On career and identity
A career pivot, or a retirement (which is really a career pivot anyway) can feel like the world is spinning on a different axis. Why? Because our work provides a significant sense of identity for those of us who are deeply emotionally invested in it.
We’ve come to believe that if our work changes, who we are changes as well.
May I offer a gentle counterpoint? Your job is not who you are. Only you get to define that.
I took my own first dive into the ice-cold reality of this idea when I was all of 24 years old. I had spent nearly half my life up to that point in pursuit of the career I was then preparing to leave.
I had decided to walk away from my first and only job as an on-air television journalist. And while “former television reporter” still decorates a proposal or a conference biography here and there, it was literally half a lifetime ago.
The attributes and techniques I gained from that work live on. I jokingly refer to myself on LinkedIn as a “recovering journalist” because I’m still curious as heck. I ask questions for a living, and I can spot a typo from a mile away without my glasses on.
But being a former anything isn’t really what I’m all about anymore.
Since leaving television in my 20s, I’ve resigned from 8 jobs and been fired from 2. I’ve had jobs where I so identified with the role or the organization that I wore a logo on my person every business day for years. And I’ve had jobs where I became so disillusioned that I couldn’t bear to talk to anyone about work when I wasn’t working.
Today, I’m in the longest and most fulfilling job I’ve had across my several careers. Yet I am just as likely to tell a stranger that “I do executive coaching and facilitation” as “I am an executive coach and facilitator.” This work suits me better personally than anything I’ve ever done, but it does feel like something I do rather than someone I am.
This detachment of identity from work can lift a burden and provide amazing clarity.
In my retirement coaching certification program, I learned the very simple difference between a former doctor and a doctor who no longer practices medicine. You’re the same person with a different set of activities.
A friend of mine was very much in DC and of DC before leaving town a number of years ago. When we caught up recently, he spoke about a dynamic at the dog park, at the car wash, that seems pretty healthy to me. “In Chicago, nobody gives a s**t what you do for a living.”
What would it look like to give yourself that same permission, maybe without moving to the Midwest?
Coaching can help you rediscover your sense of identity as distinct from your career, and to find and assemble the other building blocks of who you are. Let’s talk, and I can tell you more.