Position Power

"So, what do you do?"

It is one of the first questions we ask when we meet someone new. And for most of us, the answer comes automatically. A job title. A company name. A sector. Clean, efficient, reassuring.

But what happens when that answer is no longer available?

Whether you have been made redundant, are on extended sick leave, on maternity leave, or simply between roles, many people find themselves unexpectedly tongue-tied in the face of that question. Not because they lack substance. But because for years, possibly decades, their professional title has been doing a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to identity.

This is what I call position power. The way our sense of self becomes quietly entrenched in what we do for a living, to the point where we can barely articulate who we are without it.

It happens more than we admit

I see this regularly in my work as an executive coach. Highly accomplished professionals, people who have led teams, driven strategy, built organisations, suddenly find themselves stalled by a question that would once have felt effortless. The job is gone, or paused, and with it, a version of themselves they did not realise they were quite so attached to.

It is not vanity. It is not weakness. It is something much more human than that.

For most of us, work is not just what we do. It structures our time, shapes our relationships, signals our place in the world, and gives us a ready-made shorthand for who we are. When that shorthand disappears, even temporarily, the gap it leaves can feel disorienting in ways that catch people completely off guard.

A client of mine, a senior leader with 25 years at the same organisation, described her first few weeks after redundancy like this: she could not finish the sentence "I used to be..." without feeling a wave of grief she had not anticipated. She had expected to feel relieved. She had not expected to feel lost.

The identity you built before the title

Here is what I want to offer, not as a neat fix, but as a reframe worth sitting with.

Your title was never the whole of you. It was a container, and a useful one. But the skills, the judgment, the values, the way you think through problems and bring people with you: those were yours long before any organisation put a name to them. And they remain yours now.

The discomfort of being between roles is real. But it is also an invitation, often an unwelcome one, to reconnect with the person underneath the position. Many of the people I have worked with have emerged from that process with a clearer sense of what they actually want next, rather than simply defaulting to whatever comes closest to what they had before.

That is not a small thing.

If you recognise this

If you are currently navigating a period without a title to reach for, be patient with yourself. The discomfort is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is a sign that something mattered. And that is worth acknowledging before you rush to replace it.

A question to leave you with

If someone asked you today, not what you do, but who you are, what would you say?

That answer is worth knowing. It is also, in my experience, a better foundation for what comes next than any title ever was.