Newsletter #4 - Who Am I?

I went to a retreat a few weeks ago and as part of the pre-work I was to “craft a story of your life that appeals to your own heart that feels joyful, uplifting, and fully alive.” Uh, what? I spent a couple of weeks not understanding the assignment and asking everyone repeatedly for clarification. Like, was I supposed to write my whole life story? And what if it’s not particularly joyful, uplifting and fully alive? Or just a snippet of it? Or envision a future life story that is all of those things? I found this paralyzing and a bit triggering.

And then I remembered something that I had come up when interviewing Dion Elliott Jensen on Deep Work Out Loud. The theme of our conversation was “I am who I am, not what I do.” And the great challenge for us as adults is to describe who we are without mentioning our jobs. This seems impossible when title and role are the things we work for all our professional lives. Dion has made it a party game - tell me who you are without telling me what you do.

This reminded me of the “I Am" poem my kids all did in elementary school. The assignment was to write a poem using I AM prompts. For example “I am from……..” they would say things like ‘the smell of baking cookies and my grandma’s hugs.’ I am of….Spanish and English and French.  I am….a basketballer. Every kid sounded like a poet, and they were so evocative of smells, feelings, sensory experiences.

Since I had recently talked about these poems in my conversation with Dion, I decided to try this prompt as a way to get into this storytelling exercise I had in front of me. I started with the basics, “I am from Japan, Seattle, New York, Los Angeles — with brief layovers in Phoenix, London and Tennessee” which led to “ I am of cities where you can be alone and free in a sea of people, but never lonely.”  And after that it just started pouring out. Full of contrast and contradictions. Love and loss. Highs and lows. And not a word about work. It was the kind of writing where I cry while I write it and my voice shakes when I read it aloud..

I had the opportunity to give this to a client recently as an assignment. When you have built an entire identity around what you do,  and have had great success to the exclusion of many other things, and then that work goes sideways - how do you remember who you are? We’re going back to basics. I am…

And because I love a theme, this came out during the other podcast conversations from this last month as well.

Heather Pomerantz spent twenty-five years as a senior finance executive, including two stints as CFO, before she became an executive coach. She knew for years that coaching was where she belonged. She stayed in the role anyway, achieving and achieving, until she was, in her words, in physical pain. What she tells her clients now is ‘why wait, integrate’. You don't have to blow up your life to start living it. But you do have to know who you are outside of what you do, or the integration has nowhere to go. And the beginning of that journey is knowing your core values.

Kim Stepanski is an organizational psychologist who has spent her career working with leaders at places like Pfizer and the Gates Foundation, and what she keeps seeing is what she calls the loneliness of leadership, which is not the social kind but the kind where you never get to put down the performance long enough to remember who you are under it. She's building peer communities for senior women executives specifically so people can bring their real selves, their actual challenges, into a room with other people who understand, and discover, as she put it, that the challenges look remarkably similar no matter the sector or the title. People are people, she said. Which sounds simple until you've spent twenty years performing a role and forgotten it was true.

Ben Basilan has been thinking about identity his whole life, he said, though the last three years made it impossible to ignore. A divorce, a role change, a mother aging — all of it at once, all of it asking the same question from different angles. Ben works as both a UX researcher and a transition coach, and for a while he tried to keep those two selves in separate boxes, until an executive coach asked him why they needed to be separate at all. What happened when he stopped trying to manage two distinct identities and just became one Ben who showed up the same way everywhere — curious, listening hard, trying to help — was that he got better at both things. He also said something I keep returning to: that identity isn't just what we build, it's what we carry forward from every hard thing we've survived. You don't have to lose the person the difficult years made you. You just get to decide, as he put it, what you still need and what you can finally put down. 

And Rebecca Shaddix, who thinks a great deal about how we spend our time and why, makes the case that we would never spend money the way we spend our minutes, giving them away to things that make us smaller, deferring the things that make us more ourselves until some future date that keeps moving. You don't need a retreat to start, she says. You need ninety seconds and a little intention.

Speaking of retreats…

The retreat I mentioned earlier was with four women I know well and love. There was forest bathing, there were deep conversations, and according to my cohort it was really more of a gentle nature experience than a hike, though I respectfully disagree because we definitely hiked and it was definitely uphill. Oh, and also, there was definitely a bear.

And for all this outdoorsyness, I brought a tote bag. Not a backpack. A farmer’s market, NPR- listening, urban hippie tote bag. As one does (not).

On the first hike, one of the women stopped and looked at me with genuine concern. "What's in your bag?" she asked. I started to open it. "What do you need?" She shook her head. "No, I meant it looks heavy, can I carry something for you?" Oh. I felt a little embarrassed. "No, it's fine," I said. "I'm fine."

Later, when it was obviously not fine, I crossed the straps and wore it on my back. Someone noticed. "You turned it into a backpack," she said, which felt like a compliment. Yes, yes I did. I am nothing if not resilient.

The next day we hiked up in the mountains with our yoga mats to reach a meditation clearing. The yoga mat had a strap. The tote bag had straps. I threaded one through the other and hoisted the whole thing onto my back.

Like a serious hiker.

Because here is the lingering thing: between my client's crisis and the conversation with Dion and my own poem and the tote bag arriving at the clearing, we spend so much time performing the version of ourselves we think the situation requires. The right credentials, the right title, the right equipment for the terrain (for many years, the right shift dress and high heels.) And then something happens, a job loss, a transition, a retreat in the woods, and we get asked the question underneath all the other questions.

Who are you, actually?

Among many other things, I’m the lady who brings a tote bag to a nature hike. Maybe I’ll add that to my poem….”I AM the lady who brings a tote bag to a hike.” 

I will share my poem with you here. If you read it, be kind, it is vulnerable.

I would love to read yours. I invite you to try it.

P.S. If you read my last newsletter, I want to tell you that on my way back from the retreat, my husband met me in the airport, on the way to his writing retreat. I landed, we shared a drink, he gave me the car keys, then he flew off to his own adventure. He had a backpack; I am sure a tote would have been just fine.