Who are you when the roles you've used to define yourself begin to change?

Our identity can become deeply connected to our career, job title, relationships, responsibilities and the people who depend on us.

But what happens when those roles change, or when the life you've built no longer completely fits the person you've become?

In this episode, I explore:

• Separating who you are from what you do
 • Recognising the evidence of what you're truly capable of
 • The four stages of learning and why discomfort isn't the same as inability
 • Why becoming a beginner again can be challenging when you're already experienced
 • Three questions to help you explore who you're becoming and what you want next

You are not starting over. You are starting from experience.

🎁 Free Identity Workbook & Toolkit:
Reclaim Your Identity

🌐 Explore The Resilience Movement:
The Resilience Movement

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hi everyone, and welcome to uh the Resilience Movement Podcast. I'm Donna, and wherever you're listening from today, I'm really glad you're here. This is a short conversation, but it's about questions I think many of us reach at some point in our lives, and that is, who are we when your roles change? And what used to define you begins to change. That's the big question, right? And you know, because so much of our lives, we're a leader, a manager, a mum, a partner, a business owner, provider, the person people come to to have things fixed, you know, so you have all of these roles. And there's nothing wrong with any of those identities. But what happens when one of those roles changes? When the career ends, when the children fly the nest, uh, when the relationship changes, when the job title disappears, or when you simply just reach a point where you realize that the life that you've been living doesn't quite fit the person you've become now. Suddenly the question isn't just what am I going to do next? It's who am I now? And I think we spend years becoming incredibly good at being who everyone else needs us to be at different times. You know, we always meet the deadlines, we hit the targets, we solve the problems, we look after the family, we support our teams, we carry a lot of responsibility. And somewhere in amongst all of that, we can lose sight of a really important question. I remember when I walked across Spain, I asked myself this question many times. Um, and I was walking solo, and it was who am I when nobody needs anything from me today? Let me ask you that again. Who am I when nobody needs anything from me today? Not what do I need to do or who needs me or what responsibilities do I have? Just what do I want? What matters to me now? You know, what gives me energy, what fills my cup? Sometimes we don't know what the answers to those questions are because we've been so busy doing, doing, doing all the time that we actually haven't stopped long enough to think. So those questions can be surprisingly difficult to answer because uh, you know, often we're much better at describing what we do when we're needed. And, you know, your resume is a really perfect example of this. It can tell you where you've worked, it can tell you what you've done, your qualifications, your job titles, your responsibilities, maybe some of your achievements, and it can possibly capture all the evidence of what you've become capable of. It doesn't necessarily tell me about the difficult conversations you've had to navigate, the people you've developed, the problems you've solved, the times you've had to adapt, the things you've learned when you had absolutely no idea what you were doing at the beginning. The times life changed unexpectedly, and somehow you still found your way through it. That's why I think when we're considering what comes next, we need to stop looking only at our resume or what we have done and start looking for other evidence of things. Um, ask yourself, you know, what have I actually proved that I'm capable of? And, you know, what do people trust me with is another really powerful question. What have I learned to navigate? What problems have I solved? What comes naturally to me? And what comes naturally to me that used to take a lot of effort. Um, what have I overcome? What have I survived? What have I built? You know, what have I learned about myself along the way? You know, sometimes we're so busy that we don't actually have time to reflect on, did I actually do that? I remember years ago, back in 2012, I went on a powerful journey and trekked Kakoda. It was the year of the 70th anniversary of the Anzacs, and we had completed it, and I was sitting in the hotel room. The funny thing is, they uh lost all my clothes that I had ready to change into. Um, so I had to kind of sit there. So instead of it being a metaphor, you know, when you're bare naked and you have to think about things, um, I was there with simply a towel and a reflection of did I just trek Kakoda? It was kind of unbelievable that I actually achieved that. And sitting there for a while reflecting on that experience and how it was so physically and mentally challenging. And I did that, right? And that was really, really powerful. Um, you know, so thinking about what you've done, what you've learned about yourself along the