If You Want To Trust Yourself Again, Look At Your Energy
What you surround yourself with impacts how you feel about yourself. This is my most personal post yet where I share what I have learned about energy, worth, significance and identity.
Last year, I left my job at Twitter (now called X) after more than 10 years, multiple roles, teams, offices, and memories. Half my career was spent there. And when I say it became part of my identity, I’m not exaggerating. After leaving, I felt totally unmoored, unsure of what to do next, but knowing that I wanted something different.
Looking back, I can see that I was grieving. An old way of being, an old version of me. Even though leaving felt like the right move, because I knew I wanted more, it still hurt. But in order to get to wherever it was I wanted to go, even though I didn’t exactly know where that was, I had to live inside the discomfort of uncertainty and ambiguity. Not my favourite place! Definitely out of my comfort zone.
There were things that helped. I went for walks with my dog Henry. I talked to kind, supportive friends and ex-colleagues who understood. I spent long stretches of time with my son that I would never have been able to do before. And in the good moments, I felt sure I was doing the right thing by not returning to the corporate world.
Life slowly became full and rich in ways that had nothing to do with work. My identity started to shift. It became wider, softer, more whole. I am softer now.
But one thing that did not help was logging into LinkedIn.
Seeing updates from people announcing new roles made me feel like a failure. Old connections sharing exciting news made me feel like I was falling behind. Like I’d stepped off the path and gotten stuck.
The comparison angst was intense.
What I now understand is that I was suffering a loss of significance. It can hit hard when we leave a role where our identity was deeply tied to what we did.
I remember thinking, I used to matter.
And you can hear the heartbreak in that. The belief that I mattered only because of what I did. And once that was gone, I wasn’t sure I mattered at all. Did I even exist anymore?
I knew this wasn’t healthy. And this was one of the reasons I chose to step into this identity unraveling very deliberately & intentionally. Because I didn’t want to keep believing my worth came only from work.
I don’t feel that way anymore. My identity has changed. My self-concept is rooted in so much more than what I do. I can visit Linkedin again! It doesn’t trigger me anymore and if anything, it’s given me a space to explore the new me. The me I am now.
I’m a mom. A wife. A daughter, sister, friend. Someone who’s playful & laughs easily. Who loves new ideas, games, books, gritty tv shows. I’ve even developed a thing for flowers and gardening.
I define myself now by who and what I love. Not by what I do. Not by how I perform or what I achieve in order to be loved.
I’m sharing this because I really believe that when you’re in a time of transition, when things feel shaky and your identity is still forming, the energy you surround yourself with matters. It matters regardless, but so much more when you’re feeling wobbly and new.
And when I say energy, I don’t mean productivity. I don’t mean how much sleep you got or how many tasks you ticked off. I mean your psychological energy. Your relational energy. The quality of your presence.
We are shaped by what surrounds us.
And during a time of intense identity change, LinkedIn was too much for me. The comparison, the dissonance, the performance. It clashed with the inner work I was doing to figure out who I was without work.
This week’s episode of The 10-Minute Shift is about all the above. It’s about our energy, our presence and what it means in the context of self-belief.
Because if we want to feel confident, grounded, rooted in who we are, we have to be mindful, intentional about what surrounds us & what we allow in.
That’s where boundaries come in. I set one with myself - if I logged into LinkedIn and felt that sinking feeling in my stomach, that nagging doom-like feeling that I was falling behind, I logged out. I gave myself space.
And it passed. I got through it.
How?
Because my beliefs about myself changed. I no longer need my work to help me feel that sense of significance.
Work is still a joy for me. I love getting things done. I love building and creating, new ideas light me up. But I’m not defined by it anymore. I define myself in a different way now.
If this resonates, you can listen to the full 10 minute episode here.
