I’d decided I was leaving medicine.
After more than a decade of building my life around being a doctor, the writing was on the wall. I was stressed, a bit lost and about seven months pregnant.
That’s not a great combination.
In an uncharacteristic moment of open-mindedness, I started having therapy. It was going well, and two sessions in she suggested I get out of the house and try some yoga.
I paused, then explained that I couldn’t do pre-natal yoga because I wouldn’t know what to say when people asked what my job title was.
She went quiet, took a breath, and then stared at me like I was a complete moron.
It’s one of the first things we’re asked when we meet someone. After your name, where you’re from and how you know the host, “what do you do?” tends to find its way into the conversation in pretty quick succession.
There’s a reason this innocent little question comes so naturally to us.
The human brain is lazy by design. A couple of words about someone's job title activates hundreds of unconscious assumptions about the person wearing it – within seconds of meeting a human being, the brain’s got busy making judgements about everything from their character and intelligence to their values and place in the pecking order.
But this weird preoccupation with putting people in boxes doesn’t just apply to other humans.
The labels we use to describe ourselves play a huge role in shaping our sense of self. In other words, there’s no need to answer the inconveniently complicated question of who we are from scratch every morning because there's a perfectly good answer hanging by the front door on a lanyard.
Eggs in a Basket
As we move through life, we tend to build an internal model of what it means to be us. This mental blueprint is called our self-concept, and the number of identities we pack into it varies wildly from person to person. Someone might be an entrepreneur, sister, gardener, padel player and amateur pianist.
Someone else might mostly be an entrepreneur.
The distinction sounds like a technicality until something goes wrong with the entrepreneur bit.
In a world where perception matters, job titles aren’t the only labels our brains get emotionally attached to. Looking a certain way, being a parent, having a particular net worth or even a specific postcode can all become inextricably tangled up in our understanding of ourselves as humans.
Left unchecked, our brains’ ancient and outdated tendency to reduce ourselves to labels can cause real psychological damage – when one part of life becomes central to who someone is, anything that disrupts it can feel like a threat to their entire identity.
Nobody discovers quite how much of themselves was inside a job until somebody asks for the laptop back.
Diversify The Portfolio
There’s an obvious temptation to solve this problem by collecting identities like an increasingly impressive stack of Pokémon cards.
But a bigger pile of name badges doesn’t change much if there’s still only one that really matters when the chips are down.
Someone can be a CEO, marathon runner, parent and Star Wars fan while one of those roles carries on doing the heavy lifting. The sturdier parts of human identity tend to sit one layer below the labels, in the words that would still be true if all our titles disappeared tomorrow.
A CV is an excellent description of where someone’s been.
It doesn’t necessarily do a great job of explaining who they are.
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