📋The Identity Loss
A founder I work with recently had to shut down her venture-backed company. She ran out of cash after two and a half years of non-stop work.
When we sat down for our first session after the wind-down, she was completely stuck. She could not bring herself to update her LinkedIn profile.
She dreaded the simple question, “What are you doing next?”
For thirty months, her calendar told her who she was.
Pitch decks, board meetings and hiring targets filled every hour.
When that stopped, the silence felt deafening. She had accidentally tied her entire self-worth to her company valuation. Without the founder title she felt completely empty.
I gave her a strange assignment. I challenged her to do absolutely nothing for two weeks. No networking, no introductory coffees and no brainstorming new ideas.
When we spend years running on pure adrenaline our brain gets addicted to the chaos. We are working on a business and we are running away from stillness.
During that quiet period, we looked at her past calendar. We mapped out the exact tasks that actually gave her energy and the ones that drained her.
We identified the specific types of people she enjoys working with and the environments that make her miserable.
Yesterday a local fund reached out to her. They wanted to hire her as an Entrepreneur in Residence to launch a new high-scale project. It came with a big title and immediate validation. A few months ago, she would have accepted it within five minutes just to feel important again.
This time she looked at her list of personal boundaries first. She realized the role would drain her and turned it down.
She is still figuring out her next move. But the process is different now. She is using her identity to choose her next company and not the other way round
The Drill: The Identity Audit
When we are transitioning out of a project or a company, our brain is probably still wired to our old job. We need to reset the system.
Take a piece of paper and write down the three biggest professional achievements you accomplished over the last two years.
Now cross them out completely. They do not exist anymore.
Answer these three questions as simply as possible:
Who are you when you are not being useful to the market?
What activities give you energy that cannot be measured on a spreadsheet?
If your next project never makes a single dollar, what parts of the daily work would still make it worth doing?
The goal here is not to find our next business plan. The goal is to realize that we are the person who creates the work and we are not the work itself.
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