Our Identities, These Velcros

"And what do you do for a living?"

It is probably one of the first questions we ask when we meet someone.

We answer with a profession, a role, a project, sometimes a list of achievements.

Entrepreneur. Executive. Artist. Investor. Teacher. Consultant. Mother. Retiree.

In a few words, we become legible.

Others can place us, classify us, attribute skills to us, imagine what we might bring them.

It's practical. It makes exchanges and life in society easier.

But it doesn't tell the whole story of a human being.

I remember project presentations I attended when I worked in investment.

The entrepreneurs presented their markets, their figures, their strategy, their ambitions.

And I, behind their presentations, often found myself looking for something else.

Who is this person?

What drives them, beyond their project?

What would I discover about them if we had nothing to build together?

I was looking, out of simple curiosity about human beings, for the person behind the pitch.

Our Identities, These Velcros

Over the course of a life, we accumulate identities.

Some are assigned to us. Others we choose. Others settle in gradually, almost without our noticing.

I like to imagine them as Velcro strips that stick to us.

A role, a profession, a skill, a reputation, a social status.

They allow us to be recognised. They give us a place. Sometimes they even give us a certain security.

I myself carried several of these identities for a long time, and with pleasure.

Finance, entrepreneurship, running a company, supporting projects, boards of directors…

These experiences enriched me. They allowed me to develop skills, to earn a living, to achieve things I cared about.

But they also ended up forming a kind of professional identity card.

And that card kept circulating, even when my desires had changed.

People came looking for me for what I already knew how to do.

I was offered a role, a responsibility, a place in a project.

A chair, so to speak, among chairs already set around the table.

All I had to do was sit down.

But what if I no longer wanted that chair?

What if I wanted to take part differently? Or simply to meet the people around the table, without yet knowing why?

Knowing how to do something does not oblige us to keep doing it, nor to carry all our lives a role in which we were once recognised.

Value and Usefulness

In the business world, one expression comes up often: bringing value.

What added value do you bring? What problem do you solve? How does that translate into revenue?

These questions are perfectly legitimate when building an economic model.

But something troubles me when this logic spills over into how we see ourselves.

By dint of asking what we bring, don't we end up confusing our value with our usefulness?

Our experience can then become an asset, our network a capital, our encounters opportunities. And our uniqueness itself, a value proposition.

For a long time I tied my own value to my ability to take on responsibility.

Organising, anticipating, deciding, solving, moving things forward, channelling energies.

That ability has been precious to me.

But I realised it had also become a way of justifying my place.

If I took on responsibilities, I brought something. If I brought something, I was useful. And if I was useful, I had a legitimate reason to be there.

There was even an expectation of recognition: by taking things on, I hoped others would see what I was doing for them.

This mechanism could be gratifying. It could also become exhausting.

Because taking on responsibilities sometimes ends up meaning feeling responsible for everything that might happen. Results, decisions, mistakes, other people's reactions.

To the point of monitoring one's own words, initiatives and impulses, to anticipate the consequences they might trigger.

Being responsible for what we do does not mean being responsible for everything it provokes in others.

It took me time to understand this distinction other than intellectually. And even longer to begin to live it.

What if, by dint of inhabiting the roles we are offered, we ended up forgetting all the other ways of being in the world?