Working Identity Quotes

“The end of all our exploring,” as T. S. Eliot reminds us, “will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
― Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

“Social scientists have argued that a strategy of “small wins”—making quick, opportunistic, tangible gambits only modestly related to a desired outcome—is in many instances the most effective way of tackling big problems.2 Part of the reason small wins can produce much bigger results than a grand strategy is psychological: Defining a problem as “big and serious” can make us feel frustrated and helpless and therefore can elicit a less creative (or more habitual) response. We become paralyzed. We make the wrong move just to change. When we see change as requiring “big, bold strokes,” we amplify our fear of it; we overcome this fear by putting one foot in front of the other, in a series of safer steps.”
― Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

“Working identity is not just who we are. It is also who we are not. Being able to discard possibilities means we are making progress.”
― Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

“Gary’s seemingly random, circuitous method actually has an underlying logic. But this test-and-learn approach flies in the face of the more traditional method, the”
― Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

“I liked problem solving but found the work repetitive and the tools constraining. I longed to manage the problem, not the client. I wanted ownership of the problem.”
― Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

“popular books like David Epstein’s Range”
― Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity, Updated Edition, With a New Preface: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

“Self-creation is a lifelong journey. Only by our actions do we learn who we want to become, how best to travel, and what else will need to change to ease the way.”
― Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

“We learn by doing, and each new experience is part answer and part question.”
― Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

“Potential employers or coworkers come to know (and therefore, trust) us when they know our story and can accept it as legitimate. Sometimes it takes many rehearsals before it comes out just right. What happens in the retelling is not just a more polished story; we finally settle on a narrative that can inform the next step.”
― Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

“One of the central identity problems that has to be worked out during a career transition is deciding on the story that links the old and new self. Until that is solved, the external audience to whom we are selling our reinvention remains dubious, and we too feel unsettled and uncertain of our own identity.”
― Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

“Time-out periods—sometimes as short as Jane’s ten-hour drive, other times as long as Brenda’s multiyear moratorium—help people make changes by providing a space for reflective observation.18 Stepping back makes room for insights we have been incubating but cannot yet articulate. It helps us see the coexistence—and incompatibility—of old and new.”
― Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

“Consider how many times we have heard people reproach their organizations by saying, “There is no one there I want to be like.” The reinventing process corrects this deficiency, heightening our desire for role models and people we can relate to. These people and groups provide a “safe base” that enables us to take risks with our new selves and a professional community in which we can develop a new sense of belonging.”
― Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

“Most people who have made big career changes have heard loved ones tell them, “You’re out of your mind.” Sabotage is not their intention, but a shared history has entrenched certain expectations, and reinventing oneself can amount to breaking the implicit “contract.” People who have quit smoking, lost weight, or gotten divorced are familiar with the mixed reactions of friends, who see the change as loss.”
― Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

“What makes a contact useful for a job change, argued Granovetter, is neither the closeness of our relationship with them nor the power of his or her position. It is the likelihood that the person knows different people than we do and, therefore, bumps into different information. The acquaintances, neighbors, and coworkers who operate in the same spheres as we do can rarely tell us something we don’t already know because they hear about the same things we do. Of course, having an Ivy League, Oxbridge, or Grande École connection can dramatically improve one’s prospects for moving into certain closed circles. But even members of elite tribes need “weak ties” to connect to worlds outside their immediate experience. Yet most people, like Harris, wait until they have been stuck for quite some time before starting to look outside their core circle of friends and colleagues. Our close contacts don’t just blind us, they also bind us to our outdated identities. Reinventing involves trying on and testing a variety of possible selves. But our long-standing social networks may resist those identity experiments. Remember Gary McCarthy’s chagrin when he learned, three years out of college, that his family had already pegged him as a “finance person”? Without meaning to, friends and family pigeonhole us. Worse, they fear our changing.”
― Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

“Changing careers is not merely a matter of changing the work we do. It is as much about changing the relationships that matter in our professional lives. Shifting connections refers to the practice of finding people who can help us see and grow into our new selves, people we admire, would like to emulate, and with whom we want to spend time. All reinventions require social support. But as this chapter reveals, it is hard to get the support we really need from career counselors, outplacers, or headhunters, or even from old friends, family members, or trusted colleagues.”
― Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

“when we follow our passions, we also risk escalating our emotional commitment to a new course of action before we have evidence that it will be doable.”
― Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

“Small wins may be scattered, but what counts is that they move in the same general direction—away from the stifling situation we are trying to escape.4”
― Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

“Exploration is about formulating hypotheses or best guesses; confirmation is about rigorously testing preliminary conclusions. Confirmation turns best guesses into sure bets. As in scientific discovery, the less we know about a phenomenon, the more openended our questions. As relevant knowledge builds up, we become more precise about what we seek to learn, and we start to anticipate (more and more accurately) what we will find. Because hypothesis-testing experiments (for example, taking a new job on a provisional basis) are usually more costly than exploratory experiments (for example, working on a side project without leaving one’s job), we prefer to defer the former until we have solid data suggesting that we are going in the right direction. Variety for its own sake is not enough. In fact, a prolonged exploratory phase can be a defense mechanism against changing, and it can signal to others that we are not serious about making change. A true experimental method almost always leads to formulating new goals and new means to achieve them. As we learn from experience, we have to be willing to close avenues of exploration, to accept that what we thought we knew was wrong and that what we were hoping to find no longer suits”
― Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

