Reinventing in quiet moments
Herminia Ibarra's work on identity and career reinvention has shaped how I think about change for years, since first reading Working Identity. So when her piece "Reinventing Your Career, When It's Not Just About You" landed on her LinkedIn feed last week, it felt like a moment to re-examine my own thinking about career transitions.
Her central point is simple and, once you've seen it, hard to unsee: no one reinvents themselves in a vacuum. Your significant others have a stake in what you leave behind and what you move toward, whether you've discussed it openly or not.
I say a version of this constantly in my own coaching practice - we don't make any professional decisions in a vacuum. But reading Herminia's piece, I understood something about why that's true that I hadn't quite put into words before. It's not just that the people around you have opinions about your change. It's that, over years, we've all quietly built scaffolding around the way things currently are.
You're already surrounded by invisible scaffolding
Roles, routines, who walks the dog, who does the school run, who covers for whom at work, who holds the household together when the other person can't. That scaffolding doesn't come down just because you've decided it's time to reinvent.
I saw this up close when my partner left the RAF after 24 years. I'd only ever known him as being in the RAF, it was who he was for the entire time we'd been together. So this wasn't just his transition, it was the first time I had to relate to him outside a frame neither of us had ever had to question - identity, rank, routine, a whole structure built over two decades. When it came down, it didn't just change his life, it changed the shape of mine too - not dramatically, but enough that we had to quietly rebuild, piece by piece, while we were both still living inside the thing we were rebuilding.
Someone goes first
Once his change started to feel settled, that's when there was finally time and space for mine. But I couldn't have imagined us both reinventing at the same time. The household simply couldn't have absorbed two people pulling down scaffolding at once.
This is where Herminia's piece pushed my own thinking further, into sequencing. It's rarely one change and done, and it's rarely both people at once either. If you're both approaching a threshold at the same time, it's worth naming that explicitly rather than discovering it mid-collapse. Someone goes first, the other follows once things settle, and getting that order right is its own quiet piece of work.
Reinvention doesn’t always announce itself
Here's the other thing I've noticed, watching my own version of this play out. Reinvention rarely turns up as a single dramatic decision. Mine has been happening in smaller, quieter ways, and only looking back can I see they were all part of the same shift.
Rebuilding my coaching practice under a new name, We Are Mhòr, was one thread. Taking on new projects and deliberately stretching myself at work was another. And underneath both, I was surrounding myself with people who could help me experiment and understand myself a little better, day by day, gathering evidence about who I was becoming before I could have named it outright.
It's testing, not leaping. And rather than declaring a new identity, you're gradually collecting proof of one, in the margins of your existing life, until one day the new version of you is simply the one that's true.
A question to sit with
If you're standing at the edge of a change right now, what scaffolding would need to come down first, and whose? And if someone close to you is mid-reinvention already, what would it look like to ask what your next change would mean for them, before you make it, and, what their change means for you?
Source: ¹ Ibarra, H. "Reinventing your career, when it's not just about you." herminiaibarra.com, 16 January 2024. https://herminiaibarra.com/reinventing-your-career-when-its-not-just-about-you/
