You are not your job

You’re so much more than that

Who Are You?

“What do you do?”

The single most confusing question we are asked on a regular basis.

By convention, we know the real question is “What is your job” but even then there is vagueness. Do you mean my job right now, or the job I mostly do, which I might call my career? Or do you mean the one, out of the many jobs I do, that I prefer? Or the one that you can understand and have a pigeon-hole for so that you can file me away?

It’s a lazy question so that you don’t have to think too much but instead outsource the burden of cognitive effort onto me.

But that’s not the worst of it. Our brain hears the question literally and, because the question is without context or time bounds, it spirals away into trying to sift through a billion possibilities. “Er, what, eh?,” goes your brain, “ What is it? Breathe. Stand. Exist. Hold atoms together in a human form. Contemplate the unending nothingness of the universe. Scratch. Fart. No, no, not those. Is it in this dimension? Or is it in the future? Or the past? No, wait. It’s here somewhere. Oh god, quick, find it, this is agony. Ah, yes, got it! This worked last time…”

“I’m in marketing. In Telecoms. Sort of.”, you burble.

“Oh, right,” says your inquisitor, whilst looking over your shoulder for someone else to talk to and showing their evident dissatisfaction with your reply. “Interesting”, they lie.

It’s a form of cognitive assault. People who ask it should be prosecuted for ABH. Those who organise ‘networking’ events should be tried for the same crimes as those who run hare-coursing or dog-fighting competitions. It’s why some of us come out of networking events feeling completely slaughtered and need to go and lie down in a darkened room for a while.

So, to protect ourselves, we come up with our ‘stock answer’. Which is actually worse.

Firstly, it reduces all conversations to a completely banal exchange of rehearsed statements. I don’t know about you but after meeting the fifth or sixth person and having exactly the same exchange, I’m starting to lose interest in myself and am in danger of slipping into a catatonic state. My brain, relieved of the cognitive torture of trying to answer the question properly, is now screaming at me because it is so bored and threatening to shut down for a bit in protest.

But secondly, and this is really what I am wanting to talk about this week, it reduces the wonderful complexity of our humanness and the innate mystery of our life into a two-dimensional caricature, like reducing the majesty of Da Vinci’s ‘The Last Supper’ to a drawing in crayon of stick-men around an indiscernible shape covered in undefined blobs.

We are reducing our identity to a simple statement about what our job - or at best our career - is.

And that’s not who we are.

But if we keep saying it, then we start to believe it. We begin to identify with the label that we have put upon ourselves. We put ourselves in the box and close the lid.

And that’s really dangerous.

Losing My Religion

I massively over-identified with my job. When I left corporate, this was a big problem.

It’s not uncommon for boomers like me, particularly men. Women are often less attached to their job roles because their other roles in life, most obviously motherhood, are so important and demanding. They often have a career break when they have children, they have clear identity outside of their job.

But for men of my age, who see ourselves as the provider for the family (because that’s how we were socially conditioned) and are less involved in bringing up children (again, because that’s our social conditioning), then we are prone to over-identifying with the job because it consumes the majority of our time and effort and it is the means by which we fulfil our social and family roles.

It’s also the place where we get status and authority (because forget trying to get either from your family, especially when they are teenagers!). Our employers encourage this identity, they reward us for conforming to their norms, for making sacrifices for the company. They encourage us to commit to the job, to expend our emotional effort on it. We become emotionally bound to our job, by degree, without even realising it.

As I became more senior and had more responsibility, the job grew and ate into my leisure time. I didn’t have time to follow my interests, to develop hobbies, to join clubs and societies. My work schedule was too disruptive to commit to regular attendance and I didn’t have the energy or mental bandwidth for other things anyway. Home time was family time and work took up most of the rest. Imperceptibly, over time, my world shrank and my other roles and identities (outside of family) fell away.

So when I left corporate, I went through something of an existential crisis. Without a job, without a place to be, without the expectations of others to be met, I was lost. I didn’t know who I was or what to do with myself.

My response was to buy a franchise to be a business advisor and coach. In truth, what I was trying to buy was a job (and, in truth, that’s what they sold me, but that’s another story), I was trying to repair my broken identity. Inevitably, it ended in disappointment and failure.

Since then, it’s been a long and painful journey back to myself, to forge a new identity and develop new roles for me to fill my life with. I’m not there yet, there’s still a lot of gaps to fill in, but I’m in a much better place than I was.

