Who are you beyond your job title?

Someone at a birthday party asks the question everyone asks: “So, what do you do?” You answer on autopilot. But lately the answer feels less solid. Your industry is changing, new AI tools keep arriving, and nobody can quite say what your role will look like in five years. A small-talk question starts to feel like a big one: who am I, beyond that?

If that question has been sitting with you, it makes sense. A job title isn’t just a label. It’s shorthand for years of learning, the people you work alongside, the things you’re trusted with. When the ground under it feels uncertain, part of you can feel uncertain too.

We don’t have a neat answer, and we’d be wary of anyone who did. But we do think that looking inwards now, before anything is forced on you, is one of the best ways to prepare for difficult times. Call it inner resilience: knowing who you are and what you value, so that change shakes you less. And there’s an old idea in psychology, usually squashed into a triangle on a lecture slide, that turns out to be kinder and more hopeful than its reputation. It’s worth a second look, especially now.

Why does uncertainty at work shake who you are?

In 1943, psychologist Abraham Maslow published “A Theory of Human Motivation”, the paper behind his famous hierarchy of needs. One of the needs he described was esteem: self-respect, and the respect of others. When that need goes unmet, he wrote, people can feel inferior, weak and helpless.

For many of us, work is where that need gets met. It tells us we’re good at something, that someone relies on us, that we have a place. So if uncertainty about your work has left you feeling smaller or less sure of yourself, that isn’t vanity or self-pity. By Maslow’s account, it’s what happens when a basic human need feels under threat.

Here’s the hopeful part. Esteem was never meant to come from one place only. And it wasn’t the top of Maslow’s list.

What did Maslow mean by self-actualisation?

At the top, Maslow put self-actualisation. He borrowed the term from Kurt Goldstein and used it for the desire “to become everything that one is capable of becoming”. A musician must make music, he wrote, and a poet must write. His most quoted line: “What a man can be, he must be.”

Notice what’s missing. There’s no job title in it, no salary, no promotion. It’s about becoming more fully yourself. That’s why self-actualisation and self-realisation are close cousins. In a 2001 review, psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci described the “eudaimonic” view of wellbeing: wellbeing as meaning, self-realisation and how fully a person is functioning, as opposed to the “hedonic” view of pleasure and avoiding pain.

Carol Ryff’s 1989 model of psychological wellbeing lists six parts: self-acceptance, positive relationships with others, autonomy, a sense of mastery over your surroundings, purpose in life and personal growth. None of them is a job title. Work can feed several of them. It doesn’t own any of them.

Do you have to have everything sorted first?

This is where the triangle misleads people. Maslow never drew a pyramid. In a 2019 paper, management scholars Todd Bridgman, Stephen Cummings and John Ballard traced how it was built later, as his ideas travelled through management writing and textbooks. The pyramid made it look as if you had to finish each level before you were allowed near the next, with the top saved for a lucky few.

Maslow didn’t see it that way. Using figures he openly called arbitrary, he imagined an average person as perhaps 85% satisfied in their physiological needs, 70% in safety, 50% in love, 40% in esteem and 10% in self-actualisation. Partly met, at every level, all at once.

Modern data points the same way. In 2011, Louis Tay and Ed Diener analysed Gallup World Poll responses from 60,865 people in 123 countries. Meeting needs was linked to wellbeing everywhere, but the order mattered far less than the pyramid suggests. People reported good relationships and a sense of growth even when their basic and safety needs weren’t fully met.

So if money and safety are taking up most of your head right now, Maslow would hardly be surprised, and it doesn’t make you shallow. But who you are isn’t on hold until everything is fixed. It keeps going, even in a hard season.

What comes after self-actualisation?

Late in life, Maslow went further. As psychologist Mark Koltko-Rivera showed in 2006, Maslow amended his model to place self-transcendence as a step beyond self-actualisation: being moved by something bigger than yourself, such as other people, a cause or a sense of connection. Many of these later ideas appeared in The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, published after his death.

Psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman has brought the idea up to date. In a 2018 study he turned Maslow’s descriptions into a questionnaire covering ten characteristics, including authenticity, purpose, equanimity, humanitarianism and a continued freshness of appreciation for everyday life. People who scored higher reported more life satisfaction, self-acceptance and personal growth. These are self-report surveys, so they describe patterns, not a formula. In his 2020 book Transcend, Kaufman swaps the pyramid for a sailboat: safety, connection and self-esteem form the hull that keeps you afloat, while exploration, love and purpose form the sail that moves you.

