THE IDENTITY YOU HAVEN'T UPDATED

The Identity You Haven't Updated

We each carry a picture of ourselves in our heads: capable, generous, ambitious, the reliable one, the smart one. Other people carry a picture of us too, often a slightly different one, formed years ago and rarely revised since. The trouble with both is that they stop updating long before we do.

That would be fine if the world held still long enough to let identity catch up. It doesn't. We're changing constantly – in what we know, what we want, what we're capable of, what circumstances demand of us. In a world moving as fast as this one, a static identity isn't a stable foundation. It's a lag.

The discomfort most of us feel, at various points, isn't really about the change itself. It's the gap between the identity we're carrying, the reality we're living, and the person we're aspiring to be. When any two stop matching, something feels wrong, even if we can't always name it. Sometimes that shows up as low-grade unease. Sometimes it's a genuine crisis.

I see the gap constantly in client work, usually before the client has named it as an identity problem at all:

• A chief of staff who sees herself as the person who closes every gap, and hasn't admitted that the role she, and the business, actually needs now is a different one.

• A man whose family no longer needs providing for, still running an identity built entirely around being the provider.

• A woman renegotiating who she is as ‘wife’ stops being one of her available answers.

• A senior partner nearing retirement, still gripping an identity built for a title he's about to lose — and no clearer on who he wants to be once it's gone.

  
  

In each case, the identity was accurate once. That's exactly the problem — it was accurate for long enough to feel permanent, and permanence is precisely what it can no longer afford to be.

I felt this myself, and I still do. For twenty-five years, “geopolitical expert” was the identity I carried and the one others assigned me. As my role at Equinor disappeared, I realised it was no longer who I wanted to be — but I didn't yet know who I did. That gap sat open for longer than I was comfortable with.

Updating it wasn't a single decision. I'm still working on my redefinition every day. It's a new habit I have to practise: waking up and being deliberate about how I want to turn up, forgetting and falling back into the old picture of myself, then noticing and trying again. On the hard days, I need to centre myself. Most days it's smaller — catching the reflex, and then deliberately choosing how I want to respond.

That's the actual discipline, and it isn't tidy. It's not finding your identity once and holding onto it — it's checking it against reality on a rolling basis, and against who you want to become, and being honest when they have drifted further than you'd like to admit. You won't do it perfectly. I don't. But the checking is the point, not the certainty.

Most people wait for a crisis to force the update — a redundancy, a diagnosis, a divorce. You don't have to wait. A static identity is a liability now in a way it wasn't a generation ago. Keep it moving, or the dissonance will move it for you, on its own timeline, not yours.

Best regards,

Xenia

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