My advice, then, is simple. Keep your identity and your job separate as much as possible. If you must have your job as part of your identity, be sure to keep it to a minority role. Fill your life with other things, with your hobbies and interests, with community and friends, with things that express how you uniquely are. Never allow the job to push these out because that’s the only thing you can’t keep hold of. It’s out of your control and can be taken away from you in an instant.

I meet a lot of people of my generation who have made this mistake of over-identifying with their job, something they have come to rue. More concerning, I see people of younger generations making the same error, and the risks are far greater.

It’s My Life

Why is this? We’ve been told for a while now that people will no longer have one career but several. Indeed, it’s gone from ‘two or three’ to ‘a dozen or more’. We also know that jobs, even for major corporations, have become far more precarious (as I wrote about last week in ‘Layoff the Layoffs’). And yet people are still falling into this trap.

Many aren’t, of course. A lot of Gen Z are just refusing to enter the corporate rat race and value variety and change much more that the illusion of stability and safety than the corporate gig offers.

And we’ve seen a lot of older workers, who are already in the system, re-evaluate their priorities after COVID and to reduce the role of ‘the job’ in their lives. There’s a trend of millennials declining to climb the greasy pole, preferring to have a less-demanding and less stressful role that leaves them the time and energy for the other parts of their life. This, in my view, is very wise.

However, there are still a number of Gen Z that are signing up to the corporate gig and lots of people that are already bought in and committed (albeit somewhat reluctantly, in many cases).

Their response to this is to look for more from their employers. They are looking for organisations that have a purpose, that can give them meaningful work, that are having a positive impact in the world. They expect their employers to take clear moral and ethical positions on issues that are close to their hearts (which many employers are complaining about, preferring to avoid all questions of morality and ethics).

They are doing this because corporate roles take up some much more of their lives than they did for my generation. Although I over-committed to my job, many were able to have good and rewarding job and still have a full and vibrant life outside of work. That’s no longer possible and so they look to their work and their employer to meet some of their needs. Whilst understandable, I think this is a mistake.

Let’s look at those needs. Purpose and meaning are central to our sense of being, seeking these is man’s eternal quest. Then we have core needs of belonging and connection. Community is something that nourishes us and enables us to meet these needs. Then we all seek security and support.

Getting these needs met is the heart of a good life. However, if you tie these to your job, as well as your identity, then you are in an extremely vulnerable position because the only thing you can’t control is whether you have a job or not. Besides, organisations are generally not a good way to meet these needs, it’s not what they are designed to do.

Your job can disappear in a heartbeat, for reasons completely beyond your control. If the means of meeting your fundamental needs disappears with it, what do you do then? What resources do you fall back on?

When my role at BT was suddenly ended (despite being part of team that had delivered our project on time, to spec and within budget), I really didn’t appreciate how much I had lost with it. I was fortunate to still be employed but I had lost my purpose (the thing I had been working on for several years), I had lost my circle of relationships that gave me connection, I had long my sense of belonging to the ‘messaging’ community, I had lost my status as a ‘go to’ person in my field. I was isolated, abandoned, rudderless. It was crushing.

That dependency made me extremely vulnerable. I lacked resilience to negotiate this set-back (not helped by my inability to recognise it so I stayed in denial).

This is not a good position to be in. Yet it’s one that some people are sleep-walking into right now.

There’s a saying that your true wealth is what you have left if all your money disappears. The question to ask yourself here is what life do you have left if the job is taken away. That’s your true life. Make sure it’s a rich one.

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Learning To Fly

I don’t want to pretend this is easy, especially if you are already some way into your career and starting up the corporate ladder, if you have family commitments and a mortgage or rent to pay. It’s going to mean making some difficult choices, deciding on the trade-offs that you are willing to make. It will pay off in the long-term, however. It will give you the resilience you need to navigate the uncertain future. You’ll be investing your time in things that you have control over, that endure, that have real worth. Things that nourish your soul rather than merely add to your bank balance.

And the paradox is that you are probably going to succeed more over the span of your working life. You’ll almost certainly be happier and more developed as a person. Because you are not your job, you are infinitely more than that.

In fact, your job is probably the least interesting thing about you. Which is why that question should be banned.

I don’t want to know ‘what you do’. I want to know what your interests are, what you do for fun, what lights your fire, what makes your eyes shine with excitement.

That’s where the real you is. Never lose sight of that.

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If you feel you are in danger of over-identifying with your job and are not sure what to do about it, please get in touch. I’d love to hear your experience and see if I can help. No obligation or icky upsell, just an open (but confidential) conversation.

Book a call on my Calendly page

Email me at colin@colinnewlyn.com

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