Why The Career You Built May Not Actually Be Yours (Personal Development Wisdom Snippets) | #651

[Agi Keramidas]
Welcome to Personal Development Mastery Podcast and this is another snippet of wisdom, where I select my favorite, most insightful moments from previous episodes. Let's dive right in.

[Kate Kayaian]
Identity is such a perfect place to start with this conversation. In my experience, going through what I did to sort of leave classical music and figure these things out, there was a lot of resistance. People didn't want me to shift my identity, yet I felt this pull.

What I ended up figuring out, and I wrote a whole book about it, Beyond Potential, is a three-part process, where the first step is to reassess, the second step is to redefine, and the third step is to reignite. I think a lot of people skip this first step, which is where identity is based, and that is to reassess. Now, why was I a cellist?

This is my overall identity. Why was I a cellist? I was a cellist because when I was four and a half, I had a crush on a boy who was eight, who played the cello, and I knew that if we played different instruments, we would never be able to get married.

Right? This is my logic, and this is the reason I have this whole identity in my late 30s. We laugh, and it is kind of funny that a lot of these choices that we made are kind of arbitrary.

Maybe you became a dentist because you went to a career day at school, and your friend's dad was really cool, and he was a dentist.

[Agi Keramidas]
I actually became a dentist because my mom was a dentist, personally. That's my background. That was the reason, so it resonates.

[Kate Kayaian]
It resonates. What if your mom had been a teacher? Would you have been a teacher?

If we can reassess, where are we, and how did we get here? What are the stories we've been living according to? It kind of creates a little bit of distance.

It creates the circumstances around that identity, and then we can rewrite that. We can say, okay, well, if it's a little arbitrary that I became a cellist, then I can become something else. Other things are possible.

I think that's the first step, is to just create a little bit of distance, so it's not only ... It goes from, I am a cellist because that is just who I am. I was born to be a cellist.

It takes it from that to, no, I became a cellist because we happened to be family friends, and I had a crush on this boy, and he played the cello, and the decision was made. Then maybe I had some talent for it, and I had good training. Yes, yes, all of those things, but at the same time, it's arbitrary.

The first step is to create a little bit of distance between that identity. Then the second step, I think, is to redefine, to look at what else could be possible for you. I think it often seems impossible.

I'm like, well, no, I went to law school. I went through all of that work, all of that money, all of those studying hours, and now I'm a lawyer. I can't possibly do something else.

I work with somebody, Aggie, who's, as a client, I do a lot of one-on-one coaching to help people through these transition moments. He loves classical music, and he wants to be a classical musician. He just had it in his head that he couldn't.

It's looking at this, how do we redefine ourselves as a musician? What would that look like? What would that take?

As soon as he was able to redefine himself in that way, his next steps became very clear.

[Agi Keramidas]
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