Working Identity – Herminia Ibarra
“Then indecision brings its own delays,
And days are lost lamenting over lost days.
Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute;
What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it;
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Preface
“Most people experience the transition to a new working life as a time of confusion, loss, insecurity, and struggle. And this uncertain period usually lasts much longer than anyone imagines at the outset. An Ivy League network doesn’t help; even ample financial reserves and great family support do not make the emotions any easier to bear. Much more than transferring to a similar job in a new company or industry, or moving laterally into a different work function within a field we already know well, a true change of direction is almost always terrifying, even as it is exhilarating.
At the heart of this book are the stories of dozens of people who changed careers. It analyzes their experiences through the lens of established psychological and behavioral theories. Based on the stories and extensive re- search in the social sciences, the book affirms the uncertainties of the career transition process and identifies its underlying principles. But it does not offer a ten-point plan for better transitioning, because that is not the nature of the process. Instead, it lays out a straightforward framework that describes what is really involved and some tried and proven unconventional strategies that will make the difference between staying stuck and moving on.
The book hinges on two disarmingly simple ideas. First, our working identity is not a hidden treasure waiting to be discovered at the very core of our inner being. Rather, it is made up of many possibilities: some tangible and concrete, defined by the things we do, the company we keep, and the stories we tell about our work and lives; others existing only in the realm of future potential and private dreams. Second, changing careers means changing our selves, reworking our identities. Since we are many selves, changing is not about swapping one identity for another but rather a transition process in which we reconfigure the full set of possibilities. These simple ideas alter everything we take for granted about finding a new career. They ask us to devote the greater part of our time and energy to action rather than reflection, to doing instead of planning. Hence, the unconventional strategies.
- Reinventing Yourself
“Most of the time, our working identity changes so gradually and naturally that we don’t even notice how much we have changed. But sometimes we hit a period when the desire for change imposes itself with great urgency. What do we do? We try to think out our dilemma. We try to swap our old, outdated roles for new, more alluring selves in one fell swoop. And we get stuck. Why? Because, as adults we’re much more likely to act our way into a new way of thinking than to think our way into a new way of acting. We rethink our selves in the same way: by gradually exposing ourselves to new worlds, relationships, and roles.
The morning after my husband asked me that question, I had a sort of epiphany. I realized that I already had enough money to take a risk. What was holding me back was not financial security; it was plain fear that I might not be good at what I thought I’d be happy doing. I concluded that I might as well change now because I was dying to do something else and it would not get any easier with time. The next day—a year and a half ago—I quit.
Act your way into a new way of thinking and being. You cannot discover yourself by introspection.
Start by changing what you do. Try different paths. Take action, and then use the feedback from your actions to figure out what you want. Don’t try to analyze or plan your way into a new career. Conventional strategies advocated by self-assessment manuals and traditional career counselors would have you start by looking inside. Start instead by stepping out. Be attentive to what each step teaches you, and make sure that each step helps you take the next.
We like to think that we can leap directly from a desire for change to a single insight or decision that will complete our reinvention. As a result, we remain naive about the long, essential testing period when our actions transform (or fail to transform) fuzzy, undefined possibilities into concrete choices we can evaluate.
Neither Lucy nor Pierre planned their way into their transitions, nor did they kick things off with a good dose of self-analysis. Instead, events in their lives and work led them to envision a new range of possible selves, the various images—both good and bad—of whom we might become that we all carry.
What is important is not changing the work or organizational context but reworking outdated basic premises and decision rules that are still governing our professional lives.
As Lucy’s and Pierre’s stories illustrate, the tools at your disposal group into three kinds: experimenting with different possibilities, making new and different connections, and stepping back to make sense of what you are learning along the way.
2: Possible Selves
“ Research on how adults learn shows that the logical sequence—reflect, then act; plan, then implement—is reversed in transformation processes like making a career change. Why? Because the kind of knowledge we need to make change in our lives is personal and situational; it comes from involvement in a specific context and with specific people, not from solitary introspection or abstract information gleaned from theoretical, general-purpose personality profiles. It can only be acquired by taking action.
For starters, we must reframe the questions, abandoning the conventional career-advice queries—“Who am I?”—in favor of more open-ended alternatives—“Among the many possible selves that I might become, which is most intriguing to me now?
