Rethink Your Career by Joanna Maxwell

Author:Joanna Maxwell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2017-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

Identity

Identity is another of the five functions of work, and as we live for longer, it becomes more important than ever to be able to play with our sense of identity, our sense of who we are in our private and public worlds. There are threads of identity that stay with us forever, no matter how life changes. These give us our sense of ‘I’ and allow us to find connection between all the parts of our lives day to day, as well as over time. However, we also need to be able to reshape parts of our identity, explore new sides of ourselves and become more flexible if we’re going to navigate this changing world. We need to take charge of ourselves, develop a sense of being in charge, so as to make the most of new and different opportunities.

In The 100-Year Life,3 Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott stress that as our lives become longer, we need to be able to experiment with ourselves, to create a multi-stage life that works for us. As traditional age and stage-of-life models break down, we need to be able to make our own choices in a world with many more possible futures – and possible future identities. It can have remarkable benefits and it doesn’t have to be an enormous challenge: a simple change of perspective can alter everything, as I discovered on a research trip to the United States in 2014.

I met with a New York clergyman, who ran a soup kitchen for homeless people. It was a pretty standard set-up – they came in every day, stood in line and had their meal served to them by volunteers who also did the cooking and cleaning up. And the people would eat their meal and they would go.

This clergyman became interested in ‘asset-based community development’, an approach where you look at what a person can offer, irrespective of their past work history or circumstances, so he sat down with each visitor and asked, ‘What are the gifts that you have?’ And in doing that he found some people who could cook, even if not professionally. And he found others who played a musical instrument, so he said to them, ‘Okay, you’re now the band. So we’ll get you instruments, you’re gonna play music during lunch when everybody else is coming in’, which they did.

Then there were people who used to be on the receiving end of the line who were now cooking or serving the visitors. After a while he found they didn’t need the volunteers to do that alone, they had these people who had taken over their own process. As he said to me, ‘And so you could give people names like, you know, not “John the homeless guy who came to the soup kitchen every day” but he was “John the cook” now or “Joe the musician” or whatever. In this way, you can help remove people from “I was an office worker and now I am unemployed”. It gives people an identity and a sense of purpose.

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