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Your identity beyond your business is one of the first things to blur when you have spent years becoming the person who built your name in an industry.
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When Someone Asks Who You AreSomeone at dinner asks what you do. Later in the night, they ask who you are. You give an answer. The business is in it. You try again, and it is in that one too. Try this. See how long you can talk about yourself before the business comes up. For a lot of leaders, it is about a minute. If you stopped short, that is worth looking at. There is plenty in you. We talk about what matters to us, and we share what we value, so when the business is all that comes out, it tells you where most of the room inside you has gone. Because you are evolving, and the business will not always sit at the top. Retirement. A sale. A sudden stop like the one in 2020 that took the choice out of your hands. At some point the business moves, and if it has grown into most of the space you would use to describe yourself, you feel that move in your identity, not just your calendar. That is overidentifying with the business.
When the Business Becomes the Whole AnswerThe business started as something you created. Over the years it became the way you understand yourself. A strong month and you feel like yourself. A hard month and something in you contracts, often before anyone else has even seen the numbers. Look at your calendar, or the way you introduce yourself at an event. The company arrives before you do. And there is usually a thought you keep to yourself. If the business sold tomorrow, who would I be? Over the years, you and the business have grown so close together that you can no longer quite see yourself apart from it. I call this an Identity Lock.
What Being All In Gave YouYou did not end up here by accident, and it is not a flaw in you. Being all in on the business gave you meaning. In the years when almost no one could see what you were building, it gave you a reason to keep going. Your effort had somewhere to go and something to show for it. The business would not be where it is without that. The shift comes when the thing that once gave you direction starts to hold you in place instead. The people closest to you know the leader well, and the rest of you less and less. Friendships thin out, because the work comes with you to every table. Even a holiday becomes the business in a nicer location.
Your Identity Beyond Your Business Was There FirstThe things you value most did not start with the business. You had them well before you signed your first client. You built the business because something already mattered to you. Creating. Leading. Providing for the people you love. Solving the problems other people walked away from. The business gave those values somewhere to go. It became the vehicle, not the thing itself. It is one expression of who you are. There are others. They have not disappeared. They have been waiting in the parts of your life the business has been taking up.
Leading From Your Identity, Not Your BusinessThis is not about stepping back, or caring about the business less. It is about stopping overidentifying with it, so you can see who you are underneath it. So that if it were taken away tomorrow, you would still know who you are, and still know how to meet the deeper reasons you went into business in the first place. So ask where in your week you exist as someone other than the founder. And who in your life actually knows you, outside of what you do. When you can describe yourself beyond the business, it no longer has to hold all of who you are. You lead it from choice instead of need. Your family and your health get more of you, and so does the work. And if a sale is anywhere on the horizon, you meet it as someone with far more to bring to the next chapter than a company name. Who would you describe if the business was not part of the answer? If the business has become the whole answer to who you are, book a 15-minute Strategy Call and we will look at what sits beyond it. To your brilliance, Tanya Cross Industry Leader Coach & The Coaches’ Coach BAppSoSc (Counselling) |
