Working Identity, Updated Edition, With a New Preface

2 Possible Selves

Reinventing your career is not a straightforward process of trading in an old, tired role for a new and improved one; nor can we always make progress along a straight and linear path. Trying very hard to go in one direction can lead us, circuitously, to another. Where we end up often surprises us.

For these reasons, as much as we would like to, we simply cannot plan and program our way into our reinvention. And spending a lot of time at the start looking inside to find the “true self” that can guide a systematic search can be counterproductive (it may even be a defense against changing). When you don’t know what the future will bring, or when the path you were on takes an unexpected turn, it makes sense to explore a diverse ...