“I Sense Something is Happening.”
Over the past few weeks, I have had a number of conversations that began with the comment, “I sense something is happening.”
There is a societal transition happening that is altering our perception of life.
This transition reminds me of that great turning point in the musical Les Miserables, where the criminal Jean Valjean must decide whether to continue to hide behind the mask of the citizen leader or face the reality that there is an innocent man who is being judged as Jean Valjean for the violation of parole. Here’s that moment of decision.
Javert, the policeman who spends his career tracking down Jean Valjean, sees him as a “criminal”. His crime? He stole bread to feed a child. This designation of “criminal” becomes the identity that society has branded Jean Valjean as. The label, even as he has led an exemplary life after his time in prison and now the defiance of the parole order, defines him and emprisons him with a judgment that he can never escape.
When we ask Who Am I?, we find ourselves trapped in a similar dilemma. Does the label of my job, of my nationality, or my gender, of my political affiliation, or any public opinion expressed on social media truly define Who Am I?
I say No. Emphatically No.
These designations are assigned by the social structure of society, intended to sequester us into ideological groups that define, limit, and control us as individuals. We are marginalized by these labels. They do not tell us what we are capable of or the talent that we have, or the purpose that we may have for our lives. They are simply ways to show others how we fit or do not fit within the structures of society and organizations.
When people say that they feel something changing, it is quite possibly the collapse of this culture of institutional identity as a basis for the ordering of society.
Who Are You?
I am convinced that we are overly influenced by social media affecting how we understand work, and the institutions of society.
This influence ultimately robs us of our agency as persons as we worry more about how to assimilated into the dominate consumer and ideological cultures presented through social media. Our social institutions weaken as the core values that distinguish their values to society are replaced by spectacles of simulated reality. Organizational programs of intervention and training may have a buffering effect on the most egregious aspects of this culture. However, they don’t address the fundamental problem that I see inhibiting our ability to define Who Am I?
A quarter century ago, when my leadership model, Circle of Impact was just forming in my mind, I saw three patterns of behavior in organizations that concerned me.
The lack of clarity about values and purpose in businesses - Ideas.
The lack of relationships of respect and trust in the work environment - Relationships.
The lack of awareness of how the structure of organizations impact people in the workplace - Structure.
A decade and a half later, I published my book, Circle of Impact: Taking Personal Initiative To Ignite Change describing these three patterns. The book had a poor showing on launch day. The experience of writing, publishing, and promoting the book over a three year period revealed a specific insight to me about this process.
Six months before publication, I began a new weblog called Leading for Impact. The intention was to present Ideas posted through the Structure of social media platforms to build an audience anticipating the release of the book. These steps did not translate into sales. An audience of Relationships never formed for two reasons.
Why Didn’t Our Approach Work?
First: If you listen to experts in the publishing industry, they will tell you that very few books are bestsellers on publication day. Yet, this is how the process of promotion is sold to us. The reality is very different and it requires the author to change the image of themselves as a future bestselling author to being an author who is building a community through the promotion of their book.
The Structure of social media promotion does not form a community or a network of Relationships. Social media reinforces messages presented through consumer marketing. Increasingly, as society has become increasingly heterogeneous and tribal, traditional mass consumer marketing has had to embrace social and political ideological messaging to capture the small segments of society.
If your message is a fresh and innovative, in many ways contrary to the conventional messaging that dominates contemporary culture, the Relationships dimension will build slowly over time.
Why as this?
The question that my team asked me as we prepared the book for publication was Who Is It For? Who is your marketing avatar? My team of traditional publishing wanted me to identify some role or title within a corporate structure. They failed to understand that I wasn’t writing for CEOs or HR. people. I told them: The book is for people who are in transition and businesses in transition that want to elevate the leadership capacities of their people.
In effect I was asking people to identify themselves in ways that are distinct from the traditional institutional forms of identity. In writing the book for people and organizations in transition, I am signalling to them that it is time to re-identify who they are. To identify yourself as in transition, whether personal or occupationally, is to begin to see that Who Am I? is a question separate from how I fit into the institutional structure of the organization where I work. I am instead a person unique, not in my consumer preferences, but rather in what I have to contribute to a company or community.
