Create a Compelling Vision for Your Life in the New Year
Episode 487 | Author: Emilie Aries
What would change if you decentered your career from your identity?
A new year is upon us! I plan to welcome 2025 by focusing on a particular career contemplation, and I have some compelling reasons for you to meditate on this as well. Decentering your work from your identity might seem a counterintuitive topic for a podcast about career development, but it’s a significant philosophy these days. Given the amount of burnout and disillusionment, that’s not too surprising.
Our work should be important and provide us with purpose. The problem arises when it becomes the only important and purposeful part of who we are. The practice of decentering career from identity offers a middle ground, one that respects the significance of work in our lives but doesn’t require us to give every part of our identity to our job.
Here are three things to think, journal, and talk about to help you start questioning whether work plays an outsized role in who you are and want to be.
Consider your communities
I’ve been practicing putting community first for the past couple of years. I spoke with author Julia Hotz about this in Episode 456, How Connection Can Cure What Ails Us. The communities and social networks we engage with outside of work shape who we are and who we become in big ways. It’s about both surrounding yourself with people in solidarity with what you’re presently experiencing and finding communities of growth that will push you and inspire you to participate in change.
How can you be more deliberate about the communities you’re currently involved with and the communities you’d like to be a part of in 2025?
Get active with your rest and renewal
We know we need to step away from work. But how often does that rest take the form of flipping through Netflix or endlessly scrolling on Instagram? These passive renewal activities frequently leave us feeling worse. And look at it this way: they’re actually consumer activities, putting dollars in someone else’s pockets every time we click or pause to watch.
How can you prioritize some more nourishing active renewal this year? “Active” doesn’t mean you must work up a sweat, though hiking and yoga are wonderful examples. Active renewal is anything that asks your mind to be an active participant—this includes listening to or playing music, reading, or even playing video games. In 2025, get mindful about making intentional time for rest that’s actually restful.
Investigate your working identity
The final reflective exercise I’d like you to explore is your true working identity. Many of us, millennials and Gen X in particular, grew up believing that we had to be passionate about the work that delivered our paycheck—but that’s so much unfair pressure to put on your job. Instead of an all-or-nothing approach, get familiar with which parts of your work give you a sense of meaning and which parts just provide you with money. There is no shame in doing pieces of your job just because they enable you to support yourself and your family.
Whether you’ve never felt intense purpose and passion about your career or it’s faded over time, I’m just asking that you be intentional about positioning your career in your life. Be realistic and mindful about how central work really is. You can love it, like it, or feel apathetic about it—just make sure you know which one it is. Then, remember there’s nothing to feel guilty about. You’re not saying you don’t want to work; you just don’t want it to be the central theme of your identity anymore.
Which of these thought experiments resonate most with you? How does it feel to think about decentering your work from your life? Join us in the Courage Community on Facebook or our group on LinkedIn to share what comes up when you sit with these questions.
Related Links From Today’s Episode:
Episode 456, How Connection Can Cure What Ails Us
Mondo, “Tips To Keep Your Job From Becoming Your Identity”
“Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career,” by Herminia Ibarras
The Ezra Klein Show, “Tired? Distracted? Burned Out? Listen to This” with Gloria Mark
“Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity” by Gloria Mark
LEVEL UP: a Leadership Accelerator for Women on the Rise
Find more inspiration to LEVEL UP your life and your career:
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[INTRO MUSIC IN]
EMILIE: Hey, and welcome to the Bossed Up podcast, episode 487. I'm your host, Emilie Aries, the Founder and CEO of Bossed Up and first of all, Happy New Year. We are on the precipice of a whole new era.
[INTRO MUSIC ENDS]
And in that spirit, I'm going to whisper a little bit today because it's very late as I record this right now, but I want to share a few thoughts on how we can ease into the new year with a new philosophy. Something that has been bubbling up on this podcast for a year now and is very much a trend in the career development space. And that is this idea of de-centering our careers from our identity.
So if you have, over the past decade or so, like myself, kind of built your identity around your work, something I think a lot of Millennials and Gen Xers in particular have leaned into over the past 15 plus years now, I want to offer us a different way forward that respects the place that work occupies in our lives without losing our entire identities to our careers. And so there's a couple of ways I want to think about this when it comes to positioning ourselves to make the most of 2025, to be really intentional about who we are, who we want to be, and how we want to spend our, one and precious life on this planet.
And the first way I want us to think about this is to think about the communities that we belong to. Community first, has been such a big part of my emerging philosophy on this in the past few years. In particular, I would highly recommend listening to episode 456, all about the Connection Cure, a book that came out last year by Julia Hotz, all about, like, the different social networks and community networks that we do or, or used to belong to and how much they shape who we are. So I want you to reflect first and foremost on what communities are you a part of and what communities do you want to become a part of? These can be online communities. These can be in-person communities. I think there are some major benefits to building community in-person whenever possible, but these ground us and help shape who we are. Like, who we surround ourselves with has a direct influence on who we are and who we become.
I'm in my parenting era, right? This is a big part of my identity these days. Surrounding myself with parents I respect and people who are experiencing similar challenges and opportunities and joys that I'm navigating right now, is a really inspiring and interesting part of my identity these days.
I'm also more civically engaged in where I live here in Denver, Colorado. I've really been intentional over the past two years about getting more involved, both locally and nationally, politically. And I think there's something about that work that is definitely extracurricular outside of my working identity, outside of my career, but is a huge part of my purpose, and it fuels what I care most about and the kind of changes that I want to be a part of.
