Hey Reader,

There was a period in my career where I went from exceeding expectations to just meeting them. I got passed over for a couple of opportunities that I’d normally be a shoo-in for. Nobody said anything at the time. There wasn’t a grand intervention to get me back on track. But inside, it felt like I was going through a crisis. I was the person who delivered results. I was the leader people could count on. And soon I realized that I saw “meeting expectations” as an attack on my core identity.

I still had my role (and still do), but for a while it didn’t feel solid. It took a lot of talking and honest reflection to get to the root of why that was. What I eventually understood was that the discomfort wasn’t really about the performance dip. It was that for years, the work I had done became my way of proving that I mattered.

What I’ve noticed since, in conversations with leaders across a lot of different industries, is that this pattern is more common than anyone tends to admit. And in the past few years, it’s only gotten more prevalent.

The economic and political landscapes are changing every day. Industries that felt stable are being reorganized. The playbook a lot of us built our careers on is starting to feel less reliable. All these external shifts shake our confidence, and that leads to the elephant in the room: Artificial Intelligence. In the space of a couple of years we’ve gone from wondering how it might affect entry-level jobs, to watching it move into the kind of thinking that used to feel exclusively human. Strategic judgment. Creative problem solving. The work that senior leaders built their entire sense of self around.

With so much change everywhere, the right thing to do feels like doubling down, working harder, and proving how valuable we are. For a lot of us, that instinct has a long history of working. Earlier in our careers, pouring everything into the work, even at the expense of other things, brought rewards. A new title. Recognition. A sense of stability. Over time, that cycle taught us something:

If I give things my all, I’ll be okay.

Don’t get me wrong, there are certain situations where pushing harder is what’s right for us. The problem is when that becomes the only way we know how to work. When every challenge becomes a reason to prove ourselves again, the work stops being something we do and starts being something we need. So when the role feels threatened, whether by a performance dip, a restructure, or a technology that can now do parts of it faster and cheaper, it doesn’t just feel like a professional problem. It feels personal.

This identity trap doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s built from ideas about what makes us valuable, and what we need to achieve to feel like we’re enough: The first gold star in kindergarten, what our parents celebrated, the work environments we’re a part of. We absorbed those ideas until they felt like our own.

What’s worth remembering is that AI can automate a task. It can replicate a process. But it can’t replicate your judgment, your particular way of reading a room, the specific kind of impact you want to have. That’s yours regardless of what the tools around you are doing. And being clear on that means knowing who you really are, separate from the title and what you’ve been rewarded for.

A useful place to start is to ask yourself: where do you feel most lit up in your work? Not most effective. Not most praised. Most like yourself. I’ve found that question tends to point at something the metrics never captured. And whatever that thing is, it’s a lot harder to automate than the rest.

This pattern is one of the things I explore in my keynote, Being Human Again. It’s built on the idea that most of us have spent years optimizing so much of our lives, our work, our rest, our relationships, that we’ve slowly lost touch with who we are at our core.

When did you last feel most like yourself in your work, and what was actually happening in that moment? Hit reply and let me know. I read every message.