Stage 2: Life Context | Life Roles

You are not one person, but a collection of roles that shift depending on who's in the room.

Employee at 9am. Partner at 7pm. Parent at bedtime. Daughter on Sunday calls. Creator at midnight when the house is quiet. Some of these roles feel like breathing, but others might feel like holding your breath for hours.

A roles audit asks a simple question: which of the identities you carry actually belong to you, and which ones did you inherit, absorb, or accept because someone expected them?

This connects directly to the shadow work and values you explored in Stage 1. Your values tell you what matters. Your shadows reveal what you're hiding. Your roles are where those truths collide with daily life. A role that lines up with your values gives you energy, but a role that conflicts with them costs you every time you step into it.

The goal here is to map every role you play, measure how authentic each one feels, spot the places where your roles pull against each other, and decide which ones deserve more of you and which ones deserve less.

The research behind life roles

Sheldon Stryker and identity theory

Sheldon Stryker, a sociologist at Indiana University, spent decades building identity theory. His central argument: people carry multiple identities (parent, worker, friend, activist), and these identities are arranged in a hierarchy of salience. The identities highest in the hierarchy are the ones you're most likely to invoke across different situations.

Salience means that certain roles push their way to the front. If "parent" sits at the top of your hierarchy, you'll filter work decisions through the lens of parenthood. If "career professional" sits highest, you'll filter parenting decisions through the lens of work. The hierarchy isn't fixed. It shifts with life events, relationships, and conscious choice.

Stryker's research, developed from the 1960s onward and formalised in his 1980 book Symbolic Interactionism, showed that identity salience predicts behaviour better than attitudes or beliefs alone. What you do on a random Monday afternoon is shaped less by what you believe and more by which role is running the show in that moment.

Donald Super's life-career rainbow

Donald Super, one of the founders of career development theory, created the life-career rainbow in the 1980s. The rainbow maps the major roles people play across their lifespan: child, student, worker, citizen, homemaker, leisurite (Super's term for the role you occupy during free time), and parent.

Super's key insight was that a career doesn't exist in a vacuum. The worker role interacts with every other role we carry. A person who is simultaneously a worker, parent, and caretaker for an aging parent is spreading themselves across three demanding roles at once. The quality of their career experience can't be understood without seeing the full picture.

His research showed that role overlap peaks in midlife, typically between ages 30 and 50, when we are most likely to hold the highest number of simultaneous roles. This is also the period when burnout and role strain hit hardest. Super argued that career counselling without attention to life roles is incomplete, because how we experience work depends on what else we're carrying.

Erving Goffman's front stage and backstage

Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) introduced the dramaturgical model. Goffman treated social interaction as theatre. Every person has a front stage (the performance we put on for our audience) and a backstage (who we are when the audience can't see us).

Front-stage behaviour involves managing impressions. We dress a certain way for work, we speak differently with our boss than with our best friend, and we show confidence in meetings where we feel uncertain. All of this is role performance.

The strain comes when front stage and backstage drift too far apart. Goffman observed that people who spend too much time performing roles that don't match their backstage selves experience exhaustion and alienation. The wider the gap between performance and reality, the higher the psychological cost.

This maps directly onto what you'll do in this exercise. When you rate a role's authenticity, you're measuring the distance between your front stage and your backstage for that particular identity.

William Goode's role strain theory

William Goode published his role strain theory in 1960 in the American Sociological Review. His argument: because people occupy multiple roles simultaneously, they face constant pressure from competing demands. Role strain is the felt difficulty of meeting all the obligations attached to our various roles.

Goode identified two types of strain.
Role overload happens when the combined demands of all our roles exceed our available time and energy.
Role conflict happens when the requirements of one role directly contradict the requirements of another. Being told to work late on the same evening our partner is feeling unwell and we need to care for them, is role conflict. Feeling crushed by the sheer volume of everything you we to do is role overload.

Goode's research found that people manage role strain through bargaining, delegation, compartmentalisation, and elimination. The people who cope best are the ones who actively choose which roles to prioritise instead of trying to give 100% to everything. This exercise is designed to help you make those choices consciously.

Authenticity and well-being

Alex Wood, P. Alex Linley, Peter Maltby, Michael Baliousis, and Stephen Joseph published a study in 2008 in the Journal of Counseling Psychology examining the relationship between authenticity and well-being. They developed the Authenticity Scale, which measures three components: self-alienation (feeling out of touch with your true self), authentic living (behaving in ways consistent with your values and beliefs), and accepting external influence (the degree to which you shape yourself to meet others' expectations).

Their findings were clear: higher authenticity predicted lower anxiety, lower stress, and higher subjective well-being. People who reported living in alignment with their values and resisting pressure to perform roles that didn't fit them showed better psychological health across every measure.

The implication for this exercise: roles that score low on authenticity aren't just uncomfortable. They're actively working against your well-being. And roles that score high on authenticity are doing more for your mental health than you probably realise.

Your alignment exercise

This exercise asks you to be honest about where your life matches who you are, and where it doesn't. The temptation will be to score everything as "mostly fine" or to catastrophise everything as broken, but try for accuracy instead.

Access the Notion workbook here.

Part 1: Role inventory

For each role you currently play, complete the prompts. Skip any roles that don't apply to you and add roles that are missing.

Authenticity (1-10): How much does this role feel like the real you? 1 means you're performing entirely for someone else's benefit. 10 means this role is indistinguishable from who you are at your core.

Energy cost (1-10): How much does stepping into this role take out of you? 1 means it gives you energy. 10 means it drains you completely.

• Partner/spouse - Who expects this of me? - Authenticity (1-10) - Energy cost (1-10) - Would you keep this role if no one was watching?

