Your Job Is Something You Do, Not Who You Are

4 1/2 years ago, I quit my full-time job in finance to become an influencer. It has only been within the last year and a half that I have started to feel fully comfortable explaining what I do to new people.

And it’s obviously not because my business isn’t legit or because I did not have evidence that leaving was the right decision. By the time I quit, Break Your Budget had outpaced my salary, and within my first year of self-employment, 3x my income. I had built something that gave me substantially more control over my time, money and life than my finance career ever had, but despite all of that evidence, I still struggled to describe myself as a creator or influencer without feeling a little bit embarrassed.

For 5 years, I had a career that required almost no explanation. I studied finance in college, completed multiple finance internships and then worked in the industry. If you had met me during that phase of my life, I probably would have introduced myself by saying, “I’m Michela, and I work in finance at John Hancock.”

My title and employer gave people an immediate way to understand me, or at least to think they understood me, and the reaction was usually some version of: that sounds difficult, you must work a lot, you must be smart.

At the time, I found a lot of security in that response because I liked having a career that sounded impressive even though I didn’t actually like it (how sick and twisted, right?) I would be lying if I said I never looked down on people who had easier or less conventional jobs. Obviously, not only was the rude, but it was totally off base. Now with hindsight, I can see that much of that judgment came from my own insecurity. It was difficult to admit that the career I had spent so much time and emotional energy building was sucking the life out of me, so instead, I became protective of the status it gave me.

Being “the girl who works in finance” was not just what I did; it had become the shorthand I used to explain who I was. When I left, I gained a life that worked much better for me, but I also lost an identity that other people immediately understood. This was REALLY hard for me.

When people discuss leaving a job or changing industries, the conversation usually centers on practical concerns like money, benefits, experience and whether the new path will work. Those concerns obviously matter, and I would never pretend otherwise, but the emotional difficulty of a career change is not always rooted in the logistics alone. Sometimes, the scariest part is the possibility that leaving the job will also require you to leave behind the version of yourself attached to it.

When I quit working in finance, I remember lying to my manager and coworkers about what I planned to do next because I didn’t know how to explain that I wasn’t leaving for another job. I hadn’t really shared much about my social media at work (unless someone found it and brought it up), and although content creation was already a legitimate industry in 2022, I knew the people around me might not understand it.

More importantly, I wasn’t confident enough to let them misunderstand it without allowing their perception to change how I felt about myself.

Saying that I worked in finance made me feel credible. Saying that I was a content creator or an influencer (why does it literally feel like a slur) felt like it discredited everything I was building, not because the work was less demanding or the business was less real, but because I could not rely on a universally understood title to make it sound important.

Even now, there are people who don’t understand what I do. At a wedding recently, someone I had not seen in years asked whether I was “still doing that blogging thing,” and when I said yes, he responded that it was great if “I could make a living from it.” (LOL) My entire family had a good laugh about that on the car ride home.

The interaction bothered me more than I wanted it to because it reinforced the old story that the work I do is somehow less “real” than the corporate career I left behind.

The difference today is that I no longer need everyone else to understand my career in order for me to believe in it. I have enough evidence that this version of my life works better for me, and eventually, I allowed that evidence to override the story I had been telling myself about the kind of career I was supposed to have.

My identity did not shift because I woke up one day with some profound realization about who I was. It shifted because I slowly built proof that I could be successful, fulfilled and financially secure without maintaining the title that once made me feel safe.

If your identity is deeply connected to your career, it doesn’t mean you’ve made some personal mistake. We are conditioned to think about work this way from the time we are kids and are old enough to understand what a job is, because this is when adults start asking “what do you want want to be when you grow up?” rather than “who do you want to become?”

The career question comes before the identity question every time.

A job title also gives us a convenient shorthand for explaining ourselves. If you tell someone you are a marketing analyst at Deloitte, a nurse, an attorney or a teacher, they immediately begin making assumptions about what you do, what you value and the kind of person you might be.

Whether we like it or not, work is part of the common language we use to size each other up, which makes leading with a title feel both normal and efficient.

We also spend the majority of our waking hours working, so it makes sense that our jobs can begin to feel like the main character of our lives. This was especially true for me during my first few years after college because I didn’t have a lot going on outside of work.

I would wake up early to exercise, commute to the office, work all day, go home around 7 p.m. and spend the rest of the evening doing chores and preparing to repeat the entire process the following morning. Outside of fitness, I had given myself very little space to explore who I was when I was not being productive. This is normal… ??? But it really shouldn’t be!

Work also provides a kind of external validation that is hard to replicate anywhere else. Corporate careers come with titles, promotions, raises and performance reviews, all of which create a clear sense that you are progressing.