So in the year ahead, I really want you to reflect on what communities you want to become active in. How can we be more deliberate in putting ourselves in communities of growth? Because who we surround ourselves with will shape who we are and who we become. And after years of isolation post-2020, and with just social isolation and social infrastructures crumbling, and social isolation on the rise, this is such an intentional step, I think would benefit us all from a wellbeing standpoint, that I really want to make that central to how we think about setting ourselves up for success in 2025.
If you are also feeling a little burnt out a little bit, you know, like you've poured your entire self into your career and you don't really know who you are outside of that, one of the best ways to think about expanding your identity beyond work is to think about rest and renewal in a really deliberate way. So often, rest and renewal kind of defaults to really passive forms of rest. I'm guilty of endlessly scrolling Instagram reels on the couch after a long day, or just turning on the TV and seeing what's on Netflix. Like, those are very common consumer behaviors that actually drive somebody else's profits, right? Whenever I'm scrolling on social media, I think I'm giving myself a little treat, but I'm really lining the pockets of Mark Zuckerberg in the process, right? Like, there is a paid incentive in me perceiving rest through a consumer lens. Right? That actually is a business incentive.
And there's lots of companies out there competing for my attention in that way, in the attention economy, which is a really fascinating conversation that was inspired by an Ezra Klein podcast that came out originally on January 5, 2024, so about a year ago now, featuring Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California and the author of the book Attention Span, who really dives into the attention economy and how radical it is to renew your own attention, to basically give your brain a break in a way that's really nourishing to our neural networks and our ability to be less burnt out and to actually feel renewed and refreshed and ready and present, quite frankly, in our lives and Living our lives in a real way.And what she's talking about is active renewal. Some of the active forms of renewal that I find most uplifting include, playing music, my husband and I play our garage band, basically I play the drums, I sing. I've done that more often in the past than now, since I'm in my child rearing era. But music, whether I'm at a concert in a live music venue, or making music in formal ways or informal ways, that's a really active form of renewal. It's fundamentally different than what I do for work. And it's engaging and it's forces mindful presence.
Similarly, things like biking, yoga, hiking, movement that requires me to be physically and mentally present where I am is such an active form of renewal for me. So I want you to think about how can we be more intentional in the year ahead about making time for active renewal to basically rinse our brains of the passive forms of consumer economy renewal that feels like rest, but isn't actually that restful. Maybe you enjoy reading, maybe you enjoy playing video games, right? That's an active form of renewal. I think it's healthy to give our brains a little bit of a break from screens on occasion, but, you know, whatever floats your boat, needlepoint, making cakes, baking, whatever it might be, you know, how can you be more intentional about making time in your life for the things that leave you feeling renewed? That is the second reflection question I would encourage you to journal on, as we start this brand new year ahead.
And then finally, let's talk about our working identities. I've long admired scholar Herminia Ibarra, who talks about working identity a lot and has written books on it since, I think, the 90s. And really, who you are at work is a big part of who you are for a lot of us. And there's nothing wrong with that. But I do want to make it okay for us to acknowledge what parts of work give me a sense of meaning and what parts of work just give me money, and what does that money enable me to do, right? Like, there's no shame in acknowledging like, there are parts of my life, there are parts of my working life that lift me up, that fill my cup, that fuel my purpose, that feel like I'm stretching myself and learning and growing and pushing myself as a professional. And there are also parts of my career that really just like, enable me to live the life that I want to live by providing for myself and my family. If that applies to you. There are different phases of life in which our career will hold varying degrees of meaning and varying degrees of significance in terms of who we are. And that's okay.
I think so many of us, as millennials, were raised in that hustle culture where your passion had to be what delivered a paycheck, and it had to be something, like, central to who you are. And that's just a lot of pressure. That's just a really high bar to achieve. And if you're not feeling that way about your career or if it's changed over time, I just want us to be intentional about positioning our career in our lives, mindfully. And it's ironic for me to say this on a podcast all about career development and leadership development, because I do love my work, no doubt about it, but it's just not the center of my universe in the way that it once was. And I think that's okay.
I think that can trigger feelings of guilt for some of us. I was just talking with a friend who's like, that doesn't mean I don't want to work, you know? Who got kind of defensive when we were talking about this. I'm like, no, no, no, that's not what we're saying, right? We're not saying that we don't want to work or we don't like work. We're just saying that it's okay to acknowledge that, like, work is not the center of our universe as it maybe once was, and that's okay.
So as we step into a new chapter, a new year together, if de-centering your identity, your working identity, your career from who you are is appealing to you, I would spend some time journaling and reflecting on these three questions, what communities am I a part of or do I aspire to become a part of in the year ahead? How can I be intentional about rest and renewal, specifically active forms of rest and renewal, and again, be intentional about scheduling that and making time for that and being intentional about that in terms of that contributing to who I am, and how I spend my time? And finally, what parts of my career fuel my sense of purpose, and what simply yields my paycheck that enables me to live the life that I want to live? And how can I be really clear with myself about my own expectations around that? I think if we give, ourselves the space to be really thoughtful on these questions, we can move into 2025 with a little bit of grace for ourselves and clarity on what matters most in our lives.
Thank you so much for spending some of your most precious time with me here tonight, having this conversation. It's late, and I don't know. I think there's something really special about being on the threshold of a new day, of a new era. And I'm so honored that we've been able to have the relationship here on this podcast that we have.
So, as always, I want to hear from you on this. Like, what stood out to you? How does de-centering your career from your life land with you? Please, let's keep the conversation going as always, in the Bossed Up Courage Community on Facebook and in the Bossed Up Group on LinkedIn.
[OUTRO MUSIC IN]
I look forward to hearing from you there. And in the meantime, Happy New Year. Let's keep bossin’ in pursuit of our purpose, whether that comes in the form of our professional life or our personal life, and let's lift as we climb.
[OUTRO MUSIC ENDS]