This is what I describe in the first chapter of Circle of Impact: Taking Personal Initiative To Ignite Change. I tell the story of William, who is going through a career transition. Here’s his story as presented in the book.
Who Am I Now?
William has worked for the same large corporation his whole career, first in sales and then for the past decade in management. The company is in the process of being acquired by a foreign company. William is pretty certain that his department and his job will be absorbed into the same office overseas. However, he isn’t in a position to move his family overseas at this point in his career. For William and his family, this is a transition point in their lives. There is a moment of decision pressing in on them that will determine the course of their lives for the next decade or more.
William realizes that at his age and level of compensation, it is not easy to transfer to a new department or another company. He correctly sees himself at a transition point in his career. As he reflects on his situation with his wife and children, they decide that it is time to see what other opportunities are available to him outside the company. Does he start over in a new industry? Does start his own business? His children will reach college age over the next few years, so financial considerations are important in this time of change.
I’ve seen many variations of this scenario over the years. I find that many people can tell you what they do and how well they do it, but they have a more difficult time saying what difference their work makes. Many people in William’s situation often just jump to looking for the next job. They assume that the primary question before them is finding employment. However, like William, the more pertinent question concerns what they bring to a job. This is the moment of transition that William is in. He is confronted with a level of change that is unprecedented in his life. Before this moment, every change was logical, predictable, and incremental. Now it feels like he is crossing a threshold into a new land with an unknown frontier.
This is the world of change that I believe we are experiencing. It is more than a change in the scenery of the office or moving laterally from one company to another, yet doing the same time at both. Rather, this is a challenge to the idea that I am just another name on an organizational chart.
Asking the question, Who Am I?, takes on a greater seriousness than any time in recent memory. Saying this is my job, my role, my title, or some other generic description is no longer sufficient. We need to think more deeply about who we are and why our lives matter. This is part of what people are saying when they speak of “I sense something is happening.”
Impact Is What Matters
I remember as a child sitting at the dinner table as my father who was in HR at a national firm, talking about his day and complained about the difficulties he had at work. As an impressionable child, hearing these stories influenced me not to go into business.
Ironically, my father and I would later laughed about how I had become a leadership consultant working to business leaders. When my father died at the age of 85 years, people shared with our family of my father’s impact on them and the community. It painted a picture of a man who saw his life, not as filling a slot on that organizational chart, but as person of impact who made a difference that mattered. These stories confirmed what I had learned over the previous four decades that led to the creation of the Circle of Impact model of leadership.
If you are at a transition point in your career or more broadly in your life, and you are asking questions like, Who Am I?, then it is important to understand what kind of question this actually is.
Asking Who Am I? addresses the three patterns of behavior described above. We can restate them in this way.
What do I believe about the value of my life? - Ideas
What relationships do I have where there is genuine respect, trust, and mutual accountability - Relationships
Where am I making a difference that matters? - Structure
I have found that the first two questions are more readily known to us. It is the third question that is more difficult. It is because it has had such a heavy influence on our identity.
What Do You Do?
How do you introduce yourself to others? On The Eddy Network Podcast, I ask people to introduce themselves by saying something like, “Who are you and what do you do?” It is clear to me that “being” - Who I am - and “doing” - What I do - are tied together. As some of my guests have said to me, they see this connection describing us as always “becoming”. But most of the organizations where people work do not allow them to become. Instead, the must “do” to “produce”.
If we define ourselves by what we produce, we are trapped in a consumer culture understanding of the identity that we possess. In this culture, labels matter. In the digital age, the ideological character of labels as defining who we are has eclipsed the actual possession of a particular consumer product. It is the meaning assigned to the product that leads to the personal identification of the product.
My sense is that when people say, “I sense something is happening.”, they sense that ideology and consumer preferences no longer have the power to adequately define our lives. So, we ask Who Am I?
When we speak of what we do, we need to take the next step and ask, Why Does What I Do Matter? This is a question of the impact that we are having.
Impact is a change that makes a difference that matters.
Think about this for a moment.
Think about what you do at work. What difference does it make?
I’m not asking you to compare yourself to some high standard that no can meet. Just in the ordinary work of each day, what difference are you making. If you have a good working relationship with your boss, ask their opinion. In fact, annual evaluations should include this kind of reflect about performance.