We spend our childhoods advancing from one grade to the next, receiving feedback and learning how well we are doing, and then corporate life recreates a similar structure for adults with a paycheck attached. Personal growth, relationships and hobbies rarely give us the same obvious milestones, so professional achievement can easily become the primary way we measure whether our lives are moving forward or not. That, and getting married and having kids. Whole different convo for another time <3

None of this makes career ambition inherently bad. You are allowed to care about your work, to want the promotion, to earn more money and feel proud of what you have accomplished.

The problem happens when professional success becomes your only available source of purpose, progress or self-esteem, because at that point, any disruption at work stops feeling like a change in circumstance and starts feeling like a referendum on your worth.

Separating your identity from your career does not require you to stop caring about what you do, and it also doesn’t mean that everyone needs to quit corporate America, become an entrepreneur or turn a passion project into a business. My experience happened to involve leaving finance and becoming a creator, but building a fuller identity outside of work is relevant regardless of your career path (and I know that my path is not representative of the masses).

The goal is not to make work meaningless. It is to make sure work is not the only meaningful thing you have. HUGE. DIFFERENCE.

One of the simplest places to start is by changing the way you introduce yourself. The next time you meet someone new, notice whether you automatically lead with your job title and consider sharing something else about yourself first. This may sound insignificant, but the way you describe yourself reveals what you have decided deserves the most weight in your identity.

I have noticed how much this varies depending on the culture around you. In some cities and social circles, nearly every conversation seems to revolve around where everyone works, what they do and where they earned their MBA.

In LA, unless I am attending a specific work event, I find that jobs come up much less often, if ever. People are usually doing something interesting, but that doesn’t mean it has to dominate every conversation. I personally find that freeing because everyone needs to do something to make money, but we really don’t need to treat that information as the most interesting or important thing about one another.

It is also important to build something outside of work that you take seriously - and by “build,” I don’t mean starting a business or finding another thing to monetize. I mean having a hobby, skill, community or goal that receives real time and attention rather than whatever energy is left after your job has taken everything else.

When I first graduated from college, fitness was the primary thing I had outside of work, and I trained for a marathon - which gave me a goal that had structure, measurable progress and a clear end point. Today, my life outside of work includes cooking classes, needlepoint and a ceramics studio, all of which give me things to anticipate and care about that have nothing to do with making money or proving that I am good at my job.

Taking your life outside of work more seriously also doesn’t mean that every evening has to become a self-improvement project. Resting, watching tv and doing nothing productive all have a place in a normal life, but if work is the only thing that consistently challenges, engages or excites you, it will naturally take up more of your identity than you may want it to.

Although this is largely a conversation about identity, it would be dishonest for me to separate my own career shift from money. Earning more through Break Your Budget is what gave me permission to leave finance, and having savings, a financial cushion and a growing income allowed me to sit with the discomfort of changing my identity without also feeling like my survival was at risk.

It’s A LOTTTT easier to separate yourself from a job title when you are not terrified of what will happen if the job changes. Financial stability will not answer every question about who you are, but it can create the space you need to make choices based on what works for your life rather than clinging to the safest available option (or, identity!)

It doesn’t mean you need to wait until your finances are perfect before you make a change, because that point may also never arrive. But it does mean that building savings, managing your expenses and increasing your income can give you more than a positive number in an account; they can give you the ability to change your mind.

That has always been the larger purpose behind getting your finances in order. Money cannot tell you who to become, but it can make it easier to stop being someone solely because you are afraid of what it would cost to change.

I still catch myself placing too much weight on work because these beliefs are difficult to unlearn, and working for myself has not made me immune to allowing professional validation to shape how I feel.

The difference is that I now have a life with more sources of meaning, satisfaction and progress, which means my work no longer has to carry the full responsibility of telling me who I am.

Your job is something you do. It can be meaningful, impressive, lucrative, difficult and deeply important to you, but it is still only one part of your life.

If you are questioning your career or know that you need a change but feel afraid that leaving would mean losing yourself, consider whether the version of yourself you are protecting is actually making you happy. You don’t need to have a new identity perfectly defined before you take the first step away from an old one. In my experience, that confidence comes from slowly building evidence that another version of your life can work.

So intead of asking only what you want to do next, ask who you want to be regardless of what appears beneath your name on LinkedIn. Think about what you would care about, talk about and spend time doing if your job were no longer available as the first answer.

The goal is to build a life that gives you more to care about…. not to care less about your career.

How much of your identity currently comes from what you do for work, and what is one part of yourself you want to take more seriously outside of it? I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

xx

Michela