Who Am I Without This Career Identity?
The other week a coaching client found out her grant - that was already awarded and in the middle of a multi-year funding - had been pulled by a private foundation supposedly due to the current political chaos. Essentially the organization was like, ‘DEI is important, we hope you keep doing it, but it won’t be through our funding, peace out,’ my paraphrasing.
This has happened to so many other researchers, and many will continue to do the work but without the support and space that the funding had given.So many folks are understandably devastated and feel blindsided. These external decisions are rocking their very sense of self.
Many of us craft our identity in some way around the work that we do, whether that is the job title, the position, the content, or the institutional context. It makes sense and gets more tangled when we conceptualize our career linearly, as many of us do. It’s the XY graph model of do X and you grow in Y. Go to school for this and you get the job and move up in it.
Yet, in a linear pathway, both internal catalysts (e.g., birth or adoption of our kid, peri-menopause) and external catalysts (e.g., layoffs, market shifts, illegal revenge firings) can knock us off. How do we show those on our XY chart?
Let’s map this out.
Mapping Your Linear Pathway
Write down the trajectory of your career and contributions as you’ve viewed them (e.g., education, grants, promotions, measures of success).
Now add in these layers of reflection:
What was the starting point? What did you envision as the ‘end’ point?
As you look at your trajectory, where are your steps value-aligned?
What assumptions about success, progress, or validation shape this linear thinking? What were the core components to your overing or sacrificing?
What does the linear path miss- what doesn’t it show?
Where does your linear pathway shift upwards, plateau, down? What do those directions mean to you?
So what happens when the linear path you’ve built your career around suddenly shifts, stalls, or disappears? If you’ve been mapping out your trajectory, you might already see how a linear framework struggles to account for pivots, disruptions, or the deep soulful need for realignment. It’s a model that often assumes constant upward motion, but life, identity, and purpose sure don’t move in straight lines.
And it’s really common in midlife and midcareer that you get hit craving something that doesn’t fit neatly on this track.
There’s a way to make sense of it all and better incorporate shifts and pivots. Next week, we’ll step outside the rigidity of the linear framework and explore a more regenerative way to reconceptualize career identity - one that holds space for change, resilience, and purpose beyond a job title.
Until then, notice where the linear path still shapes your thinking and behaviors. Where are you holding onto an endpoint that no longer fits?