I took two and a half weeks off this summer, which is the longest I’ve been away from my laptop and my inbox in about five years. For the first three or four days I kept picking up my phone out of pure habit, half-expecting something urgent. Nothing was urgent. Nothing had ever been urgent, apparently. And once I stopped checking, a different question turned up, one I hadn’t asked myself in a very long time: if you took away my job title, who would I be?

I still don’t have a good answer. But the question wouldn’t leave me alone for the rest of the holiday, so here we are.

The bubble

I don’t mean a place. I mean the loop most of us work inside. You hit a target, someone senior notices, you get praised, a bigger target appears, round it goes. Promotions, KPIs, the quarterly review, the congratulations post on LinkedIn. Every one of those measures you against the organisation’s yardstick, and the organisation is the one holding the ruler.

The loop is comfortable, and it’s designed to be. It rewards you for staying in it. What it almost never does is ask whether the game still makes sense to you personally.

I want to be careful here, because I’m not making an argument against ambition. I’m ambitious, I like winning, and I have no intention of pretending otherwise. The problem is subtler than that. Somewhere along the way the organisation’s definition of a good employee starts standing in for your own definition of a good life, and the substitution happens so gradually that most of us never clock it.

Do you identify with your work?

This is the part that got under my skin on holiday.

Ask most people who they are and they’ll give you a job title and a company name. I do it too. There’s nothing vain about it, it’s just how we’ve learned to describe ourselves, and nine times out of ten it’s what the other person was asking for anyway.

Being proud of your work is fine. The trouble starts when the job becomes the main thing holding your sense of self together, because at that point a reorg or a missed promotion or a piece of blunt feedback stops being information about a situation and becomes information about you. I’ve watched genuinely capable people read a restructure as a personal verdict on their worth. I’ve done a version of it myself, more than once, and I’d like to say I’ve grown out of it.

So: if the job disappeared tomorrow, would you still know who you are? I don’t think there’s a clean answer. I still think it’s worth asking.

Why this lands harder for women leaders?

Women who’ve had to fight for every rung tend to be more invested in the rung. If you’ve spent years managing how you’re perceived as carefully as how you actually perform, code-switching your way through rooms where you were the only woman in them, then loosening your grip on any of it can feel like giving back ground that cost you a fortune to take.

Here’s the thing I’ve learned from sitting in hiring meetings and promotion discussions for the better part of a decade, and I mean this as good news rather than cynicism: a great deal of what looks like merit from the outside is narrative. Who got remembered after the meeting. Whose work ended up attached to their own name rather than their manager’s. Who happened to be standing in front of the right people at the right moment. That isn’t a conspiracy, it’s just what human judgement looks like when you scale it up and put it under time pressure.

I found that oddly reassuring when it finally landed. It’s much easier to decide how much of your life you want to spend on a game once you can see clearly that it is one.

Some signs, in case any of them look familiar

  • Your calendar belongs almost entirely to other people’s priorities, and if someone asked you to describe a week built around your own, you’d struggle to fill it.
  • You judge a good week by the feedback you got rather than by anything you actually made.
  • “Will this be noticed?” has replaced “do I care about this?” as the first question you ask about a new piece of work.
  • Promotions still feel good. They just stop feeling good so quickly now.
  • And somewhere at the back of your head, you already suspect the next title won’t do it either.

Leaving without leaving

You don’t have to resign to get some distance from all this, which is fortunate, because I haven’t resigned and I’m not planning to.

What has helped me, and I’m early enough in this that you should treat it as a work in progress rather than advice, is building a second measure of success that runs alongside the work one. Not instead of it. Alongside. When more than one thing is holding you up, praise at work goes back to being pleasant rather than structural.

In practice that has meant some fairly unglamorous admin. Writing down what “enough” looks like in concrete terms: an actual seniority, an actual number, an actual number of hours a week, instead of letting the definition drift upward every time I get close to it. Keeping one thing in my life that has no relationship whatsoever to my performance review. And being honest with myself about which parts of the climb I still want and which ones I’m doing because stopping feels too much like falling.

I came back from those two and a half weeks without a tidy conclusion, which I’ll admit was mildly annoying. What I did come back with was enough distance to ask the question properly, and I hadn’t managed that in years.

I’m not against the bubble. I built my whole career inside it and I’m still in it. It’s just narrower than it looks from the inside, and most of the senior people I genuinely admire turn out, once you know them a bit, to have built something outside it as well.

A few reads worth your time on this topic

  • Working Identity by Herminia Ibarra. Very relevant if you want to explore how people rebuild who they are outside a job title or after a role stops fitting.