Does your work determine who you are? It can… but it doesn’t have to. Change your approach to your career to ensure that you can retire with your identity intact.
Just a few decades ago, you’d know exactly what John Farmer, John Butcher or John Baker did for a living. Even today, it’s one of the first questions we ask people when we meet them for the first time: “So, what line of work are you in?”
You spend most of your time at work – doing your job, advancing your career and building relationships with your colleagues, clients and customers. It’s no wonder, then, that a Foresight Factory survey found that 46.7% of the global population think their job is very important to their sense of identity. That’s not too far off the number (47.7%) who cited their nationality or even their gender (53.6%). (Family, at 68.6%, was the most important factor when it came to people’s sense of identity, according to the survey.)
There are many complications that come with allowing your work to define you. What happens if you change your job, or lose your job, or find yourself no longer able to do your job? If you are what you do, what are you when you’re not doing that anymore?
It’s a question that most people grapple with when they retire. Harvard Business School Professor Teresa Amabile recently completed a study on this exact problem.
“Life structure is defined as the major contexts of your life – the places where you spend your time, literally the geographical, physical spaces where you spend your time, the major activities that you engage in, the most important relationships that you have in your life,” she told the Harvard Business Review. “When you’re not working, a lot of that goes away. You know, we ask people who are retired, do you miss working? Most say something like, ‘I don’t miss the work, but I do miss the people.’ I think that most of us don’t realise how anchoring and important those work relationships are.”
During her research, Prof Amabile spoke to someone who was about to retire. “He spoke openly about how the transition was making him question his identity. ‘After I retire, I’m going to have to discover who I really am,’ he said. I was so struck by that. He clearly felt he was going to become untethered from the person he’d been for many years, in a fundamental way.”
Shifting your perspective
Here’s an idea: instead of letting what you do define who you are, why not let who you are define what you do? Gary Sinderbrand, CEO of health data company Betterpath, told Inc. magazine how he does it.
“To the contrary, 100% of who I am is what defines how I approach my job,” he said. “My core beliefs allow me to consider possibilities and ‘impossibilities’. Like the chronic disease patients that my job serves, fixing seemingly unsolvable issues can only happen if you truly believe you can achieve your goals, even if you do not know the ‘how’. The commitment and faith that you will find a way personifies the collective belief of my team.”
A 2012 study by the University of Johannesburg, published in the South African Journal of Industrial Psychology, highlights another useful perspective. One of the people interviewed in the study said that, instead of letting their job define them, they took the lessons they learned in the workplace and used those to enhance their personal life – lessons like communication, consideration for others, leadership, teamwork and accountability.
“Most of principles learned, can apply at home and everywhere; then you become a better person and you grow a lot,” the study subject (known as “Participant 17A/B”) said.
Perhaps he or she gets what many of us don’t: that who you are is informed and affected by your work, but it isn’t defined by it. There are many ways to uncouple your work identity from your actual identity – and as you head towards retirement, there has never been a better time to do it.
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