Identity Comes Before Performance: What Jazmyn Jackson's Career Teaches Every Athlete

There are moments in an athlete's career that everyone can see.

A championship. A draft selection. A record-breaking season.

For Jazmyn Jackson, everyone saw the Triple Crown.

Few saw the sentence that came before it.

"I started saying, 'I'm a professional athlete,'" Jackson said on Out of Left Field. "Once I actually started telling people that, that's when everything changed."

Nothing about her swing changed overnight. Her speed didn't suddenly improve. She didn't discover a new training program.

Instead, she changed the way she described herself.

Within a year, Jackson dominated professional softball in Mexico, becoming the first Triple Crown winner in Liga Mexicana de Softbol history by leading the league in batting average (.519), home runs (10) and RBIs (32), then hitting .857 with four home runs during the championship series.

It's tempting to dismiss that as coincidence.

Science suggests otherwise.

Identity Before Performance

Psychologist Albert Bandura spent decades studying why equally talented people often perform differently under similar circumstances.

His research on self-efficacy found that people who genuinely believe they can execute a task are more likely to persist through adversity, recover from setbacks and ultimately perform at a higher level—not because belief magically changes ability, but because it changes behavior.

Confidence influences effort; effort influences preparation; preparation influences performance.

Jackson's story reflects that sequence.

Before embracing her identity as a professional athlete, she introduced herself differently.

"I do lessons. I'm a coach. And I play professional softball."

Professional softball wasn't her identity. It was something she did. Then she flipped the order.

"I'm a professional athlete."

That subtle shift changed how she evaluated opportunities, who she surrounded herself with and how she approached her career.

"It totally gave me a path and enabled me to have more discernment about what should be a part of my path and what shouldn't be," Jackson said.

Identity didn't improve her batting average. Identity improved her decision-making. The batting average came later.

Elite Athletes Don't Just Train Their Bodies

Sports psychology has increasingly focused on the relationship between identity and performance.

Researchers have found that athletes with a strong, internally driven athletic identity often demonstrate greater resilience, higher motivation and stronger commitment during difficult periods of competition.

That doesn't mean identity alone creates success. It means identity influences the behaviors that eventually create success.

Jackson describes it differently.

"I started leading my own path."

It's a simple sentence, but it's fundamentally different from waiting to be discovered.

Waiting to be chosen. Waiting to feel ready.

For years, Jackson admitted she tried to fit into rooms.

"As a Black woman in a predominantly white sport... you want to be chosen," she said. "You don't want to be too much."

Many athletes experience that pressure. It doesn't come from a lack of confidence, but from a yearning to earn belonging.

Jackson eventually realized those aren't the same thing.

The Permission to Become Yourself

Professional sports often celebrate authenticity, but living authentically is much harder.

Especially for women. Especially for athletes. Especially for athletes whose identities have historically been underrepresented.

Jackson's breakthrough wasn't pretending to be someone new. It was finally allowing herself to become more fully who she already was.

"I think I've become everything I'm supposed to be in a softball player."

That mindset now shapes her advocacy work as much as her career.

One of Jackson's core beliefs is that simply showing up authentically creates space for someone else to do the same.

"One of my biggest forms of advocacy is just showing up exactly as who I am," she said. "Because you are already, by being authentically you... changing the space that you're in. When people get to see you show up as you, they have permission to show up as themselves."

A Lesson Bigger Than Softball

It's easy to look at Jackson's Triple Crown season and search for mechanical explanations.

Maybe a swing adjustment. Maybe a better approach. Maybe stronger competition prepared her.

Those things almost certainly mattered, but they weren't where her story began.

Her story began with identity – with deciding that being a professional athlete wasn't simply something she did.

It was who she was.

Performance doesn't always create identity. Sometimes, identity creates the conditions for performance.

And for athletes chasing the next level, that may be the most important development that never appears in a box score.