Think Again

TIME FOR A CHECKUP
We foreclose on all kinds of life plans. Once you’ve committed to one, it
becomes part of your identity, making it difficult to de-escalate. Declaring
an English major because you love to read, only to discover that you don’t
enjoy the process of writing. Deciding to start college during a pandemic,
only to conclude later that you should have considered a gap year. Gotta
stay on track. Ending a romantic relationship because you don’t want kids,
only to realize years down the road that you might after all.
Identity foreclosure can stop us from evolving. In a study of amateur
musicians, those who had settled on music as a professional calling were
more likely to ignore career advice from a trusted adviser over the course of

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the following seven years. They listened to their hearts and tuned out their
mentors. In some ways, identity foreclosure is the opposite of an identity
crisis: instead of accepting uncertainty about who we want to become, we
develop compensatory conviction and plunge head over heels into a career
path. I’ve noticed that the students who are the most certain about their
career plans at twenty are often the ones with the deepest regrets by thirty.
They haven’t done enough rethinking along the way.
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Sometimes it’s because they’re thinking too much like politicians,
eager to earn the approval of parents and peers. They become seduced by
status, failing to see that no matter how much an accomplishment or
affiliation impresses someone else, it’s still a poor choice if it depresses
them. In other cases it’s because they’re stuck in preacher mode, and
they’ve come to see a job as a sacred cause. And occasionally they pick
careers in prosecutor mode, where they charge classmates with selling their
souls to capitalism and hurl themselves into nonprofits in the hopes of
saving the world.
Sadly, they often know too little about the job—and too little about
their evolving selves—to make a lifelong commitment. They get trapped in
an overconfidence cycle, taking pride in pursuing a career identity and
surrounding themselves with people who validate their conviction. By the
time they discover it was the wrong fit, they feel it’s too late to think again.
The stakes seem too high to walk away; the sacrifices of salary, status, skill,
and time seem too great. For the record, I think it’s better to lose the past
two years of progress than to waste the next twenty. In hindsight, identity
foreclosure is a Band-Aid: it covers up an identity crisis, but fails to cure it.
My advice to students is to take a cue from health-care professions.
Just as they make appointments with the doctor and the dentist even when
nothing is wrong, they should schedule checkups on their careers. I
encourage them to put a reminder in their calendars to ask some key
questions twice a year. When did you form the aspirations you’re currently
pursuing, and how have you changed since then? Have you reached a
learning plateau in your role or your workplace, and is it time to consider a
pivot? Answering these career checkup questions is a way to periodically
activate rethinking cycles. It helps students maintain humility about their
ability to predict the future, contemplate doubts about their plans, and stay
curious enough to discover new possibilities or reconsider previously
discarded ones.

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I had one student, Marissa Shandell, who scored a coveted job at a
prestigious consulting firm and planned on climbing up the ladder. She kept
getting promoted early but found herself working around the clock. Instead
of continuing to just grit and bear it, she and her husband had a career
checkup conversation every six months, talking not just about the growth
trajectory of their companies but also about the growth trajectory of their
jobs. After being promoted to associate partner well ahead of schedule,
Marissa realized she had reached a learning plateau (and a lifestyle plateau)
and decided to pursue a doctorate in management.
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Deciding to leave a current career path is often easier than identifying a
new one. My favorite framework for navigating that challenge comes from
a management professor, Herminia Ibarra. She finds that as people consider
career choices and transitions, it helps to think like scientists. A first step is
to entertain possible selves: identify some people you admire within or

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outside your field, and observe what they actually do at work day by day. A
second step is to develop hypotheses about how these paths might align
with your own interests, skills, and values. A third step is to test out the
different identities by running experiments: do informational interviews, job
shadowing, and sample projects to get a taste of the work. The goal is not to
confirm a particular plan but to expand your repertoire of possible selves—
which keeps you open to rethinking.
Checkups aren’t limited to careers—they’re relevant to the plans we
make in every domain of our lives. A few years ago, a former student called
for romantic advice. Caveat: I’m not that kind of psychologist. He’d been
dating a woman for just over a year, and although it was the most fulfilling
relationship he’d ever had, he was still questioning whether it was the right
match. He had always imagined himself marrying a woman who was
ambitious in her career or passionate about improving the world, and his
girlfriend seemed less driven and more relaxed in her approach to life.
It was an ideal time for a checkup. I asked him how old he was when
he formed that vision of a partner and how much he’d changed since then.
He said he’d held it since he was a teenager and had never paused to rethink
it. As we talked, he started to realize that if he and his girlfriend were happy
together, ambition and passion might not be as important to him in a partner
as they had been in the past. He came to understand that he was inspired by
women who were highly motivated to succeed and serve because that was
who he wanted to be.
Two and a half years later, he reached out with an update. He had
decided to let go of his preconceived image of who his partner should be:
I decided to open up and talk to her about how she’s different
from the person I’d imagined being with. Surprisingly, she told me
the same thing! I wasn’t who she imagined she’d end up with
either—she expected to end up with a guy who was more of a
creative, someone who was more gregarious. We accepted it and
moved on. I’m thrilled to have left my old ideas behind to make
space for the full her and everything our relationship could bring.
Just before the pandemic, he proposed to her, and they’re now engaged.

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A successful relationship requires regular rethinking. Sometimes being
considerate means reconsidering something as simple as our habits.
Learning not to be fashionably late to everything. Retiring that wardrobe of
ratty conference T-shirts. Rolling over to snore in the other direction. At
other times being supportive means opening our minds to bigger life
changes—moving to a different country, a different community, or a
different job to support our partner’s priorities. In my student’s case, it
meant rethinking who his fiancée would be, but also staying open to who
she might become. She eventually switched jobs and became passionate
about both her work and a personal cause of fighting educational inequity.
When we’re willing to update our ideas of who our partners are, it can give
them freedom to evolve and our relationships room to grow.
Whether we do checkups with our partners, our parents, or our
mentors, it’s worth pausing once or twice a year to reflect on how our
aspirations have changed. As we identify past images of our lives that are
no longer relevant to our future, we can start to rethink our plans. That can
set us up for happiness—as long as we’re not too fixated on finding it.