Who Are You When Work No Longer Defines You?

Sarah Barry (00:00.086)
Mm-hmm.

Sarah Barry (00:04.184)
Hello, I’m Sarah Barry and welcome to What Comes Next. Whether this is your first time here or you’re back again, I’m glad you found this. Today I want to talk about who you are when work no longer defines you. There’s this question people get asked all the time, so what do you do? And almost all of us have an answer ready. I’m a lawyer, I’m a teacher, I run a business, I’m in finance. Whatever it is, the answer comes quickly. We’ve said it a thousand times before.

And then one day that answer doesn’t quite work anymore. Maybe you’ve retired, maybe you stepped back, maybe you’re in between things, and suddenly that small social question feels heavier than it should. You hesitate, you hear yourself start to say, I used to be a and notice the past tense. And honestly, I think people are often surprised by how big that small moment can feel. It’s a tiny question.

In a tiny social exchange, and yet it can feel oddly stabilizing because the answer to what do you do isn’t really about what you do. It’s a stand in for who are you? And when you can’t answer that simply, something else gets exposed. Here’s what I think is going on. I think we underestimate how much work quietly organises our identity.

Not because work is the most important thing in our life, often it isn’t, but because work is doing so much in the background, and we don’t really notice it until it stops. That’s the part I want to get into today. Not the obvious bit about work providing an income, the quieter bit, the bit nobody warns you about. When you actually stop and think about what work provides, income is just one item on a on a long list. Work gives you daily routine.

Where to be, when to be there, what to do when you get there, and that structure is so familiar that people don’t even register it as a structure. It’s just life. Work gives you a social environment, colleagues, hallway conversations, lunches, after work drinks. Most of the casual social contact in a working life happens through work, often without you even choosing it.

Sarah Barry (02:28.834)
Work gives you a sense of competence, that quiet daily evidence that you’re, you know, can do something well, that people rely on, you know, that your effort produces a result. And that’s a steady source of self worth. Quiet but real. Work gives you status where you sit in a hierarchy, what people think when they hear your job title, whether you’re senior or junior or somewhere in between.

And look, we don’t always like talking about status, but it’s there and it shapes how we feel about ourselves more than we’d probably admit. Work gives you a language, a vocabulary for introducing yourself, a ready-made answer to who you are, a frame that other people can immediately understand. And on top of all of that, work gives you the thing that holds it all together, a reason to get up in the morning.

That doesn’t have to be invented from scratch, you know, e every day. The reason is just built in. And I think most people only notice all of that when it disappears. You know, while work is running, these things are basically invisible. They’re so woven into the rhythm of life that they don’t feel like anything in particular. And then when work stops and one by one these structures fall away.

The routine goes, the hallway conversations go, the status indicators go, the language stops working, and what’s left is a person who knows a lot about who they used to be, but isn’t quite sure who they are now. And honestly, the people I talk to about this often describe a really similar experience. They’re somewhere in their 50s, their work is still going well, they’re competent, they’re respected, they’re doing what they trained to do.

But there’s this growing awareness that they don’t want to be in their sixties doing exactly the same thing. And it isn’t a dissatisfaction with the work. It’s the way it’s that who they are has become larger than the role they’re playing. You know, the role has stopped fitting properly, even though they’re still doing it well. And I think a lot of people approaching retirement are sitting with some

Sarah Barry (04:47.406)
Quiet version of that experience without really having the words for it. So, what does all of this actually mean for someone listening? I think it means that if you’re approaching retirement or you’re in it, and you found yourself feeling more unsettled than you expected, you’re not doing anything wrong. What you’re actually doing is realizing everything work was quietly doing for you.

And you’re realizing it all at once because it’s suddenly not there anymore. It means that the work of rebuilding isn’t about replacing your job, it’s about deliberately giving yourself the things work used to give you without you having to think about it. So, some structure, some social contact, some sense of competence, some language for who you are now.

And that’s not a quick project. It it can’t really be solved by booking a holiday or taking up a hobby, even those things even though those things can help. It’s a longer piece of work and it kind of happens in the background while you’re getting on with everyday life. The good news, if you can call it that, is that the disorientation isn’t a sign that something’s broken. It’s actually a sign that you’re meeting.

The real scale of the transition for the first time. And most people get through it. The ones who get through it well are the ones who recognize what’s happening and treat it seriously rather than waiting for it just to go away on its own. And here’s the thing I really want to leave with you. The question: who are you when work no longer defines you? Sounds like it has a single answer, and it definitely does not. It’s a question that opens up

A much longer process of finding out, and the answer changes over time. The first version of who you are after work won’t be the final one, and that’s not a problem. That’s just how this stage actually actually works. Okay, so before I close, here’s the ask a retirement coach segment for this episode. So, one question drawn from conversations I have all the time with a short answer.

Sarah Barry (07:09.014)
So, something I’m often asked is why does losing my work identity feel so unsettling when I wanted to retire? And this really is the paradox. You plan for this, you look forward to it, you may have counted down the days, and then you get there, and somehow it feels disorienting. And on the surface, that just doesn’t make sense. Why would something you wanted feel unsettling?

Here’s what I think is going on. Wanting to retire and being ready for the identity shift are actually not the same thing. You can want the freedom without really realizing how much of your sense of self was being held up by the structure underneath the job. The wanting is real. The disorientation is also real. They just live in different places. And the other thing worth knowing, honestly, is that this kind of

Unsettled feeling is almost universal. People who loved their work and were sad to leave feel it. People who couldn’t wait to leave feel it. The feeling isn’t a verdict on whether or not retirement was the right decision. It’s the experience of going through an identity transition that nobody really prepared you for. So if this is where you are, it doesn’t mean you got it wrong.

It means you’ve arrived at the part that nobody warned you about. Okie doke. So until next time. And remember, retirement isn’t just about planning when work ends, it’s about shaping how you want to live it when it does. See you next time.