Am I what I do? Can my identity and self-worth be distilled into a job title or a function? Tyler Durden, a character from Chuck Palahniuk’s legendary novel “Fight Club,” declared:
”You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your f***ing khakis. You’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.”
The intersection of what I do and who I consider myself to be has been on my mind lately, as I traveled and met family over Easter. As I reflect on the last couple of years of my career, that’s how I see myself:
- I’m a designer
- I’m a design leader
- I’m a manager
- I’m a mentor
- I’m a coach
I’ve gotten good at identifying nouns that I got from verbs that describe what I do.
A couple of years back, before my first burnout, I was very one-dimensional when it came to work and identity. I’ve dreamed, breathed, and lived design. I was reading books about it, all the podcasts I’ve listened to were about it, and what interested me was how to progress in my design career. I’ve mixed work, passion, and my self-worth into a deadly cocktail. Being quite impatient, I recall how uneasy I felt every probation period and every performance review. In the end, I’ve put everything on that one card. It pays off.
Otherwise, I’m a failure, right?
There’s more to life.
I’ve built a beautiful life for myself over the last 15 years. I love and I’m loved, I have people to hang out with, and I have multiple other interests and hobbies. The difference was that none of this was weighing similarly heavy on my self-identity and my self-worth.
Since I’ve changed my career 3 times already, and pretty much every 2 years I change something about what I do, am I really what I do?
There’s a famous quote, often misattributed to Aristotle, that could be paraphrased as “I’m what I do repeatedly”. That sounds true, in the end, we’re more what we do than what we say!
But it’s also false, as living beings, we’re never static, always moving, growing, changing, and evolving. How could a person be limited by the sum of actions they did until this given moment if the next minute might prompt them to change?
Hey, what do you do?
“What do you do?” is the question we often struggle to answer during social functions. We often can’t even clearly explain our jobs to close friends and family members. How do you describe user experience design or transformative coaching to a random person you meet at your friend’s birthday party?
I’ve always replied with “I’m a XYZ” by default. See what I did there? Instead of verbs, I’ve given them nouns. That’s how I mixed those 2 worlds before.
What seems to be a better answer these days is replying by saying what do I do these days, most simply and concisely possible.
“I help people find solutions to their work problems” is a way better answer than “I’m a coach”. In the end, I do coach, mentor, advise, and consult people on a myriad of different topics. It’s a part of who I am, but it’s more of a mosaic rather than an identity.
Identity is a story; life is a journey.
What if I temporarily don’t do these things? Will it call for an identity shift? Doubt it, these tools will remain in my toolkit until I don’t want them there anymore. The overwhelming pressure to figure out who I “want to be when I grow up” leaves me. I don’t know there is a thing “I’m supposed to do” in this life, no one I was meant to be. All of these are old thought constructs I choose to leave behind. When we ask me what I do next time, I might give you another answer. The things I do change over time, just like a person, I’m changing each day. One thing I know for sure is that no one is just one thing we do. I’m not my job, I’m not what I do. I’m who I’m becoming one day at a time.
