I came across this passage in a novel recently, and it stopped me mid-page:
“Working gives us all a sense of accomplishment. In a way it gives us self-worth and brings balance to our lives… Working is more than labor. It’s thought and effort, and reward when you’re paid… It’s self-reliance. Autonomy. It’s a boost to confidence. And sometimes pride.” — Lori Foster, The Guest Cottage
Self-worth. Autonomy. Pride. Confidence.
Those aren’t corporate words. They’re identity words. And reading them, I recognized something I hadn’t fully named before. For most of my adult life, I had been looking for all four of them in my work.
What I Watched #
I started working at fifteen. Growing up in Iowa in the 1970s, that wasn’t unusual. My first job was detasseling corn, riding a machine through the fields pulling tassels before pollination. It was hot, physical, unglamorous work. But it was mine.
Growing up in that world also showed me something I absorbed without realizing it. Most of the women around me were assigned to the home: to cooking, to cleaning, to taking care of kids. I didn’t want to reject any of that. I just knew, somewhere early on, that I didn’t want it to be the only thing I did.
I wanted to be self-reliant. I wanted to build something. I wanted to be capable in the world, on my own terms.
Knowing what you don’t want is sometimes where the story of who you are actually begins.
What I Chased #
What I didn’t realize until much later was that I had been building my entire life in reaction to what I’d watched as a girl.
Without naming it, without choosing it consciously, I had decided: I would make it. On my own. In the business world. The corporate path didn’t last long. I needed to own what I built. So I chased that instead.
And it worked.
I built a career. A business. A reputation. I was productive, capable, in demand. From the outside, it looked like proof.
Except somewhere along the way, I stopped being able to tell where the work ended and I began.
What It Cost #
Here’s the part that took me a long time to see clearly.
I thought I was choosing my life. And I was — but I was also running from one. The life I had watched as a girl. The life I had quietly decided I would not have.
I wasn’t just building. I was also escaping. And when your work is partly an escape, it takes on a weight it was never meant to carry. It becomes proof. It becomes the whole story.
The words in that novel — self-worth, autonomy, pride, confidence — those are good things. Real things. Work can genuinely offer all of them.
When those things only live in your work, you’ve handed your identity to something outside yourself — something that can be taken away.
I finally turned around and looked at what was chasing me.
It was me.
What I Know Now #
I still want all of those things. Self-worth. Autonomy. Pride. Confidence.
I just want them to be mine now, not proof of something, not a reaction to something, not an escape from something. Just mine. Rooted in who I actually am, not in what I’ve produced or built or achieved.
That’s a quieter kind of wanting. It doesn’t have the urgency of ambition or the momentum of reaction. But it’s more honest. And it holds up better when the work slows down, or changes, or ends. It always eventually does.
Ambition looks like a choice. Sometimes it’s a reaction. Knowing the difference is worth the time it takes to figure out.
Getting clear on your values — separate from your work and your roles — is one of the most grounding things you can do. The Your Values, Your Season workbook is a good place to start.