Getting Through An Identity Crisis In My Business

I’ve been having an identity crisis in my business. I can’t pinpoint precisely when it started, but for about the last six months something’s felt…off. Like I wasn’t doing what was right, like I was building something that worked for everyone but me. I have felt for a while that I haven’t been doing what I should be doing, but couldn’t put my finger on what that was exactly. This is perhaps obvious in hindsight, that the proliferation of offerings and courses I’ve released over the last few months was me trying to find my way.

Over the weekend, however, I’ve had some breakthroughs. The realisation that I have, in fact, been having this identity crisis in the first place. Identifying that I felt out of alignment, but wasn’t sure with what. But also the start of a hint of how I might be able to tackle this big ‘thing’…

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Jess and I went to see Dolly Alderton on her book tour, and during the Q&A section Dolly was asked ‘what drives you?’. She was able to quickly and easily reel off three things: telling stories, making connections and making people laugh. It struck me, and sent me reeling, that I couldn’t answer that question – not honestly at least. I could talk about the value I wanted to have for others, but not what was in it for me. What I, as a human, got out of my work and life.

When I first started this business, around 18 months ago, what I wanted out of it was just to survive. I wanted to be able to justify leaving my job, I wanted to make enough money to survive, and then enough to make it worthwhile. What drove me to get up in the morning was just to make money and make it work. But as the business has grown and developed, my driver hasn’t. I haven’t stopped to think ‘right, now you’re more secure and are making it work, what’s in it for you now?’. No wonder I’ve got sucked into a routine of doing more, more, more when I still have this outdated personal driver.

Finding a personal why

I talk about finding your why a lot, and it slowly dawned on me that actually we need to two why’s: a business why and a personal why. (I’ve actually spoken to someone on my group coaching programme about this exact thing, but of course it didn’t occur to me to apply it to myself!). The business why is your customer-facing purpose, how you want to serve the world, where you communicate from; the personal why is internal, dictating what you want to get out of work and life (and, big news, it’s ok to want to get something out of it too).

It’s a funny thing, to consciously shift your identity as a business owner. As someone who also suffers from nerve-related back pain, I’ve found it makes a good analogy. With a bad back you know if you move in a certain way the pain is a white hot hole that you try to avoid it at all costs. So you contort your body and roll yourself around the pain; you feel a duller version and see hints of the white-hot version out of the corner of your eye but don’t dare to confront it.

With shifting your identity, you have to look it in the eye. You have to stop flitting around the edges of it and confront the white hot hole and the fears within it. I looked at who I was jealous of, and why. What was it about strangers and friends that I resented, what was that envy telling me about what I really wanted? Jess challenged me to think about when I’d been happiest this year (which was surprisingly challenging), and how could I do more of that stuff? I asked myself the questions I ask clients – what do you want to be known for, what do you want your days to look like?

So what is my personal why now? Taking Dolly Alderton’s lead, I’ve narrowed it down to three things:

SHARING IDEAS

This was the clearest driver, the one that arrived most fully formed when I started thinking about this. It’s not a new thought; I’ve been dancing around it for a few months because it’s very much something I’m envious of in others. When I think about what I love about my work, what I’ve found most rewarding, and what triggers me most in others, it’s this. I want to have ideas, I want to think and investigate concepts and mindsets and I want to share those thoughts with the world. If I were to define myself, it wouldn’t be as a coach or a marketer, it would be as a thinker.

VARIETY OF WORK

If I look back in hindsight about when I felt most happy in my work this year, it was when I had the most variety in what I do. This is also something I’m envious in my friends. Mundanity was one of the things that I actively wanted to get away from by working for myself, but seem to have backed myself into a different type. Having manageable variety is something I want to get back to.

CREATING SPACE FOR LIFE

Space is a word that’s come up time and again for me over the last couple of months; I’ve been craving moments of peace and reflection to do much-needed thinking. I need to clear out the responsibility and guilt I hold every moment when I’m not thinking about my clients and find my own calmness and clarity. This personal why is a step towards thinking about my life more generally – I have, since childhood, defined myself by work or academic success and have never really known what I like to do (again, something I’ve not yet looked fully in the eye). But I need space in order to work on this.

Your personal why and your how

People who have worked with me will know that I’m a big proponent of the Simon Sinek model of the Golden Circle, that states that businesses should work and communicate outwards from the why, through the how to the what, rather than the other way round. I have started to believe that the ‘how’ of a business is driven by the personal why.

When my personal why was ‘just make this thing work!’, my how was coaching and teaching as they were the easiest, most visible ways to make things work. But now that I’m clear that sharing ideas, variety and creating space is important to me, that shifts the how somewhat. While coaching and teaching is still important in order to have variety, space and sharing is going to be found in content creation and more passive offerings.

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How does this change things going forward? I’m excited to work with every single one of my one-to-one clients that are booked in between now and April; I believe in you and can’t wait to start sharing ideas and making things happen. I am also excited, however, to slowly reduce the number of one-to-one projects I take on to make room for a new variety of offerings – courses, workbooks, talks, things I haven’t even thought of yet! I’m excited to create more content through my podcasts, to introduce more ideas and variety here on the blog, to do more sponsored content and write for other publications.

There are still things I’m figuring out, timelines to manage and practical steps to take. But I feel suddenly freer, lighter, more directional. I hadn’t realised just how heavy the identity crisis had been weighing on me, but now I’ve looked it in the eye I feel a solution is in sight and am so excited to shift over to the right tracks.