Are you your job or is the job you?
While sitting on a plane last week waiting to get out of the North ahead of the Snow storm, I came across an article in More Magazine entitled “Fired at 50.” As I read through the article it resonated with me, and the concept of “Being Authentic,” which is what my first two blog posts have been about. When unexpected or even expected life changes occur, such as a loss of a job, loss of a spouse, divorce, or becoming an empty nester, do you fine yourself in a void, questioning who you are?
Is this you? You have a fabulous career, fancy clothes, glamorous travel, and great home, and a company car, everything you ever dreamed about. And then one day, in the blink of an eye, it’s over. The rug is pulled out from under you. It’s as though you are floating in mid-air with nothing beneath you. It is so devastating that you actually go into mourning. The life you knew it dead, and you are not sure who you are. You my even ask the question, “Who am I now?” Who were you in the job, you or someone else? Were you what the corporation expected, or who you wanted to be in the job? Did you give up your identity for a career?
During my 15-year corporate career, I spent six years as a Divisional Trainer, traveling throughout the Southeast. It was a position in a Fortune 100 company that I had aspired to early on in my employment. When the promotion was finally offered, I had to move from Pennsylvania to Georgia, which I agreed to do. It was an extremely cold winter, and sunny Atlanta sounded very appealing. I arrived in Atlanta and immediately began flying out every Monday morning and returning on Thursday evening. My primary view of Atlanta was driving too and from the airport. It took me two years to get established in the community, make friends and feel as though I lived there. My life was my job! Five years later, when the economy dipped, the company decided that my department was more of a liability than an asset, and put my job on hiatus. Although my income didn’t change, my status did, and I was placed as a sales floater in a local territory.
The emotional turmoil and mourning I experienced was the result of the death of my identity. I was lost and would ask myself, “Who am I?” Who was I before this job, and why had I allowed a corporate position to define me? It took a long time for me to recover. I made some bad decisions, getting into a destructive relationship that lasted much longer than it should. Eventually I decided to become self-employed and launched 1st Impression Communications and many years later, Because We Are Women. I began redefining me, asking what’s important to me, and what do I want for me. Of course, since life is a journey, I continue to ask those questions, and evolve. However, whoever I am today, it’s whom I chose to be and not what some else expects of me. It’s not easy because everyone has an opinion and an expectation.
Losing your identity doesn’t only happen in a career situation. A spouses’ career or children often defines many women. After 18 years, when a child goes off to college, or leaves home, some women must start a re-invention process that might have been avoided if they had not deferred thief life to their children. My philosophy is: “Life if about choices. Since you can’t be all things to all people, at least be true to you.”
Stay Tuned – I have a couple of stories how two female corporate executives handled the transition of being fired.
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Great topic! It’s too bad we wait until a crisis to ask ourselves the important questions. (I’m just as guilty). I think Socrates said it best: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Gabriela, thanks for the comment. Staying true to ourselves is not always the easiest thing to do.
I am continually asking the question of myself.
We do wait for a crisis to start looking in the mirror and asking the question – who am I? Has anyone ever read the poem “The Face in the Mirror?” It is all about being your own friend and not disappointing the face in the mirror! Are you disappointed that you have not done all the things that you wanted to do in life? Sometimes I am!
I try to live by my own wisdoms.
THANKS FOR ALL THE RESPONSE. I hope to use these in a book someday.
What a thought-provoking piece.
The questions are always relevant and not easily answered. My personal answer is lived each day in helping women travel the journey inward to their authentic selves.
I am fortunate to have never identified with my jobs in corporate America, although that non-identification sometimes felt like a curse. The gift was that there was always a prevailing sense of discomfort, an underlying urge to seek more, be more, do more.
I am truly grateful that my journey has brought me to a fulfilling space, a place of self mastery that we can all experience by following the trail our feelings of discomfort create. That trail leads to the awakening that who we really are is never found in the external images & accoutrement that we tend to falsely identify with.
Thank you for the reminder.
Wow! what a great response. If we could only send these messages to all those women who feel as though they must be something other than who they are. You know the ones who think that they to be what their parent’s wanted, or what their spouse wants, or even what their friends think is best. We are the only ones who can decide and often we need permission to move into that inner space.
Thanks Leah. What have you done to help get you and keep you in the fulfilling space? Many women need to hear a “How-to” to even take the first step.