Why Leaving a Career Can Feel Like Losing Yourself

"Life is a process of becoming."

Anaïs Nin

When Work Becomes Who We Are

Depending on where you live, one of the first questions we're often asked when we meet someone new is remarkably revealing.

"So, what do you do?"

It's such an ordinary question that we almost never stop to notice what's underneath it. We aren't really asking how someone earns a living, we're asking for a shortcut to understanding who they are.

Occupation has become an incredibly efficient shorthand – it tells us something about education, ambition, status, lifestyle, values, sometimes even personality, all before we've learned what someone laughs at, what keeps them awake at night, or what their perfect Saturday afternoon might look like.

It’s also how we understand ourselves.

Recently, I was speaking with a client who was considering leaving a successful career in finance. Like so many people, she arrived believing she needed help making a decision, but she kept circling back around to the same question: “Who would I be if I were no longer Adrian the finance professional?"

It's a question I've heard many times from clients, and it’s one I know intimately.

More Than a Job

Long before I became a leadership coach, I was a competitive rower. I spent years training and competing, and if you'd asked me then who I was, rowing would have been part of the answer. The unexpected diagnosis of ARVC, a genetic heart condition, brought that chapter to an unexpected end at age 25.

Because being athletic was a balm to a deeper identity wound from childhood, not being an athlete wasn’t really an option in my mind. Less than a week passed after my diagnosis before I found my way into a coaching launch at the club where I used to train. 

Six years later, I was hired as the Head Women’s Rowing Coach at Georgetown University. I was one of the few women leading a Division I rowing program, and I carried that with enormous pride and more than a little attachment. I believe deeply in creating opportunities for women in sport. I was also completely and totally exhausted.

Leaving didn't only feel like walking away from a job, it felt like walking away from the person I'd spent years becoming, and needed to feel whole.

It was a strange mixture of relief, excitement, and a guilt I couldn't quite put my finger on. How could I feel called toward something else while grieving something I still loved–and felt so guilty leaving behind?

Why This Feels So Hard

How our brains work offers an interesting perspective on why this feels so profound. 

Our brains are constantly building models that help us navigate the world with greater efficiency by making predictions. One of the most enduring truths we form these predictions around is our identity, our sense of self. I'm a physician. I'm an executive. I'm a lawyer. I'm a coach. These aren't only job descriptions, they're organizing principles.

They create continuity asnd they help us understand who we've been, and who we expect ourselves to be tomorrow. 

When one of those organizing principles begins to dissolve, the uncertainty feels threatening, even when we're moving toward something we genuinely want. We're loosening our grip on an identity reinforced for years through recognition, achievement, promotions, praise, and the way other people have reflected us back to ourselves. 

No wonder it feels so difficult.

What Pulls Us Forward

Our lives begin to change long before our circumstances do. They change when our attention starts lingering somewhere new, or when we can’t stop finding fault in our current situation, or in a thousand other ways.

If I had kept focusing on everything I was leaving behind, it’s possible I wouldn’t have left. It’s possible the rigidity of the life I was outgrowing was too strong to entertain something new. However, the truth that kept emerging in my body–in the wisdom my intellect couldn’t always understand–was that this identity was exhausting, and no longer fit. . I stopped paying attention to what I was leaving because I became convicted by the rightness of what was ahead.

I've watched that same shift happen in so many of my clients. There comes a point when what is calling us forward becomes more powerful than what has been holding us in place, because the story we've been telling about ourselves is no longer big enough for the life we're beginning to imagine.

P.S. If someone asked you, "Tell me about yourself," and you couldn't mention your job, what would you say? I'd love to hear your answer.