The Career You're Really Building

It's not always the one you put on your LinkedIn

I was at a lunch with a group of friends recently. There was a new woman in the group, someone I had never met. I introduced myself and, as you do, I asked her what she did. She looked at me and almost imperceptibly, she hesitated before rattling off a rather impressive job title.

Most people probably wouldn’t have noticed it. The conversation carried on. Someone asked about the food. Someone else laughed about work. We chatted more and she told me what her work entailed, but I couldn’t stop thinking about that pause.

Maybe no-one else would have noticed that moment – but I did. As we chatted, something started nagging at me – that there might be two careers running side by side.

That hesitation, as it often is to me, is because there is the career you write on a LinkedIn summary and the career visible in what you say yes to, protect, avoid and quietly sacrifice for. These two careers are not always the same career. I don’t know if that was true for her. But I recognised the hesitation because I’d heard it in my own voice years earlier. That tiny pause stayed with me long after lunch had finished.

Funny how a tiny hesitation can make you look back over your own career.

I did the same thing. I drifted through 30 years in corporate, and my career was anything but a straight climb up the ladder. I muted myself; I tried to do what everyone told me would make me more visible and connected and ready for the next role.

Until one day I did exactly what this woman did – I introduced myself and just before I told someone my job title, I hesitated. For a moment, I felt like I couldn’t say my title out loud. For a moment, I didn’t feel like that title was truly mine. I kept up the conversation, but that moment bugged me. Was I embarrassed? Was I surprised? Why did I feel that way? The only thing I could point to was that I hesitated because that was when I realised that what I thought I had built and what I had actually built didn’t match.

I realised I’d been trading who I actually was – and the reason I went into this field in the first place – for what was expected of me to succeed. That’s when I knew I had to take a step back.

And that step back is both enlightening and frightening.

What would you notice if you stopped looking at your job title and started looking at the career you’ve been quietly building?