You Are Not Your Job Title

Episode 42: If the thought of changing careers feels like the thought of losing yourself, this episode is for you. Career change Coach Dana Stevens explores why so much of our identity gets wrapped up in our job title, particularly when we have committed to a career for decades, and what to do about it when it is time to change. 

In this episode you will learn:

• Why leaving a career that has been central to your identity involves real grief, and why that matters
• The personal story of leaving the BBC and what the identity loss felt like the first time Dana changed careers
• The second career change, leaving a Head of role, and what was different about it because of what Dana had learned between the two
• What upgrading your identity looks like, and why what you build on the other side is almost always richer than what you left behind

Book a free Coaching Consultation:

https://calendly.com/danastevens/initial-coaching-chat

Connect with Dana:

Website: https://www.danastevens.com/workwithme
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dana_stevens_coach/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danastevens1/

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And if you’re ready to design a working life that truly fits your needs and lifestyle, book a free consultation call at https://calendly.com/danastevens/initial-coaching-chat

Special thanks to @Lou_Greenaway_Music for the piano composition and performance.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:51

Today, I want to talk about identity and specifically how much of our identity can get so wrapped up in our jobs, often without us fully realizing it, and what that means when we start thinking about changing careers. So I want to start with a question that I think most of us have been asked hundreds of times. What do you do? Right? It's often the first thing someone asks when they meet you. Not who are you, not what matters to you, not what do you love, but what do you do? And most of us have been answering that question for so long with the same answer that the job title and the self have quietly fused. They've become the same thing, so much so that when you start to even imagine stepping away from that job, part of what you're imagining is a kind of stepping away from yourself. And that's what today's episode is about: why that happens, what to do about it, and what becomes possible when you start to define yourself by something much bigger than what it says on your job description. We live in a culture that places enormous weight on what you do for a living. It's one of the primary ways that we categorize people, including ourselves. Your job can be your social identity as much as your internal one. It determines how people introduce you, how they describe you, even how they think of you. And after years of being introduced in the same way, you start to think of yourself in that way as well. But beyond the cultural dimension, there are much more personal reasons why identity gets so tangled up with work. You're likely to have committed to your job. You've probably worked hard to get where you are. Maybe you've trained, climbed, pushed, had to prove yourself over and over again. And when you invest that much of yourself into something, it stops just being a job. It becomes evidence of who you are and what you think you're capable of. And so your job title can start to carry all of that investment wrapped up in it, all of that effort, all of that identity. And maybe you're someone who finds your self-worth there. For a lot of people, work is where they feel most competent, most respected, most seen. The feedback they get, the success they achieve, the recognition they get as well. So much of it happens at work, and over time, it can become the primary place you go to feel good about yourself. Which makes the idea of leaving feel terrifying. Not because you're going to lose the job so much, but sometimes because you think you're going to lose the source of your own self-belief. And maybe you're someone who's been finding it there for a really long time. Maybe you're doing something vocational. I've worked with women who've been teachers or nurses for 25 years, who've always been the nurse or the teacher to everyone around them, including themselves, whose whole identity, their vocation, their sense of purpose, their place in the world is inseparable from the job. And I've worked with women who have climbed up the ladder, the corporate ladder, maybe they're senior leaders or a head of department or something. And maybe they've been doing that for so long that the idea of stepping down from the title feels like stepping down from themselves. Or maybe it's just that you've been doing the same thing day in, day out, that it feels like part of you. And when you've been doing something for that long, of course walking away feels like walking away from yourself. So we don't have to feel bad about that or judge ourselves for it. That's just what happens when you've invested that much of yourself in one place. And leaving a career that's been central to your identity can feel like a loss, a real one. And it's actually pretty important that we do acknowledge that. It's not about just simply pushing through or reframing it before you've had a chance to actually feel it. I know this because I've done it twice. I've changed careers twice, and it is a kind of grief. The first time I'd worked really hard to become a radio producer at the BBC. That wasn't a role I'd just stumbled into, right? I'd wanted it, worked towards it, built my way up there, and I was originally told I was crazy for even trying as I had no connections in that world. But I worked my way up after doing so many hours of unpaid work experience for years, right, while supporting myself with four other jobs. And when I finally got there, making music and cultural programs for the world service, it was genuinely one of the best things I'd ever done. And I loved it. I was proud of it. And I was very much Donna who worked at the BBC. In my mind, as much as anybody else's, right? And when I decided to leave, when I felt I had to leave because the progression wasn't there and I needed to earn more money, and I was ambitious for things that the BBC couldn't give me at that point, I knew it was the right decision, and it was still hard. Not logistically, emotionally. Because I wasn't just leaving a job, I was leaving a version of myself that I'd worked really hard to become and that I'd become very attached to as well. There was a grief in that, a genuine sense of loss, of leaving something behind that had mattered. So if you are feeling something like grief when you think about leaving your career, I want you to know that it's not a sign that you're making the wrong decision. It's a sign that you cared, or that you still care, that it mattered, that you brought real commitment to what you did, and that's something to feel good about, to honour, even be grateful for. But the reality is what I realized is your job is something that you do. It's not who you are. And I know that might sound simple when I first say it, but I also know that it might feel completely untrue right now if your job has become the primary place you've existed as a capable, respected, purposeful human being for the last 10 or 20 years. But