After Retirement, Who Are You When You’re No Longer Defined By What You Do?
Updated: 1 day ago
Why retiring from a successful career can be more challenging than we expect — even when we’re looking forward to it.
One of the first questions we usually ask someone we’ve just met is, “What do you do?”
For most of our adult lives, it’s an easy question to answer. I’m a lawyer. I’m a banker. I run a business. I’m a partner at a professional services firm.
It’s a convenient introduction. But it also tells people something about our status, expertise, place in the world and, perhaps, how we’d like to be seen.
So what happens when, after 30 or 40 years, that answer no longer applies?
A number of my clients have told me how anxious they become when someone they meet in a social situation asks them the question “What do you do?” This anxiety tends to be exacerbated when they find themselves in a room with a bunch of people who all appear to have incredibly busy lives.
Perhaps you’ve been looking forward to leaving your career behind? You’ve had enough of the pressure, long hours or endless demands on your time. Financially, you may be well prepared, and you’ve spent years imagining the freedom that comes with no longer having to work.
Yet when the moment arrives, something unexpected can happen.
You discover that you’ve left behind more than a job.
When work becomes part of who we are
Over a long career, our professional identity becomes woven into our sense of self. We develop expertise, earn recognition, build relationships and establish our place within an organisation or profession. Work can give us structure, purpose, responsibility and belonging.
We may not enjoy every aspect of our daily working lives. We might even spend years looking forward to leaving. But that doesn’t mean we won’t miss quite a lot of what it provides.
Consider someone who has spent 35 years as a senior lawyer. They may be delighted to escape demanding clients, billable hours and partnership responsibilities. But they might also miss being the person colleagues turn to for advice or knowing that their judgement carries weight.
Or the business owner who sells the company they’ve spent decades building. The financial reward may be considerable, but the transaction can also mean losing something deeply personal: the enterprise around which much of their life has revolved, the team of colleagues whose careers they have nurtured, the weekly hustle and bustle…
Work provides far more than an income. Often, it’s only when we leave that we fully appreciate what else it has been giving us.
And someone who leaves a successful career in their mid 50s probably doesn’t want to use the word ‘retirement’ with its negative connotations to define them. The phrase ‘semi-retirement’ can seem like they simply don’t know what they want to do next.
The difference between what you do and who you are
The difficulty arises when our professional identity becomes our primary way of defining ourselves.
If you have spent your working life being successful, influential and respected, what happens to your sense of worth when you are no longer occupying the position that provided those things?
Of course, the qualities that helped us build successful careers don’t disappear when we stop working.
The lawyer doesn’t lose their judgement. The business owner doesn’t suddenly become less entrepreneurial. The executive doesn’t lose their ability to lead, solve problems or understand people.
But the environment in which those qualities were recognised and valued may have disappeared.
There’s an important distinction between losing a role and losing the qualities that made us successful in that role.
The challenge is learning to recognise those qualities independently of the job title or organisation with which they’ve become associated.
And that can be surprisingly difficult.
Why we’re tempted to replace one title with another
One response to leaving a successful career is to look immediately for something resembling what we’ve just left.
A non-executive directorship. A consultancy. An advisory position. A portfolio of professional appointments.
There may be excellent reasons for pursuing these opportunities. They can provide intellectual stimulation, financial reward and the satisfaction of contributing experience and expertise.
But it’s worth asking ourselves:
Am I pursuing this because it’s something I genuinely want to do, or because it allows me to retain a familiar professional identity?
The two aren’t mutually exclusive. But they’re not necessarily the same thing.
After decades of achievement, it can be uncomfortable to find ourselves unsure how to describe ourselves or what we have to offer.
The temptation is to resolve that uncertainty quickly. Yet replacing one professional identity with another may mean overlooking opportunities to discover different and potentially more fulfilling ways of living.
There’s a lot of value in what is termed ‘liminality’ - the space between who you were and who you are becoming.
We don’t have to know who we’re going to become
Regular readers will know that I often reference Herminia Ibarra, Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School and author of Working Identity, who has spent many years researching how people navigate professional transitions.
One of her central insights challenges the conventional wisdom that we should first work out what we want to become and then develop a plan to get there.
Instead, she argues that we often discover new identities through action. By experimenting with activities, developing relationships and trying unfamiliar roles, we gradually learn what interests us, what we’re capable of and what we might want from the next stage of life.
In other words, we don’t necessarily have to know who we want to become before we start doing something different.
Rather than asking, “What am I going to do for the next 20 years?”, a more useful question might be, “What are some different versions of myself that I’d like to explore?”
Perhaps the senior executive discovers an enthusiasm for teaching or mentoring. The lawyer finds satisfaction working with a local charity. The entrepreneur discovers an interest in writing, studying or learning something entirely unrelated to business.
None of these possibilities requires abandoning a previous identity. They simply allow other aspects of the person to emerge.
Becoming more than our former careers
Leaving full-time employment can create an opportunity to develop a broader sense of who we are.
During demanding careers, we’ve often had limited time to explore interests, relationships and ambitions outside work. Some may have been put aside decades earlier.
This doesn’t mean everyone needs a dramatic reinvention, or that we should abandon paid work or professional ambition.
For many people, an enjoyable next chapter may involve continuing to use their experience, but on different terms. Perhaps working two days a week rather than five. Combining advisory work with volunteering. Mentoring younger people. Learning something new. Or simply making more time for family and friendships.
The important point is that our identity no longer needs to be defined by one dominant role.
We can be several things at once.
Four retirement questions worth exploring
If you’re approaching the end of a long career, or have recently left one, consider these questions:
What do I value most about my professional identity? Is it the intellectual challenge, recognition, relationships, responsibility or sense of achievement?
Which parts of that identity would I like to retain? Perhaps you want to continue contributing your expertise without the demands of your former position.
What other aspects of myself have I neglected? Are there interests, abilities or ambitions that have received too little attention?
What could I experiment with? What small steps might help you explore different roles, activities or ways of spending your time?
These aren’t necessarily questions we can answer in an afternoon. The answers may change as we gain new experiences and perspectives.
That’s part of the process.
The opportunity to become someone more
We tend to think of leaving a successful career in terms of what we’re giving up: a position, a profession, an organisation or a particular way of life.
But there’s another way of looking at it.
After decades in which much of our identity has been shaped by work, we have an opportunity to decide which parts we want to carry forward — and what else we’d like to make room for.
We don’t have to discard the person we’ve spent 40 years becoming. Nor do we need an immediate, clear definition of who we are now.
Perhaps the most interesting question isn’t simply what we’re going to do after we stop working.
It’s who else we might become.
At StayCurious Coaching, I work with professionals and business owners in their 50s and 60s who are thinking about what comes after a successful career. My approach combines reflection, curiosity and practical experimentation to help people create a purposeful, stimulating and realistic next chapter.