Even if we manage to get past the paralysis, the true-self approach can mislead us into thinking that the bulk of the work is up-front and diagnostic. After that, implementation is easy. Unfortunately, implementation consumes the bulk of our time and patience in career transition. The allocation of attention, time, and energy suggested by the true-self model is exactly backwards.
Much like Gary has created three different buckets of possibilities for himself, Burnett and Evans suggest that you get your juices flowing with an “Odyssey plan” made up of three alternative realities:
• What life will look like in five years if you continue on your current trajectory (Plan A).
• What you would do if Plan A can’t happen and you need to pivot.
• What you would do if money and time were no object.
3: Between Identities
“She stepped up the Wall Street search, applying for jobs at top banks and meeting others like her with humanities backgrounds.
With each round of interviewing, June saw the links between old and new more clearly: “At first I wondered what I would do with my knowledge of literature. It seemed like such a waste. But then I realized that what I have always wanted is a job that keeps me constantly interested and always learning new things.” With each round, she also met more and more people who, like her, had “unconventional backgrounds,” or who impressed her as role models for whom she’d like to become: “I met an extraordinary woman—super smart and super nice—in fixed-income research, who graduated from my alma mater around the same time I did.
Endings are tougher and take longer than we think. No matter how unhappy we may be in a job, most of us continue to revisit the possibility of making it work because the present role is necessarily tied to a possible self—an image, outdated though it may be, of whom we once wanted to become. June’s academic identity, for example, kept reasserting itself throughout the entire transition period, even after she had handed in her resignation. “My department was family, a dysfunctional one,” June says, “but one I was an intimate part of, one I joined at age seventeen when I went to college.” For her, leaving academia meant not just giving up a long-term career objective but also an image of who she should become that important people in her life, including her mentor, harbored. The emotions she felt when she found the pile of draft articles that would have assured her professorial future show just how much giving up a possible self—even one that has become a burden or lost its appeal—marks a real loss.
Long before we start exploring alternatives, we also begin to disconnect socially and psychologically. A slow and gradual shift in reference groups—relevant points of comparison—starts to take place. June, for example, began to identify with the values, norms, attitudes, and expectations of people working in the business world and began building relationships with people outside academia. The nuns in the “becoming an ex” study likewise began to cultivate relationships with laymen and -women, using these contacts to evaluate how they might adjust to life outside the convent.
Psychological distance, even rupture (what William Bridges calls “disidentification” and “disenchantment”), is also part of the ending process. Often the rupture is personal; we experience a falling out with an important figure. When a relationship with a mentor deteriorates, or irreconcilable differences with our superiors arise, we experience more than mere disillusionment; our images of possible futures also change. June’s academic identity was forged in a relationship with her mentor; once her “personal agenda” interfered with his agenda for her, his support waned and so did the corresponding possible self.
How do we create and test possible selves? We bring them to life by doing new things, making new connections, and retelling our stories. These reinvention practices ground us in direct experience, preventing the change process from remaining too abstract. New competencies and points of view take shape as we act and, as those around us react, help us narrow the gap between the imagined possible selves that exist only in our minds and the “real” alternatives that can be known only in the doing.
A working identity, however, is not merely what we do and with whom; it lies also in the unfolding story of our lives. Throughout a career transition, the narratives we craft to describe why we are changing (and what remains the same) also help us try on possibilities. June’s attempts at explaining herself—why she wanted to make such a seemingly “crazy” career change, why a potential employer should take a chance on her, why she was attracted to a company she had never heard of a day before—were at first provisional, sometimes clumsy ways of redefining herself. But each time she wrote a cover letter, went through an interview, or updated friends and family on her progress, she better defined what was exciting to her, and in each public declaration of her intent to change careers, she committed herself further.
The between-identities phase of a career transition is about bringing possibilities to life, proving they are feasible and not just pipe dreams, and learning whether they are appealing in practice or only in theory. To discard outdated identities once and for all (that is, to do the work of ending), we need some good substitutes. Old possible selves are always more vivid than the new: They are attached to familiar routines, to people we trust, to well-rehearsed stories. The selves that have existed only in our minds as fantasies or that are grounded only in fleeting encounters with people who captured our imagination are much fuzzier, fragile, unformed. The middle period is the incubator in which provisional identities are brought, tentatively, into the world via the projects we start, the people we meet, and the meaning we lend to the events of that period.