it is important to really stop and think about that because your identity is not your job title. It's the collection of everything that you are: your values, the way you treat people, the things you care about, the way you think and solve problems and show up in the world, the kind of friend you are, the kind of parent, the kind of person, the interests and ways of being that have always been there alongside the job, even when the job started to or maybe was taking up most of that space. For so many of us, the job ends up standing in for all of that. It's been doing the identity work that actually belongs to something much bigger and richer and more personal than any job title could ever capture. And the invitation here is not to abandon who you are. It's almost the opposite, right? It's to reclaim all the parts of who you are that the job has maybe been crowding out, to expand your sense of self beyond what you do for a living, to let your identity be bigger, so much bigger than just your job description. That's what I want you to take away from this episode. Your identity is so much bigger than your job description. The skills you've built, the expertise you've developed, the judgment, the self-knowledge, your way of approaching the world that all those years of experience have given you, the way that you do things. None of that disappears when you change careers. You take all of that with you. That's the value you bring to whatever you do next. The job title goes, but you do not. And so the second time I changed careers, I had something I didn't have the first time. I had evidence. I'd already left the BBC, I'd already felt the grief of walking away from a version of myself I'd I liked and that I'd worked hard to build, and I'd not only survived it, but I had built something new and genuinely better. I knew in a way I simply couldn't have known the first time that the identity I was leaving behind was not the only version of me available. But the second change had its own specific challenge. By the time I decided to leave my role as head of strategy at London ad agency, I'd climbed, I'd worked my way up a corporate ladder, fought for recognition, earned a title that carried status and weight, often through long hours and blood and sweat and tears. And there's something particularly loaded about walking away from that. It's not just grief, it's this question of whether, without the title, you'll still be seen as successful in inverted commerce, right? Whether you'll still be taking seriously, whether you'll still be enough. And what helped me the second time was something I'd started to build in the years between the two changes. A sense of myself that was not only located at work, a sense of success that was not only about corporate markers of success. I had started paying attention to who I was outside of the office, the kind of mother I wanted to be, the life I wanted to live, the things that mattered to me beyond my career. And I'd started to let those things matter as much as or more than what was happening at work. Not because work stopped being important, but because I wanted to be more than my job title. I wanted my identity to be built on something more durable than a seniority level on an org chart, right? I wanted to build my identity around who I was and the kind of life I was creating. And when I did finally make the second change to retrain as a coach, that broader sense of self was what carried me through. Because I knew who I was without the title. I'd been building that knowledge for years. The status I was leaving behind was real, and I did feel a loss of it, but it was not all of me, and I knew it. And this is what I want for you not to rush past the grief or dismiss the loss, but to start building a sense of yourself that is broader than your job title, so that you can really appreciate that you are not starting from scratch with who you are, you're just moving into a new or different expression of it. So, what does this actually involve? What does upgrading your identity look like in practice? It starts with getting curious about who you are outside of what you do. And I mean really curious, not just listing hobbies or interests, but asking those deeper questions. What do you value? What kind of person do you want to be in the world? What would you want people to say about you at the end of your life that's got nothing to do with your job title at all? It involves starting to invest in those things, not as an afterthought or a nice to have, but as a genuine priority. The relationships that matter to you, the experiences that feed you, the parts of yourself that have been sitting quietly in the background while the job took up all the space. It also involves beginning to build a new story about yourself. Not a false one, not pretending to be something you're not, but a more complete one. One that includes the expertise and the experience and the judgment you've built, and also includes who you are becoming and what you're moving towards. This is where thought work becomes really important. The thought work is what I teach my clients, what I help them with, because the old identity, the nurse, the head of, the BBC producer, that's going to have lots of thoughts attached to it, stories that you're attaching to it about what losing that title might mean, about who you are without it, about whether you'll still be respected or valued or enough, thoughts about what others will think, or comparisons with others. And those thoughts need to be examined, questioned, replaced with something more accurate, not overnight, but deliberately over time with the right support. And here's what I can tell you from working with clients through this and from having done it myself twice: the identity that you build on the other side of this process is almost always richer and more authentic than the one you were clinging to. Because the new sense of self is based on who you actually are rather than what you've been doing. And that is a more solid foundation than any job title has ever been. So if the thought of changing careers feels like the thought of losing yourself, I want you to see what you're actually being asked to let go of. It's not you, it's a version of you that was always just one part of the full picture, a part that mattered and deserves to be honored, but also a part that doesn't have to be and will not be the whole story. You are not your job title, you are the person underneath it, and that person, with everything they've learned and built and become, is going somewhere interesting, even if you haven't quite found out where that is yet. The grief of leaving one chapter behind can feel very real. Let yourself feel it, and also know that what is on the other side of it is not less than what came before. For most people, it's more because it's something you choose, because it's built on a fuller sense of who you are, because it fits the life you actually want to live rather than one that you were living when all of this started. And if you want help working through this, the identity piece, the thought work, the practical career change piece together, come and have a free consultation with me. This is exactly the kind of work that we do. The link is in the show notes, and I want to thank you for listening this week. And I'm gonna see you next week. Bye for now.