What you do for a living is a part of your life, but who you are is so much more. Here are 3 ways to separate who you are from your job title to see your full value and potential.
When someone asks you, "What do you do?", how do you respond? It's a simple and common question that comes up in conversation but is not always simple to answer.
Most of us identify ourselves by our job title and our work. It feels great when what we do is aligned with socially accepted norms. It feels even better when it's aligned with our interests and passions and what we want to be doing in life.
But that's not always the case. Sometimes a job is just what we do to earn a living so that we can pursue our interests and passions.
In the case of socially respected titles and jobs, we happily declare what we do when asked. We feel a sense of security in how people will respond to our professional identity and how it will reflect on their surface opinion of us as a person.
In the case where the titles or work that we do is less known, understood or socially respected, we often pause to think about how to respond to the simple question, "What do you do?"
For most of my life, my response to the question "What do you do?" has prompted raised or ruffled brows and follow-up questions to clarify what it is that I actually do for a living.
For example, when I was a college student in the late 80s studying Fashion Design in Canada, I received raised and ruffled brows when I shared what I did.
Follow-up questions sounded like this:
"What made you decide to study that?"
"How will you make a living doing that?"
"Isn't that a challenging industry to get into?"
When I graduated and got my first job as a Custom Design Dress Maker, I again received raised and ruffled brows.
Follow-up questions were:
"What does custom design mean?"
"You make clothes for people?"
"So you sew for a living?"
Back then as a fresh college graduate, I didn't know how to articulate that I helped clients create the clothes of their dreams to feel confident and beautiful. I just felt the sting of being judged in a non-traditional career that not everyone understood or respected. (Especially growing up in a Chinese immigrant family where creativity was not a career of choice.)
Throughout my 20+ year career, my job titles have triggered raised and ruffled brows as people tried to quickly fit me into a box when asking the question, "What do you do?"
Even when I felt the most successful in my corporate career as a senior regional director of training and development for an international luxury beauty company...people would ruffle their brows and ask follow-up questions like, "So you teach make-up?"
To which I would politely smile and say, "Yes. And I help lead and executed the training and development of 2000 employees across the Asia Pacific. I also conduct productivity and leadership training programs for frontline to GM levels." By then, I had learned my elevator pitch.
However, my professional life was just a part of who I am and all that I did as a wife, mother, artist, writer and so much more.
When my corporate career was no longer in alignment with my life needs, purpose and personal values, I made the choice to leave. It was a deeply difficult decision that took me a year to make, but it was the best exercise in separating who I am from what I did for a living and unlocking personal purpose and fulfilment.
You don't have to leave your career to find your personal purpose and reap more life fulfilment. You can benefit from the exercise of discovering your vast potential in addition to your professional life by separating who you are from your job title.
Here are 3 ways to separate who you are from your job title to see your full value and potential.
1. Don't Let the Uniform and Job Title Limit Your Scope
Throughout my career in creativity, people assumed that I did not have business acumen or financial business understanding. Granted, these were not natural skills to me, but I learned and gained competency in these areas even though it was outside my immediate scope of work. Just because I am creative, doesn't mean that I can't also be business savvy.
By pursuing these interests and finding ways to gain experience in projects outside of my immediate scope of work in training and development, I gained confidence and knowledge that helped me to grow my career. In fact, these skills have helped me to effectively gain trust and confidence with my clients in my consulting work with large companies as a consultant.
Your job title is your function and your core role. But don't let it limit your abilities and the scope of work that you can contribute to.
Ask yourself what abilities, interests and talents you have outside your immediate job title and function. Then look for opportunities to apply your skills and talents in related projects that can expand your experience and scope of work.
Expanding your contribution and abilities may require extra effort and time on your part. The investment of your time and effort will benefit you in the long run because it builds your whole personal value and talent for your life not just your current work.
2. Don't Take Professional Mistakes Personally
In our careers, there are bound to have successes and failures. While we happily list our successes on our resumes, we exclude mistakes and failures that we hope are not revealed in the reference interviews and background checks.
One of the questions that I often used in reference interviews is, "How does the candidate deal with mistakes that he/she has made?"
The ability to take responsibility for mistakes and correct them shows personal integrity and resilience. It also demonstrates agility and resourcefulness in the face of challenges.
Life is an exercise in trial and error that sometimes leads to success and sometimes leads to lessons. We need both to realize our talents and potential.
Don't take mistakes personally. We all make them. In our minds, we panic and worry about how people will judge us by the mistakes we make. In actuality, how we accept and recover from our mistakes is what people will remember.
In the event that you make a mistake:
Don't take it personally. Breathe and don't panic.
Accept and apologize. Don't rationalize or find fault with others.
Work toward resolving the issue. Look forward instead of fixating on where it went wrong.
Mistakes are hard to accept, but that's where growth happens. It's often in mistakes that we find new solutions, opportunities and growth.
3. Realize That Not All Productivity is Created Equal
One of the biggest requests from my clients is how to improve productivity at work or in their lives. My follow-up question is "What area of productivity would create the most value for you?"
I spent a lot of my career chasing productivity and even teaching others how to be more productive. The biggest challenge is to not look at everything on your to-do list with the same importance and urgency.
Teaching concepts like the 80/20 Rule and Stephen Covey’s Time Management Matrix helps explain that not all productivity is equal.
Image Source: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey
We tend to reactively see all the things on our to-do list with the same importance and urgency when in fact they yield different results and value in our lives. If you separate the to-do list and activities in your life into 4 quadrants as described in Stephen Covey's Time Matrix (image above), you can see that your time and energy yield different values. You could even be wasting your time and energy and creating no value (image below).
Image Source: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey
Instead of just looking at productivity through the lens of your job, look at it through the bigger picture of your life.
The different roles you take have different goals. The priority of the roles you play will affect the priority of tasks and productivity.
When you identify what productivity activities give you the most value for your time and energy, create more time for those activities and you will gain more overall fulfilment in life.
Definitions of Work Are Changing
Three years in a global pandemic has taught us many lessons and has challenged our priorities and definitions of what's important in our lives. Working from home was a necessity during the height of the pandemic which has us questioning what the future of work could look like.
Generation Z and their entrepreneurial nature along with the changing landscape of businesses means that there is more freedom to define the work that you want to do for a living and not be defined by it. The socially accepted and respected boxes of professions are broadening.
So the next time someone asks, "What do you do?", hopefully, you can confidently answer with a response that shows your value beyond your job title.
Additional Helpful Articles:
Discovering Purpose - Online Article - ayclimitless.com
How to Build an Engaged Mindset and Thrive at Work - Online Article - ayclimitless.com
Stephen Covey’s Time Management Matrix - Online Article - humanskills.blog
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