For action-oriented people, the waiting time, ambivalence, or oscillating commitment to a future course of action of the in-between period can be hard to tolerate. Three temptations, listed below, are common. The danger, of course, is circumventing the reinventing process. Check which of the three, if any, is the most tempting to you right now:
• Taking on too many commitments while in between roles when what you need is some time to rest, restore, or step back before plunging into active mode.
• Exploring one kind of career possibility at a time when you’d learn more by exploring multiple options simultaneously.
• Taking the “bird in hand” job opportunity, because it’s just taking too long, when you might be better off holding out a little longer for something that is a better fit for you.
4: Deep Change
“In the reinventing process, we make two kinds of changes: small adjustments in course and deep shifts in perspective. Often the first changes we make are superficial. We try moving into a new job, interacting with different people, picking up some new skills. Even when the need for a more profound change is apparent, its meaning can remain elusive. Small choices accumulate within a harder-to-change framework of ingrained habits, assumptions, and priorities. But after a while, the old frames start to collapse under the weight of new data. Sooner or later, the cumulative force of the small steps we have been taking requires a more profound change in the underlying framework of our lives.
Seemingly small steps, changing one project at a time, create momentum. Social scientists have argued that a strategy of “small wins”—making quick, opportunistic, tangible gambits only modestly related to a desired outcome—is in many instances the most effective way of tackling big problems. Part of the reason small wins can produce much bigger results than a grand strategy is psychological: Defining a problem as “big and serious” can make us feel frustrated and helpless and therefore can elicit a less creative (or more habitual) response. We become paralyzed. We make the wrong move just to change. When we see change as requiring “big, bold strokes,” we amplify our fear of it; we overcome this fear by putting one foot in front of the other, in a series of safer steps.
Small wins are also great ways to learn and to enlist supporters. Negotiating both a good fee and mostly remote work on her first consulting contract, for example, helped Susan discard barriers and discover resources that were invisible to her before. One small win in itself may not seem like much; a series of them increases the likelihood of serious change by setting in motion a dynamic that favors a next step and makes the next solvable problem more visible.
Like many who switch careers, Susan’s transition brought her back to her starting point: working full-time for a top consultancy. Yet her professional life—the way she does her work, the way she relates to coworkers and employers, and the way she balances her personal and professional life—has changed because of what she learned along the way. Making a career move is a chance to make fundamental changes in one’s life. Many people, like Susan, have long-held dreams about their careers but for one reason or another—including financial, family, or social pressures—have put them off. In some cases, like Susan’s, the issue is less the substance of the work than the lack of flexibility of the institutional structure in which the work gets done. In other cases, a person may have dreamed of becoming a writer, musician, or entrepreneur, but the practicalities of life were constraining.
Experience reveals barriers to change that we can rarely identify at the outset of a career transition, no matter how much self-reflection we do. What we see as feasible and appealing is always constrained by the limitations of our experience.
Dan McIvy’s story below illustrates that as we explore possibilities, we start to recognize, question, and eventually dismantle some of the basic operating principles that are at the foundation of our working identities: what kinds of relationships we develop with the institutions in which we work and with our colleagues, and what kind of balance we strike between our private and professional lives.
The difference between a job change and a career reinvention lies in a depth of personal transformation that is largely invisible to an outside observer.
Both Dan’s story and Susan’s illustrate that working identity involves revisiting the basic assumptions we use to evaluate possibilities.
Even though our basic assumptions often remain hidden from our conscious awareness, they nevertheless determine how we manage our careers. Too often we fail to question them, even if they are obsolete or wrong. Precisely because they are taken for granted, basic assumptions are very hard to change. When they remain implicit, we only make incremental change. We only move from one situation into another that is superficially different. The organization or even the industry and sector may change and the coworkers may be different, but in the end, we fall back into similar roles and relationships, reproducing the same work and life structure we had before. Why? Because our working identity has remained the same.
Since basic assumptions tend to exist in interlocking clusters, what may often appear to be a work-life balance problem, or an inability to extricate ourselves from unrewarding or overly political working relationships, is in fact our inability to separate our commitment to an organization from being the organization.
Most of us know what we are trying to escape: the lockstep of a narrowly defined career, inauthentic or unstimulating work, numbing corporate politics, a lack of time for life outside work. But finding an alternative that truly fits, like finding our mission in life, is not a problem that can be solved overnight. It takes time. Whatever the first step, the process gradually changes the nature of what we know and what we seek to learn. Learning happens in cycles. Early cycles focus on the most immediate (or surface) problems.
