How detaching goodness from recognition quietly reorganized my identity
The social experiment that slowly shifted my identity did not begin as an experiment at all.
Growing up, my sense of value was quietly tied to how people perceived me. How kind people thought I was. The compliments my mother would receive about me. Over time, that feedback loop hardened into identity.
I genuinely wanted to be a kind, loving, compassionate human. That part was always real. But in my thirties, a question surfaced that unsettled me the first time I let it linger.
Do I want to be a good person, or do I want to be recognized as being a good person?
Those questions are not the same. And the motivations behind them produce very different lives.
When a person’s value becomes dependent on recognition, patterns emerge. Attention shifts toward the wrong relationships. Emotional stability begins to rely on external weather. Praise steadies the nervous system. Criticism destabilizes it. That is not resilience. It is volatility masquerading as goodness.
Our culture indoctrinates us into the value of feeling significant. But significance is not the same thing as coherence. One trains us to scan for feedback. The other allows us to act without an audience.
A Sentence That Stopped Me Cold
I did not fully understand that distinction until I attended my first workshop with Joseph Shannon eight or nine years ago.
He was exceptional. Depth, precision, dry wit, and a delivery that held the room for six uninterrupted hours. Every workshop I attended with him landed, and it landed hard.
After one of those sessions, I wrote him a long email praising his clarity and insight. I asked, as I often do when I admire someone, if I could schedule a paid mentorship.
His response was brief and boundaried.
“Thank you. I am preparing for retirement and will not be taking on any mentorships.”
I was crushed.
At a later workshop, I caught him briefly at the end and again expressed how impactful his work had been. Not to persuade him. Just because when I admire someone, I say it out loud.
He stopped me.
“Ryan, I appreciate your kind words. But your opinion of me is not my business. If I tied my sense of value to praise, I would also have to tie it to criticism. That is a recipe for an unstable sense of self.”
I did not know how to respond. I just sat with it.
My adult identity had been shaped, in part, by being reflected back to myself through others. I cared deeply about people. But I also needed confirmation that my care was seen.
That moment did not change me overnight. It lodged itself quietly at the front of my thinking.
Operationalizing Kindness Without Turning It Into Performance
I have long believed that information is ubiquitous and undivided personal attention is not. Over time, that belief evolved into a deeper framework for me: People Change People™. Our social ties are our fastest routes for change, for better or worse.
As we were building out our high school curriculum, I kept circling that truth. But I needed a way to operationalize kindness and gratitude without turning it into performance. Without recognition. Without feedback loops that would reinforce the dependency I was trying to loosen.
I began writing handwritten letters.
Long-form notes to people I admired. People I cared about. Teachers. Friends. Mentors. Sometimes strangers who had done something quietly generous. The goal was simple. I wanted people to feel seen, valued, admired, and appreciated.
That part mattered deeply to me. I just did not need recognition for it.
I also created small cards. Business-card sized. Short notes of admiration or gratitude. Left behind after moments of kindness or humanity. No name. No expectation. No acknowledgment.
Over the course of a year, I wrote close to one hundred and fifty of them.
Fewer than ten people acknowledged receiving one. Only one person ever wrote back.
What Changed When No One Was Watching
With every unanswered card, something unexpected happened.
My identity began to shift.
I stopped scanning for acknowledgment. I relied less on recognition to steady myself. My sense of self grew quieter. More coherent. Less performative.
This was never about becoming less kind. It was about letting kindness do its work without turning back to see if it was noticed.
When someone feels genuinely seen and valued, it changes them slowly. It reorganizes how they see themselves, how they move through the world, how they treat others. The ripple travels outward.
Removing recognition widened the system. It untethered the effect from me.
This was not self-denial. It was leverage.
The investment was not kindness itself. The investment was altering the environment that shaped my identity.
Over time, the returns showed up quietly. My relationships became more reciprocal. I listened more once I no longer needed to be seen as thoughtful. My emotional baseline steadied. My curiosity widened. Even my sense of meaning felt less performative and more grounded.
A Subtle Health401k® Frame
Inside Health401k®, this is a quiet example of how a multi dimensional health investment can come from an unexpected place. What looks like a simple behavior can become an environmental shift, one that changes identity and makes better patterns more likely to emerge without force.
In my case, the compounding showed up across the social, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual dimensions, not because I was trying to optimize, but because I was changing what I needed in order to feel whole.
The Quiet Takeaway
I still want to be a catalyst for good. That has not changed. What I am working to loosen is my attachment to being recognized as one.
The battle is not over. It undulates. But it is a fight worth engaging.
This is the kind of health investment no one applauds. It does not trend. It does not announce itself.
But it compounds quietly.
And in a culture obsessed with being seen, there is something profoundly stabilizing about doing good work without a witness.
Ryan Travis Woods