“Natural experiments get the ball rolling. They give us a peek at possible directions. But they only take us so far. After a certain point, a hypothesis starts to materialize, and another kind of test is required. Exploratory experiments are designed to answer fairly open-ended questions: Would I enjoy doing X? Could I be good at doing Y? Would I be able to make a living doing Z? Once a possible self begins to take form, we need to take more active steps to test the possibility more rigorously. Otherwise, we stay in the realm of daydreams.”
― Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

“One of the reasons it is so hard to change careers—or why we change, only to end up in the same boat—is that we can so fully internalize our institutional identities, relying on them to convey our worth and accomplishments to the outside world. Even when we can honestly admit that the external trappings of success—titles, perks, and other markers of prestige—don’t matter much, we can, like Harris, hide from the need for change by telling ourselves how much the company needs us. Like Dan, who postponed vacations and overrode family obligations when the organization needed him, most working adults organize at least some portion of their working lives according to the principle that self-sacrifice is OK when it’s for the good of the institution. Since basic assumptions tend to exist in interlocking clusters, what may often appear to be a work-life balance problem, or an inability to extricate ourselves from unrewarding or overly political working relationships, is in fact our inability to separate our commitment to an organization from being the organization.”
― Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

“Becoming our own person, breaking free from our “ought selves”—the identity molded by important people in our lives—is at the heart of the transition process. So is ridding ourselves of an unhealthy overidentification with the organizations that employ us, a harder-to-recognize but equally problematic self-definition.”
― Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

“they derive much of their sense of identity from their title and employer and that such overidentification with any institution can lead to stunted growth in other arenas. Far into our careers, we can remain the victims of other people’s values and expectations.”
― Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

“Even though our basic assumptions often remain hidden from our conscious awareness, they nevertheless determine how we manage our careers. Too often we fail to question them, even if they are obsolete or wrong. Precisely because they are taken for granted, basic assumptions are very hard to change. When they remain implicit, we only make incremental change. We only move from one situation into another that is superficially different. The organization or even the industry and sector may change and the coworkers may be different, but in the end, we fall back into similar roles and relationships, reproducing the same work and life structure we had before. Why?6 Because our working identity has remained the same.”
― Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

“working identity involves revisiting the basic assumptions we use to evaluate possibilities. To illustrate what basic assumptions are, it is useful to think of our career choices as a pyramid with three levels (see figure 4-1).4 At the top of the pyramid lies what is most visible, to us and to the outside world: what job we hold in what setting. Dan, for example, was an executive in a high-tech company. One level below are the values and motivating factors that hold constant from job to job and company to company. These are what MIT career specialist Edgar Schein calls our “career anchors,” the competencies, preferences, and work-related values that we would be unwilling to give up if forced to make a choice.5 Dan’s experience has led him to value himself professionally as someone who excels at turnarounds—at making troubled companies healthy. He could perform this role on a smaller or larger scale (for example, big company or small start-up), in an advisory or a hands-on role, and as a manager or an owner, but the constant is that managerial challenge is what excites him. Dan’s turmoil over the offer of a “perfect job” that would have again robbed him of his family time, however, belies a conflict between his professional and personal values that is rooted at a deeper level. In his search, therefore, he has to plumb deeper: He must explore the final, bottom level of the pyramid to understand the basic assumptions—our mental maps about how the world works—that truly drive his behavior.”
― Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

“Dropping our long-held assumptions, however, is not a simple matter of letting go once and for all. We are usually dealing with a mixed bag of preferences, priorities, and habits, some that we should hold on to and others we should jettison.”
― Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

“McKenna uses this story of a drowning woman to illustrate how stubbornly we can hold ourselves back.”
― Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

“Elizabeth McKenna, who wrote about the life and career changes of women struggling to balance work and personal life, tells a parable about a woman swimming across a lake with a rock in her hand. As the woman neared the center of the lake, she started to sink from the weight of the stone. People watching from the shore urged her to drop the rock, but she kept swimming, sinking more and more. To the gathering crowd, the solution was obvious. Their “drop the rock” chorus grew louder and louder with her increasing difficulty staying afloat. But all their yelling did little good. As she sank, they heard her say, “I can’t. It’s mine.”3”
― Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

“If we interrupt the reinventing process prematurely, as Susan nearly did, we jeopardize our ability to fully internalize this new self-definition. Often it isn’t until we are fairly far along in the reinventing process that we realize we must also reassess the foundations of our working identity.”
― Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

“How do we create and test possible selves? We bring them to life by doing new things, making new connections, and retelling our stories. These reinvention practices ground us in direct experience, preventing the change process from remaining too abstract. New competencies and points of view take shape as we act and, as those around us react, help us narrow the gap between the imagined possible selves that exist only in our minds and the “real” alternatives that can be known only in the doing.”
― Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

“oscillating among the different possibilities allows us time to come to new and different ways of integrating who we were then with who we are now and who we are becoming. When this self-exploration and self-testing ends prematurely—either because we are not able to tolerate the contradictions or because we are unable to assimilate new information about ourselves—we risk either letting go of the past too rapidly or holding on to it too rigidly.”
― Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career