How your Identity Impacts your Success

You may have noticed that it’s been a long time since I’ve written a blog entry. There is a good reason for this: in July, I made the decision to pull my children out of daycare. I took the month of August off work, and drove around the United States with them, through 25 states, visiting family, friends, museums, and historical sites. We got home in time for school to start, and I did not re-enroll them in after school daycare, choosing instead to compress my business into the hours they are at school, and devoting the afternoons to being a parent. My business motto has been “twice the revenue in half the time”. We’ll see how that actually pans out over the next year or so, but meanwhile, it has been an interesting lesson in productivity, efficiency, and surprisingly, personal identity.

On the surface, it’s been fairly clear how to prioritize my tasks, schedule my days, and make the changes required to navigate this transition. The real struggle completely caught me off guard – it was this internal sense of vague confusion over what makes me a success. I’ve had spurts of frustration and irritation that seem to come out of nowhere, and after several bouts of thinking things through it hit me that my business transition has knocked me into a mini-identity crisis.

I don’t know if we realize how tied we are to our identity until it changes. In retrospect, I know that when I started my business, the personal identity I globbed onto was “successful entrepreneur”. Statistics or not, I was not willing to fail at building a viable business that I could be proud of. All my feelings of self-worth were wrapped up in the business. Once it gathered enough momentum and I crossed that “survival” line, new questions started nagging at me, and the main one was “how am I doing in my role as parent”? I don’t think I was quite satisfied with the answer, and this began the drive to change into what I wanted my new identity to be: both a successful business owner and a successful parent.

When I work with professionals in transition, I find that loss of identity is one of the biggest contributors to the stress and emotional struggle they experience while they are out of work. I also notice that the clients I coach are going to naturally behave in ways that are in line with their personal identity, and if they don’t strongly identify with the role they are moving toward, it’s almost impossible for them to succeed.

When you think about your own success, it’s important to know what roles you have defined for yourself, and what they mean to you. For example, I when I watch other parents, I see a wide variety of ways each individual defines success in that role. Some parents define their success through the success of their children, some define their success by the amount of time they spend with their children, some by the kind of relationships they have with their children. At work, some define success by how much money they bring in, some by what they are building and the impact they are having on the world, some by the level of power in their organization, some by how much they are learning – we are all different.

If you are struggling at work or in any area of your life, you may want to write down the roles you see yourself playing, and how you define success in each of those roles. Just taking a moment to ask yourself who you are and who you want to be brings assumptions to the surface, and may reveal the source of any frustration or confusion you feel in your current role.

The bottom line is that we really aren’t any of the roles we play, and the roles we play in life change many times. Our identity is what we make up in our mind about the roles we are playing currently, and how we define success in that role. If you are feeling successful in life, you probably fit well into how you define success. If you are feeling frustrated or unsuccessful, there is a good chance that you feel “out of synch” with your definition of who you “should” be and what success in that role means.

How to get back “in synch”? Well, you can change your behavior, or you can change your definition of success, or you can look deeper for something that means more to you than the current role you are playing. If you’d like to talk about this, or anything else related to your success, don’t hesitate to write or call. These are the big questions that take time to think about, but make the difference in your success, personal fulfillment, and overall life satisfaction.