• Parent - Who expects this of me? - Authenticity (1-10) - Energy cost (1-10) - Would you keep this role if no one was watching?

• Son/daughter - Who expects this of me? - Authenticity (1-10) - Energy cost (1-10) - Would you keep this role if no one was watching?

• Sibling - Who expects this of me? - Authenticity (1-10) - Energy cost (1-10) - Would you keep this role if no one was watching?

• Friend - Who expects this of me? - Authenticity (1-10) - Energy cost (1-10) - Would you keep this role if no one was watching?

• Employee/colleague - Who expects this of me? - Authenticity (1-10) - Energy cost (1-10) - Would you keep this role if no one was watching?

• Manager/leader - Who expects this of me? - Authenticity (1-10) - Energy cost (1-10) - Would you keep this role if no one was watching?

• Creator/maker - Who expects this of me? - Authenticity (1-10) - Energy cost (1-10) - Would you keep this role if no one was watching?

• Caretaker - Who expects this of me? - Authenticity (1-10) - Energy cost (1-10) - Would you keep this role if no one was watching?

• Student/learner - Who expects this of me? - Authenticity (1-10) - Energy cost (1-10) - Would you keep this role if no one was watching?

• Mentor/teacher - Who expects this of me? - Authenticity (1-10) - Energy cost (1-10) - Would you keep this role if no one was watching?

• Community member - Who expects this of me? - Authenticity (1-10) - Energy cost (1-10) - Would you keep this role if no one was watching?

• Homemaker - Who expects this of me? - Authenticity (1-10) - Energy cost (1-10) - Would you keep this role if no one was watching?

Part 2: The authenticity check

Look at your completed table. The scores tell a story, but the story only comes alive when you sit with it. Answer these prompts in writing:

• Which role scored highest on authenticity? What makes it feel so real? Can you trace it back to a specific value or belief?

• Which role scored lowest? When did it start feeling like a performance? Was there a moment it shifted, or has it always been this way?

• Pick a role that scores high on authenticity but also high on energy cost. What's going on there? Sometimes the roles we love are also the ones we pour too much into.

• Pick a role that scores low on authenticity but low on energy cost. Is this a role you've automated? Something you do on autopilot without thinking about whether it fits?

• Look at the "who expects this of me" column. How many of your roles exist primarily because someone else needs you to play them?

• If you could drop one role tomorrow with no consequences, which would it be? What does that tell you?

Part 3: Role conflict map

Your roles don't exist in separate containers. They bleed into each other, compete for the same hours, and sometimes demand opposite things from you. Goode's research calls this role conflict, and it's one of the biggest sources of stress in adult life.

• Think about the last month. Where did two of your roles collide?

Create a table and fill in each row with a pair of roles that pulled against each other recently, and explain what the conflict was, which role won and why.

Now look at the pattern:

• Is the same role "winning" most of the time? What does that tell you about your current salience hierarchy?

• Is a role that matters deeply to you (high authenticity, high importance) consistently losing to a role you care less about? Why are you letting it?

• Where is your biggest source of role overload right now? Which combination of roles is creating the most pressure?

Part 4: Reflection

Now use the questions below to connect your role inventory to the values and shadow work you did in Stage 1.

• Which of your roles would surprise someone who only knows you in one context? What do you keep separate, and why?

• Think about a role you've outgrown. You still play it because the infrastructure of your life is built around it (people depend on you, systems expect you there). What would it take to renegotiate that role?

• Is there a role you want to play but haven't claimed yet? Something you feel pulled toward but haven't given yourself permission to become? What's stopping you?

• Look at your values from Step 1. Which role is the best vehicle for your top value? Which role is the worst fit?

• Goffman talked about front stage and backstage. Where in your life is the gap between performance and reality widest right now? What would it cost to close that gap?

Part 5: Write your roles snapshot

Pull everything together into a short summary. This snapshot is a reference you'll come back to throughout the course. Write it in your own words and as honestly as you can.

Use the prompts below as a starting structure. Write a paragraph or two for each.

• The roles that are truly yours: Which roles feel most authentic? Why do they fit?

• The roles you're performing: Which roles feel like costumes? Who are you wearing them for?

• Your biggest role conflict: Where are your roles pulling hardest against each other right now?

• The role you want to grow into: What identity is waiting in the wings?

• One thing you want to change about how you carry your roles:

Part 6: AI companion (optional)

How to use: Share your completed role inventory table and reflections with the AI. This conversation usually runs 20 to 30 minutes. It works best after you've finished all five parts of the exercise, so the AI has your full picture to work with.

Copy and paste the prompt below into Claude, ChatGPT, or any AI assistant:

You are a thoughtful life design coach helping me examine the roles I play in my life. I've just completed a roles audit where I listed every role I play, rated each one on authenticity (1-10) and energy cost (1-10), and noted whether I'd keep each role if no one was watching. I'm going to share my completed inventory with you. Your job is to help me see what I can't see on my own.
Start by asking me to share my role inventory. Once I do, reflect back the patterns you notice: which roles seem most aligned with my real self, which ones look like performances, and where you see potential conflicts. Then guide me through these questions one at a time, waiting for my response before moving on:
(1) Your highest-energy, lowest-authenticity role seems like it's costing you the most. What keeps you in it?
(2) If you could redesign one role to fit you better instead of dropping it entirely, which would it be, and what would you change?
(3) Is there a role you rated as authentic that might actually be a comfortable mask? Sometimes we're so good at a performance that it feels real.
(4) What role do you play that nobody ever asked you to play, you just assumed it was expected?
(5) If your closest friend read your inventory, what would surprise them? Keep your responses direct and honest.
Push back if I'm being vague or deflecting.