You Are Not Your Title. You Just Think You Are
What actually disappears when you turn in your badge and what to do about it
Listen here.
This is the second in a five-part series about the obstacles that can keep us stuck in “safe” jobs, even when we know it’s time to move on. I surveyed 52 high achievers who had either retired from their jobs or were considering retiring in the next several years.
“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.” — Lao Tzu
Last week we talked about money.
This week we’re talking relationships. The people you spend the most time with. A recently retired leader described it to me like this: “A few weeks after you quit, the email, texts, and phone calls come to a dead stop. No one needs you. You start to wonder who you are now without the job.”
Let’s not gloss over this. There is personal identity in being valued and being needed by others. Every person in the survey confirmed some version of this. But no one warns you that leaving your job takes two things from you at once.
The first is your title. You actually have to turn it back in the day you leave. About a third of the survey respondents named identity as a challenge. Who am I when I’m not the VP, the leader, the owner, the one people call when things break? One leader said it this way: “You have to figure out who you are without the business card. That is harder than people admit.”
Simon Sinek tells a story about a highly ranked government official speaking at the same conference a few years apart: once while still holding his title, and the second time as a mere citizen. The first time he was flown in on a private jet and got the full VIP treatment, while the second time he had to fetch his own coffee. If we’re not careful, we can conflate who we are with what we do. I’m guilty of this.
The second is the tribe. More than a quarter named work friendships as highly important. For me, thirty-plus years of hallway conversations vanished as soon as I turned in my badge. One retired executive told me the strangest part was that he misses the people, but he doesn’t want to go back to the office. “Once you cross over to retirement,” he wrote, “you are an outsider and never an insider again.” You can go back and visit, but you'll need to pull out your ID and put on a visitor’s badge. It’s not the same.
For some reason, I thought I’d be the exception. I left my corporate job 6 months ago after 21 years at the same company. The people who came to me for advice every week stopped calling. I knew it wasn’t personal. They had a new boss to keep happy. They had new challenges to face that I couldn’t help them with. The best I could offer was advice as a friend.
Also, I was under the false impression that I’d outsmarted the system. I had been investing in my coaching skills and personal growth for 3+ years before leaving. I’d been building what was next for a while. But somehow that didn’t fill the mental gap when that first Monday rolled around, and I found myself in my flannel pants and sweatshirt staring out the window of my house wondering what my former team at work was doing.
So what can you do to prepare in advance? Three things showed up in the survey.
Find new tribes. Jay built relationships at the gym. He’d been going there for a while, but he doubled down and kept showing up at 5:30 am. He got to connect with people who still cared whether he showed up for workouts, regardless of his employment status. And the upside is that he didn’t have to shower and head to the office afterward!
Find work that doesn’t need a title. Shannon traded his office for teaching classes at a local university. He is leveraging years of experience to teach students practical, hard-won lessons from the corporate playing field. He isn’t grinding anymore, but he is adding value to students and getting immense personal satisfaction from it.
Give your experience away. Laura went all in on mentoring young women in her church and in the workplace. Her years of C-suite experience are invaluable in helping high-potential women succeed in a corporate world that school never prepared them to navigate. Don’t underestimate how valuable your experience is to people coming up behind you.
My favorite answer in the whole survey came from someone who said: “I went out into a field and said goodbye to my old ego. Then I slapped myself in the face and kept moving.”
Maybe that’s what it takes. Accepting the idea that you were successful, you were given a title, you had an impact, BUT your future doesn’t have to look like your past.
The one thing I noticed is that many people who launched well into their next chapter were those who started before they left. So if you’re in that spot, now is the perfect time to start.
And I think this starts with relationships.
So here’s your homework for this week. Write down five people you want to develop closer relationships with. Reach out to one person this week and grab a cup of coffee with them. Don’t talk about work. Make it a point to talk about anything but work. That’s it. Decide now which relationships are worth investing in and invest in those people on purpose.
You will have a great life beyond what you did for work. And you need people who can encourage you along the way. We were never meant to navigate this journey alone.
This transition is hard, but it’s worth it. I believe your next chapter can be the very best chapter of your life.
See you next Sunday.
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