We find that image steadying. In calm weather it’s easy to forget the hull. In uncertain times it’s worth checking it, and remembering that the sail is still there.

How do you get to know who you are beyond your job?

If you feel you should already know, this may help. In her 2003 book Working Identity, organisational behaviour professor Herminia Ibarra followed professionals through career changes and found that most people don’t work out a new sense of self by thinking first. They try things, then make sense of them. Her “test and learn” approach means experimenting with new activities, meeting new people and gradually reworking the story you tell about yourself.

Values can help to steady you while you do. In a small 2005 lab study, David Creswell and colleagues asked 85 people either to write about a personal value that mattered to them or to do a comparison task, before a stressful speech and mental arithmetic test. Those who had reflected on their values showed a smaller rise in cortisol, a stress hormone. One study isn’t proof, but it hints that remembering what you stand for can help when the ground moves.

A few small ways to start building that inner resilience now:

1. Name what you value. Pick the one or two things that matter most to you (honesty, family, curiosity, fairness, making things) and write a few lines about why. No job title needed.
2. Notice what people come to you for. Not your role, the thing. Calm in a crisis? Good at explaining? The one who remembers birthdays? That’s part of who you are, and it goes wherever you go.
3. Run one tiny experiment. A short course, a volunteering shift, helping a friend with a project. You learn what fits by trying, not by getting it right first time.
4. Talk to someone outside your usual circle. New people often see parts of you that old settings kept hidden.
5. Let your answer be bigger than your job. Next time someone asks what you do, add one thing you care about outside work.

If it’s the worry about work itself that’s weighing on you, we’ve written about where meaning really lives, beyond your job.

If you’d like to think this through with someone

Everconnected is a place to meet like-minded people, find community and have genuine conversations, one to one, by voice. It isn’t a crisis or mental health service. It’s free to join: create an account at app.everconnected.com, or get the app from the App Store or Google Play.

Questions people ask

Sources

1. Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370-396. doi.org/10.1037/h0054346
2. Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2001). On happiness and human potentials: A review of research on hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. Annual Review of Psychology, 52, 141-166. doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.52.1.141
3. Ryff, C. D. (1989). Happiness is everything, or is it? Explorations on the meaning of psychological well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57(6), 1069-1081. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.57.6.1069
4. Bridgman, T., Cummings, S., & Ballard, J. (2019). Who built Maslow’s pyramid? A history of the creation of management studies’ most famous symbol and its implications for management education. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 18(1), 81-98. doi.org/10.5465/amle.2017.0351
5. Tay, L., & Diener, E. (2011). Needs and subjective well-being around the world. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(2), 354-365. (University of Illinois news release.) news.illinois.edu/researchers-look-for-ingredients-of-happin
6. Koltko-Rivera, M. E. (2006). Rediscovering the later version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: Self-transcendence and opportunities for theory, research, and unification. Review of General Psychology, 10(4), 302-317. (Summarised by Greater Good Science Center.) greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/maslows_theory_revisit
7. Maslow, A. H. (1971). The farther reaches of human nature. Viking Press (published posthumously). penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/322518/the-farther-reaches-of-hu
8. Kaufman, S. B. (2018/2023). Self-actualizing people in the 21st century: Integration with contemporary theory and research on personality and well-being. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 63(1). doi.org/10.1177/0022167818809187
9. Kaufman, S. B. (2020). Transcend: The new science of self-actualization. TarcherPerigee. (Sailboat metaphor summarised on the author’s site.) scottbarrykaufman.com/sailboat-metaphor
10. Ibarra, H. (2003). Working identity: Unconventional strategies for reinventing your career. Harvard Business School Press. www.publishersweekly.com/9781578517787
11. Creswell, J. D., Welch, W. T., Taylor, S. E., Sherman, D. K., Gruenewald, T. L., & Mann, T. (2005). Affirmation of personal values buffers neuroendocrine and psychological stress responses. Psychological Science, 16(11), 846-851. doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2005.01624.x