Changing Your Identity

This short talk will give you the inspiration to become more aware of the personas you've taken on. You will be motivated to shift your identity towards one that expands you and allows you to become all that you are capable of becoming.

Reviews

Thanks for sharing 🙏🪷

That talk was very topical for me right now. I appreciate your insight.

When I Do nothing and am empty then I am able to BE everything and am full.

namaste 🙏🏻

Spot on. I medically retired from an upper management position a little over a year ago, and I have not had the time to truly sit with the new identities that envelope me. I have spent much of this time caretaking for an elderly in-law who has since passed away, and that took place right before the approaching holiday season. My husband and I own a small business, but given the small volume of work we do (currently by choice), calling myself a "business owner" seems disingenuous, even if true. I am also a PhD candidate (ironically enough, studying social and group identity in a very specific context), but where I live, saying that is not regarded very highly and has made things unnecessarily complicated at times. I have published a book, but do not write as much as I once did, so that identity doesn't feel current either. My volunteer and semi-professional work in genealogy doesn't quite lend itself to adequate description at the moment, either. I am, after all, multi-faceted, multi-talented, and constantly evolving.

I settled on "researcher" for general use. It is accurate, and applies to many different aspects of my life, personal, professional, and academic. As a former career counselor and vocational rehabilitation rehabilitation rehabilitation professional for decades, loss of a "title" or job description was one of the leading causes of depression and self-esteem issues I saw in my clients. My ability to present them with a job title during our training programs was often cited as one of the best things about the program, on the client feedback surveys. I tried to convey that external titles were nice but internally-selected descriptions - when carefully and thoughtfully selected- could be more meaningful and impactful, and illustrated this by showing how their existing transferable skills could be labeled in any number of ways within the workforce. (E.g., "housewife" = homemaker = domestic engineer = group manager = scheduler = financial advisor, etc as the situation warranted.)

I find myself employing much of my own advice in this time of being a full-time budding independent scholar with thoughts of creating my own consulting business in the future. I can talk with others about my identity just fine; it's filling out forms that still trips me up, and that's largely where "researcher" comes into play.

This identity shift also happens after involuntary job loss/change and sudden onset of disability, not just retirement. It even happens during corporate takeovers and mergers, management changes, and social group leadership shifts. Understanding how to detach personal identity from external circumstances seems to me to be incredibly important, and rarely discussed. Kudos to you, Lou, for recognizing it and bring it to the fore with this excellent short talk. I've saved it so I can re-listen when I need a boost myself in this regard. 😊

Thank you for sharing this with us here. I see you and the light within you. Be well. 🤲🏻💖🤲🏻

Thank you for this interesting topic. I can relate to your story, younger me felt extremely validated by letters and titles. Returning to a child's experience of human being (rather than doing) is my current journey.