Major transitions like changing careers, births, deaths, divorces, illnesses, and just following life’s spiraling path can catalyze periodic reflection on who we are. As I continue on a major transformation in my life, friends have urged me to share my thought process of what I’m discovering, particularly as it relates to integrating corporate and creative ways of being.
In this video, I share a simple process I went through to reflect on who I am as I changed contexts from tech executive to creating my own path cooking and sharing my feelings. You can see an example below of what my whiteboard looked like when I considered it complete for the moment (expecting it to continue to evolve over time). I then synthesized what I had drawn into a new written bio on the website I launched at the same time as this newsletter, recipeasfeeling.com.
Key takeaways:
Your identity is more than your job. Your resume may focus on what you’ve achieved; mapping who you are can start with the “why,” your motivations, and your influences.
Reflecting on who you are is a process – the answers, which will change over time or may not be clear to you at all sometimes – are not as important as the process of reflection itself.
Who you are is unique to you. There are infinite variations of how you might interpret and apply this process to your own life’s specific context, and your map won’t look like mine because we are different people who think and live differently.
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