obese on “reality” television struggling to exercise, then lose 100 pounds. Or to watch a paralympian with no legs compete in table tennis. 

In a world that places a higher value on displaying to us the extremes it is important to understand that movement, generally regarded as always healthy, can become an avoidance behaviour. We must remember that the examples for how to relate to movement in a balanced way are best observed in the people who exist in real life, not on the other side of the screen, for what they show on screen is just a snippet of their life we idealize. And away from the screen is just where you can find The Integrators: Engaging with their lives, unlikely to be influenced by what they see on Facebook. Ironically, ask them to show more of their lifestyle on social media to model their balanced way of living and we risk unbalancing them. Or maybe not… Such is the true test of an Integrator’s integrative integrity.

 

Stay tuned! In the next installment we look at the sixth and final archetype, The Transcender. See you next time.