The client sitting across from me had built an extraordinary career. VP at a Fortune 500 tech company. Led teams through three successful acquisitions. Reputation as someone who delivered impossible projects under impossible timelines. Two decades of consistent upward momentum.
And she was completely frozen trying to figure out what came next.
"I should be good at this," she said, staring at her hands. "I've made dozens of complex decisions that affected thousands of people. Why can't I figure out my own next steps?"
I'd heard this exact sentiment at least 50 times in the past year alone. Different industries, different titles, same paralysis.
Here's what I told her, the same thing I've learned from coaching 500+ professionals through major career shifts since November 2022: she was struggling precisely because she'd been so successful. The skills that made her excellent at navigating organizational complexity were completely different from the skills required to navigate identity dissolution.
The better you were at the old thing, the harder it is to let go. This isn't a personal failure. It's a predictable pattern backed by decades of identity formation and career transition work.
A study in the Journal of Applied Sport Psychology examining professional female athletes found something striking: the athletes who committed most intensely to their sport identity without exploring alternatives struggled significantly more during career transitions.
The researchers called this "identity foreclosure": premature commitment to a single identity without sufficient exploration of alternatives.
Here's what makes it worse: high performers experience identity foreclosure at higher rates than average performers.
Achievement itself creates the trap.
When you're exceptional at something, every system around you reinforces that identity. You get promoted. You get praised. You get asked to do more of the thing you're already good at. Your calendar fills with opportunities that look exactly like your current role, just at a higher level.
The environment that made you successful becomes the environment that makes it almost impossible to explore what else you might become.
Over 20 years coaching visionary entrepreneurs across 31 countries, I've noticed something consistent: the people who transition most easily are rarely the ones with the most impressive resumes.
They're the ones who've maintained what I call "identity optionality" throughout their careers. They stayed curious about adjacent fields even when it didn't advance their primary trajectory. They volunteered for projects outside their expertise even when it wasn't "strategic." They protected time for interests that had nothing to do with their professional identity, even when their calendars screamed that every hour should be optimized for career advancement.
The high performers who struggle tend to have optimized. They got better and better at a narrower and narrower thing. They said no to everything that didn't directly advance their primary identity. They pruned their lives ruthlessly to create maximum focus on the work that got them recognized, promoted, rewarded.
And then when that identity stopped fitting, when their body started sending signals of misalignment (Sunday scaries that won't go away, exhaustion that rest doesn't fix, the dread that settles in Sunday evening before Monday morning leadership meetings, shoulders that hike to your ears during strategy sessions), they had no adjacent territory to move into.
They'd foreclosed on alternative identities without realizing it.
Here's what makes this particularly painful: the system rewards this kind of foreclosure. Your organization wants focus. Your industry values deep expertise. Your professional network reinforces your current identity because that's how they know you.
Every email in your inbox, every LinkedIn message, every conference invitation assumes you're still the person you were three years ago. The infrastructure of your professional life is built to maintain your current identity, not to help you explore new ones.
After coaching hundreds of professionals through these transitions, three distinct patterns emerge:
Type 1: The Optimizer Spent 15-20 years becoming exceptional at a specific function. Operations, finance, engineering leadership, legal counsel. Now realizes the work that made them valuable is also depleting them. Wants something different. Has no idea what different even looks like because they've optimized every decision around deepening existing expertise.
Pattern: identity so entangled with achievement that considering alternatives feels like failure.
I worked with a CFO who'd spent eighteen years mastering financial strategy across three industries. She could walk into any boardroom and command immediate respect. She was also waking up at 3 a.m. with her heart racing, dreading the Monday morning executive meetings she used to thrive in.
"I should just be grateful," she told me. "This is what I worked for."
The optimization trap: she'd said no to every opportunity that didn't directly advance her finance career. When a friend invited her to join a nonprofit board focused on education, she declined. "Not strategic." When she felt drawn to writing about leadership, she dismissed it. "Not my lane." By the time her body was sending clear signals of misalignment, she had no adjacent territory to explore.
Type 2: The Loyal One Built career within a single organization or industry. Thrived within that specific culture and system, often for a decade or more. Then the organization changes (acquisition, new leadership, culture shift) or the industry transforms (automation, consolidation, market disruption). Suddenly the container that held them no longer exists.
Pattern: professional identity built on external structures that no longer exist.
This pattern is particularly common among tech leaders who built their careers at companies during the 2010s growth era. The culture, the resources, the autonomy they had no longer exists post-layoffs and restructuring. They're technically in the same industry, same job function, but the ecosystem that made them successful has fundamentally changed.
Type 3: The Expert Became known for deep expertise in a technical domain. Then either the domain becomes commoditized or they realize expertise alone isn't enough for the next level. Needs to develop completely different capabilities (leadership, business development, strategic thinking) that feel foreign to their expert identity.
Pattern: success built on depth, transition requires breadth they haven't cultivated.