Transformation, then, happens less by grand design or careful strategy than by the small wins that result from ongoing practices that enhance our capacity to change.
5: Crafting Experiments
“Experiments allow us to flirt with our possible selves.
Scientists use the term natural experiment to refer to situations that occur naturally, without experimental manipulation, yet allow a clean, comparative test. The fact that life events separate some but not all twins, for example, creates a natural experiment that can be used to sort out the effects of nature and nurture. But, in most cases, the only way to learn what we want to know is to design a test ourselves.
Exploration means taking action only to see what happens, without trying to make a prediction or test a hunch. An exploratory experiment is a probing, playful activity by which we get a feel for things. Exploratory experiments succeed when we are able to formulate more specific questions, or when they lead us to a hypothesis or educated guess. Then comes a more rigorous test, a confirmatory experiment, in which the objective is to learn whether the hypothesis is supported or refuted by the evidence.
Exploration is about formulating hypotheses or best guesses; confirmation is about rigorously testing preliminary conclusions. Confirmation turns best guesses into sure bets. As in scientific discovery, the less we know about a phenomenon, the more open-ended our questions. As relevant knowledge builds up, we become more precise about what we seek to learn, and we start to anticipate (more and more accurately) what we will find.
As Jim’s experience illustrates, the experimental method does not necessarily entail an orderly sequence of steps in which one side project leads logically to a next. Instead, small probes are often fragmentary and spontaneous, driven by unexpected opportunities and dynamic situations. Jim’s wife got pregnant and Alaska was out. What next? A different kind of experiment. Like Ben and Carol, Jim went for variety in designing his experiments. But the trend is clear: Small wins may be scattered, but what counts is that together they amount to a sense of progress—away from the stifling situation we are trying to escape.
Kabir Sehgal found himself in the same predicament that many of us face. A corporate strategist at a Fortune 500 company, he long dreamed of turning his passion for music into work as a record producer.
One of the biggest advantages of going back to school, or taking any form of sabbatical, is that it makes room for play, allowing people “to experiment with doing things for which they have no good reason, to be playful with their conception of themselves.” Because the suspension of the rules is temporary (and legitimate—easy to explain to the people around us), a sabbatical demarcates a protected time and space in which we can safely toy with possibilities, knowing that we will have to come back to reality again.
Some innovative programs even combine education with temporary assignments. For example, UK-based onpurpose.org recruits young law, finance, and consulting professionals who want to shift to careers that are more socially and environmentally focused. Over the course of the transition year, they take part in an intensive learning program with their cohort as well as two assigned rotations working in purpose-led businesses.
One of the useful—and difficult—things about experiments is that they sometimes tell us that we were wrong, that we actually don’t love or can’t make a living from what we thought we wanted to do. That’s when it comes time to close doors. It’s harder than you might think.
Sophie was experiencing what behavioral economist Dan Ariely calls “loss aversion,” our human tendency to want to keep all options open. In a famous series of experiments profiled in the New York Times, Ariely showed just how far we’ll go to keep from closing doors. Students in the experiment played a computer game that paid real cash to look for money behind three doors on the screen. After they opened a door by clicking on it, each subsequent click earned a little money, with the sum varying each time. As players went through the 100 allotted clicks, they could switch rooms to search for higher payoffs, but each switch used up a click to open the new door. The best strategy, players learned, was to quickly check out the three rooms and settle in the one with the highest rewards. But if they stayed out of any room, its door would start shrinking visually and eventually disappear. Ignoring those disappearing doors turned out to be impossible. In fact, participants wasted so many clicks rushing back to reopen doors that their earnings dropped 15 percent. And they frenetically continued keeping all their doors open even as penalties for switching got stiffer, costing not just clicks but cash fees.
Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips observes that “people tend to flirt only with serious things—madness, disaster, other people.” When we craft experiments, we are flirting with our many selves, a serious endeavor because it matters so much to us. The stronger the attraction, the more vulnerable we are to biases that affect how we perceive alternatives. Since we are not neutral about which outcome we prefer, we can fall into the trap of evaluating our experiments with a positive bias, one that encourages us to escalate commitment, even when we have evidence that it would be better to abandon ship or put the pet project on hold. A related danger is inadvertently putting a current work situation at risk. The exploration feels risk free, because we hide it from work associates. But the project becomes all-consuming, and it becomes obvious to everyone around us that our attention is divided.
