Day 8 Identity Crisis-Who am I now?

I tend to describe myself by the work that I do. So how do I identify myself now that I am out of work? I wanted to change careers and do something different so now I really am faced with a challenge. How do I describe myself without saying what I did before?

Most of us tend to categorize ourselves by our job title. "I am a teacher." "I am a manager." "I am a pastor." I made a shift from stating my job title to describing my former job skills. When people asked what I did I would say, "I was an educator." or I would say, "I was involved in training and development." I found myself experimenting with generic ways to describe myself.

What I quickly realized was that I needed to come up with a new way to identify who I was without boxing myself in to what I wanted my next career position to be. I had a general sense that I wanted to move into career coaching but I wasn't sure how best to describe my new identity.

After much thought and several failed attempts I finally came up with a tentative description that served me for several months. I called myself a
Career Transition Specialist. I tried the terms Halftime coach, career specialist and vocational counselor first. I found myself struggling to find just the right words to describe my new identity but I needed something to summarize what I wanted to become. I also needed to stop describing myself by my old job title.

To my delight I discovered that new people I met took me at face value for how I was now describing myself. In fact, I frequently got very positive and inquisitive responses from people. People would say, "That's interesting. What do you do?" That gave me a chance to briefly tell them what I hoped to do, to help people find careers or volunteer opportunities where they could make a shift from success to significance.

I learned early in my career search that I had to change how I saw myself and how I described myself to others. I had to stop identifying myself by my old job title and start introducing myself with a new career label.