You are not your job (or your LinkedIn bio).
Repeat after me: I am not my job title.
One of the biggest things I’ve been thinking about lately - especially after the lovely, vulnerable replies to my first newsletter - is how easy it is to accidentally pin your entire identity to your job, business, or LinkedIn headline.
And honestly? It’s a scam. A capitalist fever dream. And also... very easy to fall into.
How do I know about this identity trap? I've lived it, babes.
After uni, my life plan was simple:
✅ Earn lots of money.
✅ Get a big shiny title.
✅ Buy things to prove that I was a successful human woman in business.
I landed a banking grad scheme straight out of uni, with a salary that made me feel smug and a deep desire to hit "manager" status ASAP.
At one point, I worked across three different roles at once, because overachieving seemed like a cute personality trait at the time - and when I asked for the promotion I’d very obviously earned, a senior manager said I couldn’t have it.
Because of Brexit, no doubt.
(Yes, apparently I personally destabilised the European economy.)
Anyway, I left and joined a tiny design agency as employee number three. And that’s when my identity properly got tangled up in my job:
The brand? Mine.
The culture? Mine.
The emotional wellbeing of an entire startup? You guessed it: mine.
I loved it.
It also broke me.
I remember telling my boss that my brain felt like it had been smashed into tiny pieces and scattered across 17 different projects - and that I didn’t have anything left for myself.
Spoiler: that was the beginning of a full-on burnout and my signed-off-work-for-exhaustion moment.
Cue therapy.
Cue the Big Realisation.
I’d built my entire sense of worth around my work.
The money, the title, the shiny LinkedIn updates... they were all covering a deep feeling of not being good enough.
Turns out, no job, no salary, and no amount of company merch can fill the gap where your self-worth should be.
Since then, I’ve rebuilt a lot.
When I started my business, it was different.
I’m proud of what we built. But it doesn’t define me anymore.
If it fails, it fails.
It’ll sting, sure. But it won’t destroy me.
Because there’s so much more to me than my job. And there’s so much more to you, too.
Here's what happens when you stop letting work define you:
You stop measuring your days by how "productive" you were.
You start noticing other parts of yourself - like creativity, curiosity, and joy - that got buried under the pressure to "achieve."
Failures hurt less. Wins feel lighter. Neither becomes your whole story.
You feel a bit more chaotic, maybe - but a lot more human.
You make decisions based on what feels good for you, not what looks good on LinkedIn.
You leave more room for weirdness, for hobbies that don't "scale," for relationships that aren’t "networking."
You realise you can walk away from jobs, clients, even businesses, and still be whole.
You stop needing constant external validation. (You might still want it because you’re human. But it’s no longer oxygen.)
You start trusting yourself more than the job title on your email signature.
I'm still learning (very imperfectly) how to separate who I am from what I do. And all I know for certain is that when I do, life opens up.
I stop measuring myself by how "busy" or "successful" I seem.
I find space for things that aren’t monetisable.
I stop chasing other people’s approval and start trusting what I actually want.
And I realise that work is part of my life, not the proof that I deserve one.
I have a challenge for you.
Write a love letter to yourself. I'm dead serious.
Not about your achievements, or your income, or your job title.
About you.
The messy, hilarious, brilliant, emotional bits of you that no job title could ever capture.
If we want to release ourselves from the capitalist identity trap of being defined by our jobs, we need to normalise recognising ourselves, showing ourselves love and celebrating what's incredible about us.
I did this last week when I was having a low moment - and honestly, it helped more than any productivity hack or goal-setting journal ever has.
Here's a sneak peek of mine:
Screenshot from my Notes app
Talk soon,
Nat x