These are the individual contributors who became so valuable at their technical craft that nobody wanted to "waste" their expertise by moving them into management or strategy. They're the senior engineers who can solve impossible technical problems, the researchers who publish groundbreaking work, the designers who set industry standards.
Then one day they look up and realize their expertise, while still valuable, isn't enough. The next level requires influence, not just execution. It requires building systems, not just contributing to them. And they have no idea how to develop these capabilities because they've spent two decades optimizing for technical depth.
All three types share something fundamental: their excellence made exploration feel like a waste of time.
When you're already winning at the game you're playing, why consider other games?
The crisis comes when the current game stops working. When the win you've been optimizing for no longer feels like winning. When your body sends increasingly loud signals that something fundamental needs to change.
A January 2025 study in the Journal of Professions and Organization examining professionals transitioning to emerging occupations found that identity construction during career transitions involves negotiating between three competing forces:
High performers get stuck because their professional identity is so strong and well-established that it crowds out the other two.
Your past excellence creates gravitational pull. Every conversation, every opportunity, every recruiter message reinforces who you've been rather than who you might become.
The clearer your old identity, the harder it is to step into an unclear new one.
Workday's 2025 Global Workforce Report analyzing workforce data across industries found that high performers are leaving organizations at accelerated rates due to stalled career growth.
But here's what the report missed: many of these high performers have outgrown the identity that got them there. They're searching for permission to become someone different, which no promotion or bigger team can provide.
The organizations trying to retain them with higher titles or bigger teams are solving the wrong problem. You can't solve an identity transition with a career ladder designed for identity maintenance.
After watching hundreds of professionals navigate this transition, here's what I've seen work:
Start exploration before the crisis hits. Don't wait until the Sunday scaries are unbearable or your body forces the issue through illness or injury. Protect time now for adjacent interests, even if (especially if) they seem irrelevant to your career trajectory.
This doesn't mean abandoning your current work. It means creating space for what career researchers call "identity exploration in breadth": investigating possibilities without immediate commitment. Take that board seat in a different industry. Mentor someone in a field adjacent to yours. Write about topics you're curious about but haven't formally studied.
The professionals who transition most successfully are the ones who started this exploration three to five years before they actually needed it.
Distinguish between "I can do this" and "this reflects who I'm becoming." You can probably excel at dozens of roles that would continue your current identity. The question is whether those roles align with who you're becoming, or just who you've been.
I've seen too many professionals take promotions that looked perfect on paper because they were optimizing for external validation rather than internal alignment. Six months later, they're back in my Zoom room more misaligned than before, now with a bigger title that makes it even harder to pivot.
Expect the discomfort of competence loss. When you step into a new identity, you temporarily lose the competence that made you feel valuable. This is the threshold. Everyone who successfully transitions goes through it. The high performers who struggle most are the ones who can't tolerate temporary incompetence.
You spent twenty years becoming someone people turned to for answers. Now you're in territory where you don't have the answers yet. That discomfort isn't a sign you made the wrong choice. It's confirmation you're actually changing rather than just rearranging your existing identity.
Find examples of hybrid identities. Look for people who've integrated seemingly contradictory identities successfully. The engineer who became a leadership coach. The finance executive who now runs a creative agency. The consultant who built a fractional practice. These people gave themselves permission to expand beyond their original expertise rather than abandoning it entirely.
Study how they made the transition. What bridges did they build? What provisional identities did they try? How long did the transition actually take? Most important: notice that they didn't wait for perfect clarity before starting. They built the new identity while standing in the old one.
Protect non-work identity. If your entire sense of self comes from your professional role, any career transition becomes an existential crisis. You're changing who you fundamentally are rather than what you do for work.
The professionals who transition most gracefully are the ones who've maintained strong identities outside work throughout their careers. Parent. Partner. Athlete. Artist. Community member. Volunteer. These anchors hold you steady when professional identity shifts. They remind you that you're more than your job title, more than your expertise, more than your track record.
This is why I structure my life around my 3.5-day workweek. My identity as a mom who walks my son to school every morning matters as much as my identity as a business owner and coach. When I transition my work (and I have, multiple times), those non-work anchors keep me grounded through the discomfort.
Remember that VP I mentioned? It took her eight months to make her move. She went from frozen to fractional consulting while she explored adjacent fields.
She stopped trying to figure out the perfect next identity and started experimenting with provisional ones. Took on a board seat in a different industry. Mentored founders in a startup accelerator. Wrote three articles about topics completely outside her expertise.
She's still highly capable. Still delivers complex work. Still gets results.
She's just no longer trapped by the identity that made her successful in the first place.
That's the paradox high performers face: the very capabilities that got you here can become the prison that keeps you stuck. Your excellence is real. Your expertise matters. Your track record proves your capacity.
None of that means your current identity is the final version of who you're meant to become.
Sometimes the hardest transition is giving yourself permission to become someone your resume doesn't reflect yet.
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