Identity Beyond the Job: Who Are You When the Role Goes Away?

Three years ago in 2023, I left my research role at Visier. Since then, I've conducted more than 100 interviews about career and life pivots, published 89 Pivot Stories, and learned a great deal about what helps people successfully redirect their lives.

I've also learned a great deal about myself.

I started this research because I had failed at retiring once before. At 70, I left paid work. It didn't take. I went back to corporate work for another seven years.

Three years ago, I did something different. I redirected.

I took my skills and passions, including research, curiosity, problem solving, writing and communicating, and directed them toward something I wanted to understand: How do people successfully redirect their lives or careers?

I began with seven hypotheses about what helps people redirect successfully. They included purpose, financial considerations, health, continuous learning, relationships and community, spirituality and mindfulness, and creating space to step away and reflect. Those ideas have held up remarkably well.

But three years of research and my own experience have taught me that something else is foundational.

Identity.

Who Are You Without the Job?

For much of my working life, the answer to "Who are you?" was easy: I'm a researcher.

I still am. I'm curious. I like solving problems. I like asking questions, finding patterns and communicating what I've learned.

But I'm not just a researcher.

I'm an 81-year-old woman. A wife of 40 years. A stepmother. Nonny to five grandchildren. A good friend. A gardener. A golfer. A traveler. A cook and foodie. A watercolor painter. A reader. A volunteer. A Master Gardener who writes for the local newspaper. Someone who exercises a lot so I can keep doing all these things. A person fascinated by AI who helps others learn to use it responsibly.

And always curious and a learner.

Some parts of my identity matter more at different moments. That's part of what I've come to understand. We are so much more than the professional "nugget" Americans often use to identify ourselves, as Lois Melbourne discussed in her pivot story.

When the title or organization goes away, those other parts don't suddenly appear. They were there all along. We may simply need to rediscover how much they matter.

What Endures?

What is most enduring to me are my values.

I want to contribute. I want to share what I learn. I want to be useful and of value to others.

That's why research remains part of my life even when employment doesn't. Research wasn't simply something I did for an employer. Curiosity, learning, making sense of things and sharing what I learn are part of who I am.

That distinction matters in a redirection.

If our identity is tied entirely to a job, losing or leaving that job can leave a very large hole. But if we can separate what we do from who we are, we may discover that many of the things that mattered to us in our working lives can travel with us into whatever comes next.

They may simply take a different form.

Did You Make Things Better or Worse?

Recently, a neighbor gave me a wonderfully simple way to think about identity.

Once a week, we hike. She recently left her full-time work as a chaplain, and we've talked about identity and what comes after paid work. She posed a great question:

Did you make things better or worse? I love that.

Maybe being "of value" doesn't have to mean doing something big or impressive. At the end of a conversation, a project, a volunteer commitment, even a day: Did I make things better or worse? That's a pretty good test of whether I'm living my values.

Identity, Time and Redirection

This realization about identity connects to another important lesson from these three years: I have become rigorous, or as Jess Von Bank says -- ruthless, about what deserves my time.

Once I know who I am and what I value, I can make better choices about where I put my time and energy.

I don't need to fill the hours that employment once occupied. I can ask whether something contributes to the life I want to live, the relationships I value, the things I still want to learn, and the ways I want to contribute.

That may be one of the biggest differences between my first attempt at retirement and what I'm doing now.

I don't think I'm failing at retirement anymore. I've successfully redirected.

And successful redirection, I've come to believe, isn't simply about figuring out what you're going to do next. It starts with different questions:

Who am I now?

What do I value?

What deserves my time?

And am I making things better?

Those are questions I expect to keep asking.