The question I was terrified of being asked…

Last year year I was in Syracuse, NY for my 10 year old son's first ever lacrosse tournament. If you have never been to a youth sport tournament let me set the scene:

You stay in a mid-range hotel in the middle of nowhere, the kids run around the hotel with their team mates being loud and unruly, and the parents, who only know each other on the most surface level, sit in the hotel lobby and have drinks and snacks. Can you tell they aren't my favourite thing :)

I am generally fine making small talk with the other parents, but at this specific tournament I was filled with dread.  I was SO worried that one of the other parents would ask me a specific question.

Any guesses on what the question was???

“What do you do for a living?”

A VERY normal small talk question among adults. In the past this question wouldn't phase me at all.

But this time - I had JUST decided to leave my full time role as a corporate executive and go ALL IN on this coaching business. And… if I am being honest, I was worried what they would think about me if I told them I was a coach. Would they judge me? Would they think it was a real job?

Of course, no one ever asked, and if they had I can guarantee none of them would have cared.  So I had to reflect on WHY I was so afraid of this question?

My career has always been such a large part of my identity… and that was shifting. Identity shifts often come AFTER we make the decision to do something different - it takes a while to catch up to it.

But the real reason that I was nervous to talk about it wasn't that I was worried that they would judge me - I mean I barely knew them - but because I was still judging myself. I was projecting my judgements on to them.

I KNOW I am meant to be a coach and my clients see amazing transformations - but I still had judgements to work through as part of my identity shift. Working through them took time, patience and a commitment to becoming my future self.

Even if you are just thinking about making a career change we can get paralyzed by the identity shift, or the fear of what other people think. Can you see yourself as someone who is an entrepreneur, a non-profit director, an executive who actually has boundaries?

Do you feel like this identity shift is keeping you stuck? Let's chat! Reply IDENTITY and I will connect with you.