The Question No One Asked

At my very first job interview after graduating from PA school, with my freshly minted medical license, the interviewer asked me where I’d be in five years. I was baffled, what did she mean? I would be a physician assistant practicing medicine, of course. That was the whole point of why I was there and what I had accomplished. I was certified! Of course the joke’s on me because I am not currently a practicing clinician, but that’s another lesson about life for another time. 

I think a much more interesting, and challenging, question would have been: WHO will you be in five years? Ten years? Thirty?

And that’s because while we talk about career transitions and promotions and development, identity transitions are the hidden requirement that we don’t discuss explicitly.

These identity transitions are about the relationship between your sense of professional worth and the changing requirements of your role. What made you valuable changes, therefore how you understand yourself in relation to your work has to change. And that reorganization is uncomfortable, disorienting, and largely unacknowledged.

It’s this that I’m increasingly aware of and intrigued by, both in my own career and in watching others develop around me. I’ve found that even knowing you’re on the edge of that transition, fully and rationally seeing it, doesn’t always make it easier to take that step into it. 

Identity is complicated. 

It’s your sense of self and your sense of how others see you, or even need you. It’s your childhood, your education, your history, work politics, experience, personality, temperament, organizational structure, the list goes on. 

The awareness of these things doesn’t make the identity leap easier. Even having made the leap before doesn’t always make the next less daunting. But it does make the choice more and more conscious each time it arrives. At some point you just have to make the leap and step into the next version of yourself before you fully feel like it fits.

At worst you learn something about who you are and the world you’re moving through. At best you soar.