The Religion of Performance

There is a phenomenal series on Hulu called The Bear that I wished more people watched. The lead character Carmy is a high level chef who has moved back to his hometown to take over his brothers Italian beef spot. I want to talk about Carmy because he’s not just sweating in a kitchen, he’s performing surgery on his own nervous system with a boning knife. He’s the walking embodiment of what happens when pressure becomes identity. When perfection is the only way you know how to breathe. In the religion of performance, your worth is the offering and the scoreboard is god. And Carmy? He’s not just devout, he’s sacrificing himself on the altar.

Sound familiar?

Yeah. That’s why we’re here.

Because high performers know that heat. The performance. The silence. The obsession. The unwavering pursuit of greatness. The quiet unraveling that you won’t let happen until you close the door to your room and you’re alone. Carmy lives it in every scene. So we’re using him as a mirror. A way to look into the deeper conversation about what performance really costs when your worth is tied to the outcome.

What you discover early in the series is that Carmy is a high performer mid-collapse. His kitchen isn’t about cuisine, it’s the psyche under constant siege. A war zone dressed in stainless steel and plated perfection.

And I’ve seen this war before.

Carmy is the athlete. The one who trains until his joints scream but he still finds a way to call it laziness. The keeper who lets in one goal and swears it defines him. The veteran player who wins and feels nothing. The rookie who spirals behind his eyes but the scouts call him unshakable.

He’s what happens when excellence becomes survival. When avoided grief is chopped, seared, and served up as greatness. When control is how you outrun chaos and the pursuit of perfection is present simply to cover all the shit he endured growing up.

Because in sport, and in Carmy’s kitchen, performance is not just a task. It’s a form of atonement.

“Yes, chef” becomes “Yes, coach.”

Not a command. A confession.

A plea to matter.

A vow to be useful.

A ritual of obedience to the invisible god of expectations.

The kitchen heat is the gameday fire. The locker room buzz. The relentless inner monologue that says: “If I mess this up, I am the problem.”

It’s the same burn in the lungs. The same inability to exhale because the weight of what’s sitting on your chest won’t allow your lungs to expand. The same quiet voice asking, “If I’m not performing, do I still have value?”

Carmy doesn’t just cook. He commands the execution of perfection. For him, the perfect plate is his atonement for past sins. He doesn’t strive to be better. He finds ways to suffer more because suffering and sacrifice are the only things that tell him he’s doing it right.

So when I watch The Bear, I don’t see a kitchen. I see the blisters sticking to your sock because you ran 3 more 400s in the 90 degree sun. The athlete turning on the lights at 6am in an empty gym when getting more sleep would have been the best choice. I’ve witnessed the effects of praising an athlete for “handling the pressure” with a good performance while the effort involved in showing up for the process is disregarded. When the only coping mechanism provided is pegging the output gauge to the right.

The real work is not just helping athletes to focus better so they can be All-Conference. It’s actually helping them return to themselves without needing a parent, a coach or the stats to be their validation. Helping them understand that performance doesn’t need to be penance. And winning, or having a great game, shouldn’t feel like relief.

And perhaps, along the journey of this work, in the early mornings with no camera to document, in the breath between reps that almost broke you, in the deafening silence after failure, you begin to feel something unfamiliar but true.

Not the rush of applause. Not the high of a near perfect game.
But the quiet pulse of discovering that you are enough, even on the roughest days. You begin to find a oneness to connect with.

Your identity isn’t earned after the final whistle nor is it defined by the outcome. Who you are was always there, buried deep within all the chaos of chasing the craft. You simply lost it somewhere along the way. Like lost keys, you set it down one day and now can’t seem to remember where you placed it.

Your truest self? You get the opportunity to emerge in the process. If you are brave enough to step into it. It shows up in the inside jokes in the locker room. In the moment you choose to rest rather grind for the sake of being seen grinding. In the uncomfortable feeling of realizing you don’t have to prove your worth today.

Discovering who you are, as opposed to who/what people have told you to be, is the first step in finding joy again. It will look like choosing presence over pressure. Choosing grace over grind.

At some point you must decide that the reward for playing well isn’t joy. Viewing joy as the reward places joy as a companion your soul searches for after a great game but can’t seem to find. But joy is there and has been there all along. Just lost in the dark corners of the room. You placed it there years ago when you were taught that playing poorly isn’t okay. That performance must be at a certain level to give you permission to feel joy for the game.

This was a destructive lie someone handed you. In that moment you made the connection that your worth, and the worth of the game you love, got shackled to someone else’s expectations.

But true joy can be found again. Rediscovered. It’s found in moments when you give everything you have for the game and you still don’t bleed for it. It’s found in your love for the craft without letting it consume you.

Because the goal isn’t to lose yourself in the pursuit of greatness. It’s to step deeper into who you truly are so the joy of the game returns, not as sparks of relief, but as fuel for your soul.