Career Coach

By Barbara Poole

I have a friend who, by all accounts, should be in paradise right now. Mike recently took early retirement from a major technology organization after serving as one of their chief scientists for many years.

He has a proud history of accomplishments, a sweet retirement package and, hopefully, many healthy years in front of him. His life is now his own, and he can come and go as he pleases without the obligation to “suit up and show up” each day. From where I sit, his opportunities are unlimited, and his life should be a playground.

The reality is that Mike is adrift. He does not know what to do with himself or the long, unstructured days that stretch out in front of him. He reads, keeps to himself and spends hours trying to figure out what to do next. What ought to be a time of celebration has become a time of feeling out of sync, disconnected from the world as he knew it, and largely dissatisfied with this limbo-land that he finds himself in.

For most of his career, Mike was so busy making a living that he forgot to make a life.

I spoke with Mike recently and invited him to talk about what he is experiencing. “I was so looking forward to retiring,” he said, “But what I’ve discovered is that I don’t know who I am without my job.”

If I’ve heard that sentiment once, I’ve heard it a thousand times. How many of us have our identities hopelessly tangled with what we do for a living?

In Mike’s case, he gave up everything for his career. His work environment was a pressure cooker, a culture that demands you hand yourself over to the business completely. Mike told me stories of the CEO telling people to “ ‘get sick on your own time—over the weekend, but not on my time during the week.’ ” Like many of his colleagues, Mike bought into that philosophy, continually making the company his first priority, until he became his job.

Think about the ways your career comes up as a way of defining who you are. You are at a party, and someone you meet for the first time asks, “So, what do you do for a living?” You are paying for something by check, and the cashier asks for your work phone number.

You are filling out a customer satisfaction survey. A question asks you to identify your occupation. Your weeks, months and years are framed by what your work schedule requires. When your spouse insists you carefully fit a rare mini-vacation between critical projects, you are ready to cancel it if something important comes up on the job.

This picture does not leave room for formulating a strong sense of self as separate and distinct from how you earn a living. Yet the truth is that most of us happened into our careers. Our DNA did not dictate our career choices. What starts off as a job of random chance often develops into a definition of who we are.

There is an old saying: When someone is lying on their deathbed, they rarely say they wish they had spent more time at the office. My sense is that this is not about time management and life balance; it is about developing a strong and rich identity completely separate from the career paths we have chosen.

If you want to see where you stand relative to this notion, try this: Write your life story, a mini-autobiography if you will, without making any reference to jobs, your occupation or what you have done during the years to earn a living. How long is the story? Now go back and add in all the material relevant to your work. How much longer does the story become? How does adding in that information explain many things, like where you have chosen to live, the friends you include, what your lifestyle is, what you do in your spare time, and how you feel about your accomplishments?

As a career coach, I make a living helping people identify what they want to do professionally and develop strategies to achieve those goals. But I would be the first one to say that a career is only meaningful to the extent that it augments a larger life.

Consider your answers to these questions:

• What do you want your life to consist of?

• What do you consider to be your purpose?

• How do you want to define yourself, perhaps by re-defining “success?”

• What are your non-career-related goals?

• What truly matters to you?

• What would you want written in your epitaph?

There is a Sheryl Crow song with the line, “I do what I can, I work for a living, and that’s who I am. That’s who I am.” My challenge for you is to be something more. Make yourself a life, not a living.

Barbara Poole is a leadership and career development coach with Charleston-based Success Builders Inc. She can be reached at CoachBarbara@SuccessBuildersInc.com.

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