Once you have identified how you make a difference, think more deeply as to why it matters to you.
Here we are reflecting on the values that matter to us.
One of the reasons that I began The Eddy Network Podcast is because people matter to me. For some reason, I have always been able to see the potential in people. As a result, I believe that each of you reading have an unlimited potential for impact. All limitations are either natural or self-imposed.
I am also curious about people. I am especially curious about people who have had no notoriety or gained celebrity. Common, everyday folk who are doing interesting things that make a difference. The world is filled with these people. I’m less interested in people who are promoting their own self-importance. I am interest in people who are persons of impact and the impact they are having in their local community.
In order to understand our impact, we need to understand how it impacts others. As a result, our relationships with people matter in ways that often do not show up in the places where we work. The structure of organizations tend to be mechanical and difficult to identify how people make a difference that matters. For this reason, I see organizational structure as the chief obstacle to organizations and their people creating an environment where impact is the focal point for everyone.
Think about the people who are impacted by what you do? What difference do you make to them?
Do you know the difference you make? You should ask. Not to seek recognition, but rather, but asking, “How can WE expand this impact?”
Who Am I, Really?
Let’s make answering the question of Who Am I? as simple as we can.
We are NOT what we do, where we work, or the groups with whom we chose to affiliate.
We know who we are by the impact that we create that makes a difference that matters.
This is the choice we make. When our identity becomes focused on the impact that we wish to create, we have actually simplified our lives. We now know our purpose. We can identify how that purpose gets expressed through our mission for impact. And when asked, we can say, “I am making a difference that matters doing … .”
My identity is wrapped up in my purpose for seeing “people take personal initiative to create impact that makes a difference that matters in their local community.” The goal that fuels my constant creatively and willingness to change is “to see 1% of the world’s population take personal initiative to create impact that makes a difference that matters in their local community.”
We could see the goal as a chasing after numbers. But it is not. Rather, it is a chasing after impact. Because it is not about how many people know me, or following me, or have purchased my book, or read my substack, or watch The Eddy Network Podcast. Those numbers matter. but only as a means to the greater end of seeing leaders of impact fill the planet.
It is not just that we are known by the impact we achieve that makes a difference that matters.
We also know ourselves as we are known by others.
In doing so, we build communities or networks of relationships where together we make a difference that matters.
In that mix of response, we learn not only who are and who we are not, but also the life we want and what we doing want in our lives. This is difficult to truly know if our decision making in primarily influenced by the consumer choices presented to us through social media.
When I wrote the short book, May Your Not Be a Yes: A Guide To Making Better Decisions, I wanted to help people simplify their lives by being able to say No to things and situations based on affirming a Yes based on their values. It looks like this.
No, I will not act against my principles.
No, I will not act simply to go along with the crowd.
No, I will not act to simply make someone else feel better.
Yes, I will act upon the values that make sense for my life.
Yes, I will act according to my purpose to make a difference that matters.
Yes, I will act to bridge the social barriers that separate people into isolated tribal groups.
Being able to say No and Yes in ways that are true to who you. want to be, is how we learn to answer the question, Who Am I?
As we all go through the transitions we face, let these three questions based on the Circle of Impact so that you can say, this is Who I Am!
What are the values that are nonnegotiable that impact my life?
Who are the people that I trust? How can we strengthen our relationship of shared impact?
What is the impact that I seek to be my legacy? And what kind of setting do I need to fulfill this purpose for impact.
These are the kinds of questions we’ll talk about in during the The Eddy Network Podcast group the last Thursday of every month at 11:30 am EST-US/UTC-5. These conversations are open to subscribers to my Substack.
Interesting observations about how we define ourselves. This is a question that often comes up in my podcast. One guest, a former surgeon sidelined by cancer many years ago, still identifies as a surgeon. She asked me how I'd identify myself. My response was based on character qualities, (Kind, compassionate, curious) not external factors. I think as we go through life, developing our character is a better game plan than developing our titles.
I think it's interesting how the structures of social media define who we are in terms of who we have been, Our lives, lived with curiosity are a sculpture in progress, like Michaelangelo removing the marble that was not The David.