Your Job. Your Identity?
When we equate our personal identity with only what we are doing, we miss out on the other half of the equation: who we are being.
How many times have you attended a networking event and the opening question from someone you just met is, “So, what do you do?”
Of course you have. And I bet you’ve asked the same question in return. Not that there’s anything wrong with the question, but if you pause and think about it for a moment, it’s rather impersonal.
But then again, so are we.
Western culture has trained us to demonstrate a strong work ethic. And in our devotion to production, we’ve been taught to place more emphasis on the profession rather than the person. We identify ourselves by what we do more than who we are.
Many of us have also been conditioned to separate work and life, but this separation can wreak havoc on our personalities. Namely, we end up having to manage two different personas — the “work me” and the “personal me.”
But in other parts of the globe, the perspective is different.
When I lived and worked in Bangalore, my fellow coworkers were more interested in getting to know me (as a person) before we started working together. My team understood that work is an extension of who we are — not the other way around. In India, they…
