You are not Your Work
It is surprisingly easy to get lost in your work, especially when you care deeply about what you do and when your professional life has gradually become one of the main ways through which you understand yourself and present yourself to the world. It rarely happens all at once. It happens slowly, almost invisibly. You start with a role, then you take on responsibilities, then you develop expertise, people begin to rely on you, and eventually your professional identity becomes so familiar that you no longer notice the difference between what you do and who you are.
We live in a world where one of the first questions we often ask someone we have just met is, “What do you do?” I remember having a conversation with someone I had just met, and almost immediately after saying hello, the second question she asked me was exactly that: “What do you do?” And I found myself thinking that this was interesting, because that was not actually the question I had asked her. Yet somehow, it has become completely normal to introduce ourselves through our work. We say, I am a coach, I am a therapist, I am a consultant, I am a founder, I am a manager, I am an entrepreneur, as if the role itself could explain the person standing in front of us. But what if it doesn't?
I am Marius, and I specialize in Systemic Thinking and Organizational & Business Dynamics, and it took me around seven years to really understand something that today feels both simple and incredibly important: I am not my titles, I am not my roles, and I am not my work. Over the years I have had different roles, different responsibilities, different professional identities, different ambitions and different ideas about where I was going. Some roles were chosen consciously, some appeared because circumstances required them, some gave me a sense of achievement and some eventually stopped making sense. For a long time, however, I was looking at these roles as if they were pieces of my identity, when in reality they were simply positions I occupied at different moments in time.
And this is where things become particularly interesting when we start looking through a systemic lens, because work itself is a system. There are people, expectations, relationships, hierarchies, money, responsibilities, feedback loops, patterns, spoken and unspoken rules, and all of these elements constantly influence one another. When you spend enough time inside such a system, it becomes very easy to lose the ability to distinguish between yourself and the role you occupy within it. You wake up thinking about your clients, your business, your team, your next project or the problem you need to solve; you finish the day still carrying conversations in your head, thinking about what went wrong, what needs to happen tomorrow and what you should have done differently. Slowly, without necessarily realizing it, the system begins to occupy more and more of your internal space.
The interesting part is that when you are deeply inside a system, it can be very difficult to see the system itself. You see the difficult client, but perhaps not the relationship between you and that client. You see the conflict inside your team, but perhaps not the pattern that keeps creating the conflict. You see the pressure in your business, but perhaps not the feedback loops that are continuously reinforcing it. You see the problem that needs to be solved, but you may not see how your own role, expectations, beliefs and behavior are connected to what is happening around you. And sometimes, without noticing, you start carrying the system as part of your identity: “I have to solve this. I am responsible for this. This is my business. This is my team. This is who I am.”
But is it?
What happens if you remove the title for a moment? What happens if there is no company, no client, no team, no business problem and no professional responsibility attached to you? What remains when you are not required to perform a role for anyone else? Who are you outside your work? This question can feel surprisingly uncomfortable, especially for people who have invested years in building a career, a business or a professional reputation. We often believe that the answer should be easy, but perhaps the difficulty of answering it tells us something about how much of our identity has become attached to what we do.
There is nothing wrong with being proud of your work, building something meaningful or wanting to become exceptionally good at what you do. The problem begins when the role becomes so closely connected to your identity that any change in the role feels like a change in yourself. If the business fails, I have failed. If the client leaves, I am not good enough. If I lose the position, I don't know who I am anymore. If someone challenges my professional competence, it doesn't simply challenge something I know — it challenges something I believe I am. This is where the distinction between having a profession and becoming your profession becomes extremely important.
Systemic Thinking gives us an opportunity to step back and look at these relationships differently. Instead of immediately asking, “How do I fix this?”, we can begin asking, “What is actually happening here?”, “What are the relationships between the different elements?”, “What pattern keeps repeating?”, and perhaps even more importantly, “Where am I positioned within this system, and what happens when I change my position?” Sometimes clarity doesn't come from thinking harder about the problem; sometimes it comes from changing our relationship to the problem and creating enough distance to see something that was impossible to see from inside it.
Maybe you don't need to care less about your work. Maybe you don't need to abandon your ambitions, change your career or become detached from what you are building. Maybe you simply need to remember that you are a person before you are a role, and that your professional identity is something you have developed, not something that completely defines you. Your title can change. Your company can change. Your clients can change. Your responsibilities can change. Your career can change. And if all of those things can change, perhaps they were never the whole of who you are in the first place.
I have learned this slowly, through my own experience, and perhaps that is why I am so interested in exploring what happens when we stop looking only at the individual problem and start looking at the larger system around it. Sometimes the most valuable thing we can do is not find another strategy, another technique or another answer, but simply create enough space to see ourselves, our work and the systems we are part of from a different perspective.
I will be organizing a practical workshop in the near future where we can explore some of these ideas through systemic thinking and systemic mapping, using real situations rather than simply talking about theory. If you feel curious about exploring your own situation and seeing what might become visible from a systemic perspective, send me a message and I will be happy to share more details.
Because, sometimes, reading about it is not enough. 🙂
Sometimes you need to step into the system and see what is actually there.
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