The Problem With Trying to Position Yourself

Navigating the gap between the career you've built and the person you're becoming.

Lydia A. Lascola

Operations Assistant

Convention of States

The Career You Built vs. the Person You’re Becoming

There is a strange tension I've discovered as I begin to establish myself professionally. At this point, I have enough experience to know what I'm good at. I've built credibility, solved real problems, and developed capabilities I know I can bring into a room.

And yet, I'm still growing into the kind of work I ultimately want to do.

That makes positioning myself surprisingly complicated.

I want to be clear about what I can do without suggesting that what I've done so far is the limit of what I can become. I want to open doors without pretending I've already walked through them.

My own career doesn't tell a particularly linear story. I've moved between different roles, disciplines, and interests, following opportunities and questions as they've emerged. On paper, it can be difficult to explain.

But I'm beginning to wonder whether the goal of a career is actually to make perfect sense on paper.

Because there is another kind of career that can look remarkably coherent from the outside: the person who has spent 20 years at one company, moved steadily up the ladder, and built an impressive body of expertise along the way.

And yet, that person may be asking a very different question:

What if the career I've built no longer reflects the person I'm becoming?

Success Can Create Its Own Kind of Inertia

This isn't an argument against the traditional corporate path. There is tremendous value in staying somewhere long enough to develop real depth, earn trust, understand an organization intimately, and take on increasingly meaningful responsibility.

The danger is subtler.

You can become very good at something you no longer want to spend the next 10 years becoming better at. You can be promoted because you are excellent at a particular kind of work, only to discover that each promotion takes you further from the parts of your work you actually love.

You can develop interests and capabilities outside your formal role, but because your existing career is working, there is little external pressure to explore them.

Nothing is necessarily wrong. You are simply no longer asking whether the direction still fits. And because the change happens incrementally, there may never be a dramatic moment when you realize you've outgrown the path.

You just wake up one day and realize:

I built this career. But I don't know if I still want to become the person this career is making me.

My Career Has Taught Me to Follow the Question

My experience has been almost the reverse. I've moved around more than many people do, and some of those moves probably looked disconnected at the time. But I have noticed a pattern in how I work: I tend to follow the question underneath the question.

Operations led me toward systems. Working with AI led me beyond the technology and into questions about organizational design, governance, knowledge, decision-making, and human judgment.

That work eventually became what I'm now exploring as Organizational Intelligence. The methodology emerged precisely because solving one technical problem repeatedly exposed a deeper organizational one. What began as an AI initiative became a way of thinking about how an organization itself needs to change in order to work intelligently alongside AI.

But even that wasn't the beginning.

My personal Sub stack, Kingdom Civics, took me in another direction entirely—or so it seemed. I was writing about politics, culture, beauty, morality, and civilization. But those questions kept leading backward toward the person.

• What kind of person can govern himself?
• What forms that person?
• What happens when the people within a culture are poorly formed?
• What is “good”?

Eventually, the connection became difficult to ignore.

Organizations are made of people. Technology is used by people. Families form people. Cultures shape people. And the quality of the systems we build is inseparable from the quality of the human beings operating within them.

The AI work made me think about how we design organizations around human judgment. Kingdom Civics made me think about how we form the human being whose judgment we are designing around.

Now, as I begin experimenting and preparing to launch my YouTube channel, Lost Mama, I am bringing those questions even closer to home: the family, motherhood, and the ordinary life in which formation actually happens.

Different work. Different audiences. Different expressions.

But the underlying question is remarkably consistent:

What forms people, and what kind of environments help them become capable of living well?

I didn't choose that sentence as a career mission statement years ago. I discovered it by paying attention to the questions that kept following me.

Maybe Your Career Needs a Thread, Not a Label

This is where I think positioning can become particularly unhelpful. We are encouraged to find our niche, define our personal brand, and communicate a clear professional identity.

There is good reason for this. People need to understand what we can contribute. But a position should make your capabilities legible. It shouldn't make your future illegible.

Your current title describes something you have already become capable of doing. It does not necessarily describe the direction in which your capabilities are developing.

This matters whether your career has been highly nonlinear or remarkably stable.

If you've changed companies and disciplines repeatedly, you may need to learn how to articulate the thread connecting those experiences. If you've spent your entire career in one organization, you may need to discover the thread that exists beneath the job description.

In both cases, the question is the same:

What keeps pulling you forward?

Not what sounds impressive or what would make the best LinkedIn headline. Not necessarily what you would quit your job tomorrow to pursue.

But rather:

What problems do you repeatedly notice?

What kinds of work make you more curious rather than less?

What capabilities have you developed almost accidentally because you kept wanting to understand something more deeply?

What are people consistently coming to you for?

What would you like to become exceptionally good at that you aren't yet?

Those questions can reveal a trajectory long before they reveal a job title.

You Don't Have to Leave to Start Becoming

This is perhaps the lesson I would most want to give someone who feels caught between the career they've built and the person they are becoming.

Don't assume the only options are stay exactly where you are or walk away and start over.

• Experiment.
• Take on the project outside your normal lane.
• Learn the thing you've been curious about.
• Mentor someone.
• Teach.
• Write.
• Build something small.
• Volunteer your expertise somewhere it isn't normally used.
• Find opportunities to exercise the capabilities you suspect you want to develop.

You don't have to abandon the career you've built in order to gather evidence about where you might go next.

And sometimes those experiments won't lead anywhere. That's useful, too.

The goal isn't to manufacture a dramatic career pivot. It is to keep your career responsive to your own development and your character.

Because your résumé should be a record of where you've been.

It should not become a prescription for where you are allowed to go.

Positioning Is a Doorway

I still care about positioning. I want people to understand my professional capabilities. I want the right opportunities to find me. I want to be taken seriously for the work I am capable of doing now while I continue building toward the work I want to do more of.

But I'm becoming less interested in finding one sentence that contains everything.

Perhaps that's because I am beginning to see a career differently.

A position is a doorway. It tells people which room they might want to enter with you. It doesn't have to contain the whole house.

So whether your résumé looks beautifully linear or completely unexpected, perhaps the question worth asking isn't simply:

Does my career make sense?

Ask instead:

Does the direction of my career still make sense for the person I am becoming?

If it does, keep building.

If it doesn't, you don't necessarily need to burn it down. You may just need to start building in another direction.

A successful career isn't necessarily the one that looks most coherent from the outside.

Perhaps it is the one in which the person you are becoming and the work you are doing continue to move toward one another.