The Persona Dale Steyn Built To Survive

By Paddy Upton

I once asked Dale Steyn something I’d wondered about for years. Was he always this confident?

He said no, almost before I’d finished the question.

What he described next was a persona, built deliberately years earlier, out of pieces borrowed from bowlers who’d scared him as a kid. Allan Donald’s stare. Shane Warne’s needle. He wanted that same edge, so he built it into a version of himself who walked onto the field in his place.

The real Dale, who had doubts, vulnerabilities and fears, waited just off the field until the day’s work was done.

It worked.

It carried him through a 15-year international career, including close to six years as the world’s number one Test bowler.

But he admitted something else too, almost as an aside. People in supermarkets had warned their kids away from him, telling them he was an angry man, when all he actually wanted was to pet their dog.

The persona had become more real to other people than he was.

For anyone who knows Dale, he’s a gentle, kind, chilled guy who just wants to have a chat to your granny and, quite literally, pet your dog.

Underneath it all was a question he never said out loud at the time:

What would people think if they saw him doubt himself?

That’s often where fear of failure gets its power. Not from the mistake itself, but from what we fear the mistake might say about the person who made it.

And that’s where we can begin constructing versions of ourselves designed to make sure nobody sees what we’re afraid they might see.

The same thing happens often in leadership, usually with less honesty about it than Dale showed. A polished, competent version gets built and worn into meetings. Underneath it, the doubt doesn’t necessarily go away. It just gets pushed beneath the cloak of strength and competence.

That can work for a long time. Sometimes for an entire career.

But it can come with a cost.

Dale’s cost showed up as exhaustion. Retirement, he told me, became the place he finally set the persona down and stepped more fully into his natural and comfortable self: barefoot, longer hair, a tattoo, skateboard and surfboard. None of which seemed particularly fitting for the image of a tear-away fast bowler back then.

He told me he sleeps better for it now than he used to.

Not everyone gets to wait until retirement to work that out.

I pause here…. as I find myself searching for some clever and punchy sentence to end this post.

But the truth, my truth, is that writing it has hit a raw nerve in my own life.

I have spent much of my professional life wearing my own version of that cloak: calmness, equanimity, mental toughness, confidence and professional competence.

Those things are genuinely part of me. But they’re not all of me.

What would people think, what might you reading this think, if you knew that I don’t know as much as I sometimes appear to know? That I’m not always as tough as I’d like to be. That underneath the composure and confidence there are doubts, insecurities and vulnerabilities that I don’t often let people see.

The weight of wearing this cloak of confidence, and keeping my doubts, insecurities and vulnerabilities underneath it, can sometimes be heavy.

Sometimes I crack under that heaviness, mostly in private.

But writing this has made me realise there is something even more uncomfortable underneath it.

There are parts of myself that I have been frightened for other people to see.

For someone who has spent much of his professional life talking about mental toughness, composure, confidence and performing under pressure, that’s not particularly easy to admit.

Because what if you saw the doubt? The insecurity? The times I don’t know. The times I’m not composed, competent or in control.

Would you think less of me?

Perhaps that’s the question underneath all of these personas. Dale’s and mine, and maybe some of yours too.

Thank you, Dale, for being honest enough about yours that I could begin to see mine.

And perhaps more importantly, for making me wonder whether I still need to hide quite so much of myself underneath it.