And to take this question to a deeper level, do you sometimes worry that you’re not sure who you are as a person, if you take away your work identity?
If so, I invite you to join me in a little experiment. It will cost you nothing and it may start to open up a whole new world to you.
If you don’t have time to read the whole blog (6 mins), scroll down to the experiment.
This experiment worked for me and for a recent client. I’d be fascinated to hear from you if you try it. Here’s what led me to do it…
My personal story
I worked for a management consulting company for nearly 2 decades. On the plus side, I learned a lot, I travelled, I met some wonderful people who have remained friends, and I earned a decent living. On the minus side, I didn’t have a life! I worked very long hours and travelled a lot. I slept badly and ate badly. My health suffered. I didn’t have any hobbies and rarely saw friends. I lived for my holidays. Whilst I enjoyed aspects of my job, I was often very stressed. And if you’d taken me to one side and asked me to project myself forwards to my 95th birthday and then look back over my life, and wonder whether this was time well spent, well, I would have just looked at you blankly. I didn’t have the energy for that kind of question.
I didn’t really query what was happening. I was, after all, lucky to have such a good job and too busy to think about whether my needs were being met.
With hindsight, there was a clue. I missed it at the time, and it might be useful for me to share it with you:
On several occasions throughout the years, I’d had the opportunity to do personality profiles. I always felt vaguely disappointed about the Myers-Briggs profile I received. It certainly matched who I was at work, so it was hard to articulate what was wrong. Yes, I was indeed logical, analytical, adaptable. And a personality profile is just a starting point, anyway. We all shared our 4-letter profiles and did some personal and professional development based on them. But the clue was in the fact that the personality profile just didn’t feel right. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I can look back and notice that I wasn’t even able to say “This doesn’t feel like me”. I just felt rather crestfallen and thought “Oh, is that who I am?” and just accepted it. When you are “in” something and have behaved in certain ways for so long, you just don’t know what you don’t know. Maybe it’s like in the olden days when we had small black and white TVs. We’d never seen a large colour TV before so we didn’t feel like we were missing out. It was only once we got a large colour TV that we said “Wow! This is amazing!”.
Fast forward to 2020 and I’ve been working as a business and leadership coach for a few years. Over the first Summer of lockdown, I do the Mental Fitness programme with Shirzad Chamine and learn about my saboteurs. I start to learn about positive intelligence and do short daily exercises to help me rewire my brain, to quieten the voices of my inner Judge and other saboteurs, and I begin to feel genuine empathy for myself and others in a way I have never done before.
And I notice that there’s another voice in there, just a whisper…
I start to be able to identify my own authentic voice.
This is so profound that I sign up to train with Shirzad, and a year later I qualify as a Mental Fitness coach.
“Jamie’s” story
A new client – let’s call him Jamie - gets in touch. He’s questioning what to do with the next phase of his career. He is wondering whether to leave or to stay around. He admits to me that he could tell me all about who he is at work, in his identity as a reliable senior programme manager – a safe pair of hands and a good people manager – but he’s totally unable to articulate who he would be if he were to leave that job. He can say exactly who he is at work, in this huge company where he knows everyone, but in “life”, he draws a blank.
I ask him to do a Saboteur Assessment and the Myers-Briggs personality profile, and for the latter I encourage him to really tune in to what he wants to answer rather than what he has always answered in the past, with his work hat on. Over the next few weeks, I take him through the initial phase of the career coaching programme. By the third session he announces he has had a breakthrough and has started being able to articulate who he is outside work! Instead of planning the next 10 years, he’s excitedly started thinking about what he can line up for the next 40 years! What experiences he wants, how he wishes to grow, and what contributions he wants to make to the world around him.
How Jamie’s story helps me…
Just to backtrack a little – when I ask Jamie to do the Myers-Briggs, out of curiosity I decide to redo one myself. The first one in years. I notice a tingle with some of the questions – ones which I’ve always answered a certain way, because that IS how I behave most of the time. But… crucially… not ALL of the time. The tingle is telling me to rebel. So this time, I dare to answer these questions differently.
The result is amazing. A very different personality profile appears in my inbox. Two of the 4 letters are different. As I read it, a big smile spreads across my face. This feels like the person I want to be! I realise it’s who I already was from the start - when I was little, before the saboteur voices took over. Before life experiences made me subconsciously decide certain things, like that it was more important to pay attention to other people than to myself, and that it wasn’t safe to show feelings. Jamie’s new profile is also different, to his delight.
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Now, it’s important to say that this won’t apply to everyone. Some people are more in touch with their inner voice and they might consciously choose to answer personality profile questions in different ways so that they can fit a certain profile for a job interview, for example. Maybe you are one of those people, so let me explain: This wasn’t the case for me. I was a rule-follower, and I was following the instruction: to answer the question based on how I respond to situations most of the time. The problem for me, and people like me, was that we didn’t realise that some of our habitual responses were the result of programming – by family, school, work and society at large. We all receive messages on how we “should” be, and sometimes these messages can make us subvert parts of our personalities and behave in a way which serves a purpose at the time, but doesn’t feel natural to us. Over time, we just get used to it and lose the ability to connect with our own needs and set good boundaries. In my case, this was probably exacerbated by the fact I was a working/middle class (never sure how that works really!) English woman living alone in Paris trying to build a career in a company which was full of people who had been to very prestigious French universities. The need to try to fit in was strong, and whilst I liked to think I was a chameleon, the energy I spent on this probably added to my general exhaustion.
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I’m now using this new personality profile, combined with my mental fitness regime, to explore a pathway towards getting closer to my authentic self. It’s very liberating and empowering! It’s having a positive effect on my work and my relationships. I can tell when I get closer, as things feel easier and it feels like I’m in the flow. It requires practice, and I’m a long way away from being a blackbelt, but I’m enjoying the process.
It’s also very fulfilling, helping coaching clients with this too.
It gives a new lease of life not only to the individual, but also to their place of work, as they’re happier and more likely to bring in new points of view and ideas. I like to imagine it creating a positive ripple effect.
The experiment
Would you like to explore how you can bring more of your true self to work and to your life outside work? This is free and you can do it in your own time.
1. Discover your saboteurs here and start to notice the whisper of your own authentic voice as you quieten the voices of your inner judge and your other saboteurs.
2. Listen to that inner voice as you fill in the questionnaire to obtain a Myers-Briggs personality profile here. Don’t just rush through it giving your usual answers. Notice if there are questions where you’re attracted by one answer, but then you try to tell yourself to pick a different answer because “at work I would answer this way”. Pause. Pick the answer which attracted you originally. Even if you’d never respond like that at work. Just join me on this experiment. Do this for all the questions where your gut is telling you to answer differently.
3. Read the resulting profile. Could it provide a pathway for you to explore getting closer to your true nature - at work and in the outside world? How exciting might that be?
If you would like to explore any of this in more detail with me, please book a discovery call here.
I work with individuals and also with organisations seeking to attract and retain talented people. Feel free to share this blog with anyone you think might enjoy it.