When the Role Changes but You Don’t Know Who You Are Yet
Understanding Identity Lag in Times of Transition
There is a moment in every major transition that no one prepares you for. It isn’t the logistical shift, the new responsibilities, or even the uncertainty itself. It’s the realization that the role has changed, but your sense of self hasn’t fully adjusted—or has shifted in ways you didn’t anticipate.
High-achieving women are often praised for adaptability. We reinvent. We pivot. We rise to what’s required. When circumstances change, we respond. From the outside, it can look seamless. From the inside, it can feel destabilizing in ways that are harder to name.
I’ve experienced this more than once—stepping away from stability, navigating unexpected endings, entering phases that required reinvention. Each time, I remained capable. I knew how to execute, how to perform, how to deliver. Yet beneath the forward motion was a more complex question: Who am I now?
Competence is not the same as identity.
You can know exactly how to lead a team, build a strategy, launch a business, or manage complexity—and still find yourself wondering who you are without the role that once structured your days and signaled your value. Roles offer context and clarity. Over time, though, they can become the primary reference point for how we define ourselves: Executive, Founder, Director, Caregiver, Partner, Parent.
When that reference point shifts, voluntarily or not, the instinct is to restore certainty quickly:
- What’s next?
- How do I replace this?
- How do I prove I still matter?
Those are strategic questions. Beneath them sits a more consequential one: Who am I becoming now?
The most overlooked part of transition is what I’ve come to think of as identity lag—the period when your previous role no longer fits, but your next one is not yet fully formed. It can feel inefficient to remain in that in-between. Yet this is often where the most important realignment occurs.
If we rush through it, we tend to default to what matches our competence rather than what reflects our evolution. We choose what we know how to do instead of examining what genuinely fits. And because we are capable, it often works—for a time.
Growth is not only about movement forward. It is also about examining whether the definitions we are operating from still apply.
During identity lag, more disciplined questions emerge:
- What parts of my previous role were genuinely mine, and which were shaped by expectation?
- Which strengths do I want to carry forward, and which habits were simply survival strategies?
- Are my core values intact, or have they shifted with experience?
- Does success look the way it did five years ago, or am I still pursuing an outdated version of it?
- If external validation disappeared, what would I choose next?
The instinct in transition is speed—to restore structure and regain momentum. Yet speed can conceal misalignment. Sometimes the more strategic move is to pause long enough to reassess direction. Ambition may still be present, but its expression may have changed. Stability, autonomy, or meaning may now carry greater weight.
Without that reflection, we risk building the next chapter on assumptions we have quietly outgrown.
For leaders, this dynamic extends beyond personal experience. Organizations are full of women navigating role shifts—returning from leave, stepping into stretch responsibilities, exiting long-held positions, balancing professional leadership with personal change. When transitions are treated as performance adjustments alone, the deeper identity recalibration is overlooked. Yet identity shapes how people lead, decide, and sustain themselves over time.
In my work with leaders, I’ve seen that the most durable shifts rarely come from better tactics alone. They come from clarity about identity. When someone moves from asking, “What should I do next?” to asking, “Who am I becoming?” their decisions carry greater coherence. They are no longer reacting—they are choosing.
The next time your role changes—or you sense it beginning—resist the urge to immediately replace it. Allow the in-between to surface what has shifted. You may discover that you are not behind or lost, but refining what leadership and success mean to you now.