6: Shifting Connections
“We cannot regenerate ourselves in isolation. We develop in and through our relationships with others—the master teaches the apprentice a new craft; the mentor guides a protégé through the passage to an inner circle; the council of peers monitors the standards of a professional group, conferring status within the community. Yet, when it comes to reinventing ourselves, the people who know us best are also the ones most likely to hinder rather than help. They may wish to be supportive but they tend to reinforce— or even desperately try to preserve—the old identities we are seeking to shed.
Changing careers is not merely a matter of changing the work we do. It is as much about changing the relationships that matter in our professional lives. Shifting connections refers to the practice of finding people who can help us see and grow into our new selves, people we admire, would like to emulate, and with whom we want to spend time. All reinventions require social support.
Yet an even more significant part of his resistance to change came from the people around him who were invested in his staying and who mirrored the view that he wasn’t yet ready to take the leap. Harris had access to the power center of his firm. But his five mentors made not a gateway, but a fence that blocked the moves that would lead to career change. By talking only to people who inhabited his immediate professional world, who thought inside four walls about what opportunities he might move into, Harris seriously limited himself.
In the mid-1970s, a Harvard sociologist named Mark Granovetter published what became the landmark study of how people get jobs. What he found and others have confirmed, is still true today: Most people find their jobs through personal connections. What surprised Granovetter—and hence the name of his famous “strength of weak ties” study—was that those personal contacts were neither friends, family, nor close work associates.
In a study reported in the MIT Sloan Management Review, more than 200 executives were asked to reconnect with such people and to use their interactions to get information or advice that might help them on an important work project. The executives reported that the advice they received from these dormant sources was, on average, more valuable and novel than what they obtained from their more active relationships. In fact, many of the “weak ties” activated by Granovetter’s job hunters were connections developed earlier in their careers that had been dormant.
What makes a contact useful for a job change, argued Granovetter, is neither the closeness of our relationship with them nor the power of his or her position. It is the likelihood that the person knows different people than we do and, therefore, bumps into different information. The acquaintances, neighbors, and coworkers who operate in the same spheres as we do can rarely tell us something we don’t already know because they hear about the same things we do. Of course, having an Ivy League, Oxbridge, or Grande École connection can dramatically improve one’s prospects for moving into certain closed circles.
Our close contacts don’t just blind us, they also bind us to our outdated identities. Reinventing involves trying on and testing a variety of possible selves. But our long-standing social networks may resist those identity experiments. Remember Gary McCarthy’s chagrin when he learned, three years out of college, that his family had already pegged him as a “finance person”? Without meaning to, friends and family pigeonhole us. Worse, they fear our changing.
We are all more malleable when separated from people who know us well. The same dynamic explains why young adults seem to change when they go away to college and interaction with family members and prior friends is necessarily reduced.
An academic study conducted by professors Gianpiero Petriglieri, Sue Ashford, and Amy Wrzesniewski, for example, found that successful professional gig workers take special care to build their “tribe,” a handful of sustaining relationships with peers. As one person in their study told them, “My ability to process, develop, and grow as a human being and understand who I am in the work I’m doing comes from the conversations that I have with these folks. These people are how I know what I’m supposed to be doing.
If we are free to try out any identity we like, it is also true that we must rely on others to complete the picture of which we are only allowed to paint certain parts. The desired identity remains incomplete and tentative without the stamp of approval of a new peer group, mentor, or community. It is important to conduct our “role rehearsals” outside our usual circles because the old audience tends to narrowly typecast us.
7: Making Sense
“Making sense refers to the practice of interpreting what is happening today, in light of past events, and creating compelling stories that link the two and point to the future. A life story defines us. Consider how we come to feel that we really know someone: We might know them well enough to predict their behavior; but we only really know them when we know their stories—the underlying narratives that lend meaning, unity, and purpose to their lives. The same is true for knowing ourselves. As this chapter illustrates, we make sense of baffling changes by infusing events with special meaning and weaving them into coherent stories about who we are becoming.
Unexpected events often provoke insights that allow progress toward a solution after a period of being stuck. They allow us to reframe our stories. For John, the revelation was not that he should become a writer. It was that he could not live in two worlds and that he would have to come to terms with letting go of the old identity that was slowing him down. John had never stopped to challenge his basic assumption that he could maintain his old social and financial status while moving into a realm that would allow him greater artistic expression.
