Identity by Association

God’s plan and expectation for every man is that each one will be productive in his/her life’s work, and in God’s sight, nothing will serve to justify your lack of productivity. However, there are some people who have chosen to be unproductive, but masquerade as people who are productive by their association with others who are truly productive. This is a pitfall that you must strive to avoid at any cost as it relates to your work or ministry.

Being productive in your work requires some level of commitment to see progress and results. Even when these results are not forthcoming as you may have expected, the appropriate thing to do is to stay there until you get your desires results. It is possible that in the course of your waiting or putting in diligent effort, God will show you how better to strategize to get the best results in your endeavor. While this is true, some have resulted to a shortcut in order to appear productive. This they are doing by simply associating with others who are being productive in their life’s work, not with the goal of learning how to be productive themselves, but rather with the goal of either deceiving others or covering up their own personal failures. This attempt to validate yourself or your identity by your association with others is what I refer to as identity by association.

Like I rightly observed, it is such a great thing to keep company with great and productive people, as long as your aim is to learn how you also can be productive in your work or ministry. But when your goal is simply for association or to get validation, you are missing the point. The consequence of this is that, should you fall out of association with the person(s) that you have been using to validate yourself, you will have to look for some other replacement. This is because you have built your self-esteem and your worth around your relationship with such person(s).

Also, if you are always seeking to validate yourself by your association you will be forced to always seek for new associations, not to learn new things or improve yourself, but simply to reinforce your own weak self-esteem and the perception of others about you. But the truth is that this will last only so long.

Your single most important objective in associating with people who have results in their life’s work should be to learn from them on how you can become a productive person yourself. Your identity and self-esteem is not defined by who you associate with, but by who God has made you to be. I have so many productive people whom I get to learn a lot from, some are really close to me, while others are not, but it really doesn’t matter, the important thing is that I am able to learn from them, but never will I have to build my self-worth around someone else’s work.

The starting point for you is to have a healthy self-esteem, believe in yourself, and in the abilities that God has deposited in you. When you do this, you will begin to realize your own potentials and you will put in little effort in seeking to associate with other people. You can then channel the time that you spend pursing association with others into productive work.

What you will find in a short time is that you have become more productive and it has become evident in your results. Then there will be people also seeking to associate with you, just as you have always wanted to associate with others, and it will now be your duty to properly guide them in ensuring that their association with you is for the purpose of learning your productive ways and not just to redefine their own identity. As we all learn to do these things, we will have the opportunity to be correctly mentored and to grow up into mentoring others correctly.

N.B

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