It's 2014. I'm eighteen months into a three-year earn-out...
...and I've finally decided to leave.
Two years earlier, in 2012, I'd sold the e-learning business I co-founded and co-owned. On paper, it was the moment I'd worked towards for years, but it wasn't supposed to end that way. I had thought I'd be in it till the very end of the earn-out.
In practice, I spent most of that earn-out period feeling increasingly sick with worry and guilt. I wrestled with a conflict between the part of me that knew I was done and the part of me that felt duty-bound to my partner and team to fulfil my three-year commitment.
Then one morning in February I woke up and the noise had gone. I knew, in my body before my head, that the money wasn't worth it.
When I walked away, the job wasn't the only thing that went.
I lost the answer to a question I hadn't realised I'd been leaning on for years.
'So, what do you do?'
I knew the answer. I'd already planned to set up as a psychotherapist by then. But the question made me realise how attached I was to the status and prestige of being a founder and entrepreneur. The new direction into therapy felt almost lame in comparison.
I think a lot of men at our stage know a version of this, whether they've left yet or not.
The title does far more than describe your job. It answers questions for you before anyone asks them. Who you are, and where you fit.
When it goes, those questions are suddenly much more challenging to answer.
That can feel terrifying.
There's a study from 1987 that would have helped me see it differently, if I'd known about it then.
The psychologist Patricia Linville looked at how many distinct sides people saw in themselves: father, husband, runner, golfer, whatever they were beyond work. Then she followed them through stressful times.
The people with more separate sides to them coped better. They were less prone to depression and illness after a hard knock, because when one side took the hit, the others held.
When a man's whole sense of himself sits in one title, losing it can feel like losing everything.
I didn't know any of this in 2014. Not intellectually, at least.
But I had been following a deep calling to retrain, even while I was still in the business. So part of me had started to recognise that there was more to me than the title and roles I occupied. It all made sense in retrospect. At the time, though, it was confusing and stressful to think about shedding one identity to replace it with another.
So here's a question I'd love you to answer this week.
If someone asked you tomorrow 'so, what do you do?', and you weren't allowed to mention your job, what would you say?
Hit reply and tell me. It'll stay strictly between you and me.
Matt
Sources: Linville, 'Self-complexity as a cognitive buffer against stress-related illness and depression', Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1987)