But such insights on their own cannot drive a career transition to its culmination. They have to be worked into a compelling story. Why? Because we define who we are by our life stories. And stories about change, by definition, require a “before” and “after.” Events are merely occasions for retelling, reworking, and reassembling our experiences. We are literally reinventing the past so that it flows into a future we desire. In John’s case, the astrologer episode gave him a dramatic moment around which he could construct a story that would explain his actions as he left the bank. Knowing the story gave him motivation and purpose. Our stories are not only for private consumption. They also help others make sense of what may seem like nonsensical actions, such as quitting a prestigious job instead of hanging on for early retirement.
Arranging life’s events into a coherent story is one of the most subtle yet demanding challenges of career reinvention. To reinvent oneself is to rework one’s story, revising it frequently, trying out different versions on others. Events punctuate continuous experience, giving us some pegs on which to hang our reinvention stories. Some events unfreeze us, help us start moving away from the old; other events focus our energies toward the future, helping the new direction to jell.
Early philosophers argued that we cannot perceive ourselves directly, rather ourselves must be “caught in the act” of perceiving something that exists in the real world. Self-knowledge, therefore, comes from our reactions to things that happen to us and around us. Just as we learn about other people by observing their behavior and making inferences from it, we learn about ourselves by examining what we do when events force our hand—yet another reason why solitary introspection is insufficient and why experimenting provides more useful information than reflecting on past experience.
One of the primary ways in which unfreezing events mark a cut with the past and herald the start of a transition period, according to psychoanalyst Manfred Kets de Vries, is by serving as an organizing scheme for everything that occurs afterwards: “From this point on, every new disturbance is recognized as part of the same pattern of dissatisfaction,” he writes.
Changes in the habitual rhythm of our work or halts in our normal productive activity can work as triggers, waking us up from our daily routines and refocusing our attention on change.
Our ability to take advantage of what psychologists call “habit discontinuity” depends on what we do in the narrow window of opportunity that opens up after routine-busting changes.
These are very good questions. In a series of studies on the introduction of new technologies, MIT researchers discovered a windows-of-opportunity effect. They found that managers have only a discrete time period in which to effect real behavioral and organizational changes after introducing a new technology. After that period, use of the technology tended to “congeal,” freezing unresolved problems at least until the next crisis. Whatever changes did not get made during that window were put off for much later, usually not until the consequences of those latent problems accumulated to provoke a crisis. Likewise, windows of opportunity open and close back up again in career change.
Similarly, research on the “fresh start” effect shows that while people experience heightened goal-oriented motivation upon returning to work after a holiday, this motivation peaks on the first day back and declines rapidly thereafter. What we do in the period immediately following a time-out, it seems, determines whether we will be able to use that experience to effect real change or whether, instead, old routines will reassert themselves, leaving basic problems unresolved until urgency builds the next time around.
Until we have a story, others view us as unfocused. It is harder to get their help. Equally important is having a good story to tell others, putting it into the public sphere even before it is fully formed. By making public declarations about what we seek and what common thread binds our old and new selves, we clarify our intentions and improve our ability to enlist others’ support. This is partially a problem of self-marketing. We need someone to take a chance on us since, by definition, we are moving into a new and unproven realm.
Conclusion: Becoming Yourself
“The reinvention process challenges us to redefine ourselves. But, contrary to popular belief, working our identities is not an exercise in abstraction or introspection; it is a messy trial-and-error process of learning by doing in which experience in the here and now (not in the distant past) helps to evolve our ideas about what is plausible—and desirable. The most typical problem at midcareer is not defining what kind of work we find enjoyable and meaningful. Rather, it is figuring out how to transfer old preferences and values to new and different contexts and how to integrate those with changing priorities and newly blooming potential. It is a problem of recombining and reanchoring. And the “solution” is never the job change itself. Self-creation is a lifelong journey. Only by our actions do we learn who we want to become, how best to travel, and what else will need to change to ease the way.
Appendix: Studying Career Transitions
“My starting assumption, based on the work of MIT psychologist and career development expert Edgar Schein, was that the changes that occur during a career transition are changes in the nature and integration of a person’s social selves and not in basic personality structure or patterns of psychological defenses. But research also indicates that the identity changes that follow a period of major questioning and exploration are not limited only to competencies, attitudes, and behavior; they may also entail a rather drastic reorganization of the basic priorities and organizing principles that structure a person’s life.