way. Because all of that comes with you, right? You're not starting over, you're starting from experience. There's another part of creating a new identity that I think we don't talk enough about, and that's sometimes you have to be willing to become a beginner again. You have to be willing to learn some new things. And, you know, for me, over the past 12 months, I've certainly been in that learning phase again, um, learning at a different stage because certain things changed. And so I was required to really reflect on who I am, where I want to go, uh, how I'm going to overcome some of the current challenges that I had and become a learner again. And that was really quite scary at times. Um, but you know, it's becoming more and more empowering as I dive deeper into that learning journey. So it's uncomfortable, especially when you you know spend years and you're very competent, you know. Um, so when I used to deliver the CERT for in training and assessment, and I did that for years, I would talk to learners about the four stages of competence because they're really important as an adult learner. And the first stage is the unconsciously incompetent. You don't know what you don't know, and then you become consciously competent or consciously incompetent, I should say, and then you know what you don't know. And that point is the point where you often get uncomfortable because you can now see the gaps in yourself. And as an adult learner, you want to retract and you want to stop the discomfort. But it's around sitting with that discomfort because you know the gaps, things take a little longer, you make mistakes, you have to ask questions because there's people who know what you don't know, and you've got to have the courage to ask them. You watch someone else do something easily that requires enormous concentration from yourself. And sometimes you start wondering, oh, maybe I'm just not good at this. Um, but I used to remind everyone in the room that this stage isn't evidence that you're incapable, it's evidence that you're learning, right? So you want to use that evidence to keep you moving forward. Then you begin to move into conscious competence. You can do it, but you still have to think about it. You know, you still have to concentrate, you still have to practice, you still have to think about the steps. And sometimes you miss the steps and have to go back to the beginning. But you practice, practice, practice, and that moves you into a different stage. So eventually you reach the stage of unconscious competence. Something that once felt incredibly difficult starts to feel a little bit more natural, right? So think about when you learnt to drive. There was a time when you were thinking about the steering wheel, the mirrors, the indicators, the pedals, the gears, the traffic, and everything else. And also what's happening around you as you're driving. Now you can arrive somewhere, and I guarantee you, there's times where you can barely think about uh how you got there. Like which way did I go today? Because it's so unconscious. Well, that's learning. And I think this matters enormously when we're rebuilding or redefining our lives, right? Because maybe you're using AI, maybe you're learning some other kind of new technology, maybe you're entering a different industry to what you've been used to. Maybe you're learning completely different ways of working, and maybe you're starting something that you've never ever done before. So don't make discomfort an inability. Don't mistake it for inability because it's not. Give yourself permission to move through the stages at your own pace. Give yourself permission to stretch and give yourself permission to not be good at something. Because you want to understand that what you were once never good at, you're now really good at. So you can get there again with something else. So I want to leave you with three questions. Um, perhaps these are questions worth putting in your journal and spending some time with. Question one What parts of my identity belong to a chapter that I've already outgrown? The next question: what evidence do I have of the person I've become? And finally, if I wasn't trying to meet anyone else's expectations, if I wasn't trying to meet anybody else's expectations, what would I want my next chapter to contain? So you don't need to have all the answers today. That's not what this is about. This is about sitting with it. You don't need to have the next version of yourself completely figured out. You can appreciate the life you've built and still want something different. You can be experienced, you can let go of an old identity without losing everything that that version taught you. And because you're not starting from scratch, you're starting from experience. And maybe your next chapter doesn't begin with knowing exactly where you're going. Maybe it simply begins with you becoming curious about who you're becoming. If this conversation has made you curious about your own identity and what comes next, I've created a free identity workbook and toolkit that can help you explore it more deeply. You'll find that on my website, The Resilience Movement, and I'll also put a link below. So until next time, keep choosing the next version of yourself one step at a time.