What Is Identity and Why I Mention It

I am not a psychologist. I have always had an interest in what makes people tick and a curiosity about why we all do what we do and what drives us. So what follows comes from my own life and work experiences, across thirty years and very different industries, rather than from a clinical framework.

Identity is one of those words that can sound either very profound or slightly abstract depending on how it is used. In a coaching context it’s a word people either recognise immediately (what you mean by it) or they look at you slightly sideways and wonder if this is about to get philosophical, which isn’t the case.

When I talk about identity with the leaders, founders and professionals I work with, I am not talking about a personality test or what is in your passport. I am talking about something much more practical and much more immediate than that.

I am talking about the specific combination of things that makes you distinctively you in a room. Your point of view, the way you see things, what you bring to a conversation that nobody else quite brings in the same way, the values that run your decisions even when you are not thinking about them, the version of yourself that feels most like you when the pressure is not forcing you into something more managed.

Crucially, how being that version of yourself, in the context you are actually in, makes you feel about who you are. When those two things are aligned, who you are and the context you are operating in, something works. When they are not, something does not. That gap is felt long before it is understood.

You have more than one identity

There is something that does not get said enough: you are not one thing.

What I mean by that is this: we all have a professional identity, the version of you that shows up in meetings, makes decisions, leads teams or runs a business. We also have a parental identity if you have children, the version of you that is responsible for small humans and thinks about the world differently because of it. We have a friendship identity, a family identity, a social identity, the version of you that exists in relation to the people who have known you longest, or best, or in the contexts that have nothing to do with work.

None of these are fake. None of them are less real than the others. They are all genuinely what makes us who we are, different facets of the same person showing up in different contexts. The fact that you are slightly different at a school gate than you are in a boardroom does not mean you are being inauthentic. It means you are a fully functioning human being who reads context.

Research published in the British Journal of Social Psychology found that people who hold multiple identities and successfully integrate them, meaning they do not experience those identities as conflicting with each other, are significantly better adjusted and report higher wellbeing. The identities do not have to merge into one. They just need to feel like they belong to the same person. (Manzi et al., 2024)

The difficulty comes when they do not. When the professional identity has become so dominant that the other ones have got lost. When the parent identity is pulling so hard against the leader identity that neither one feels fully inhabited. When the version of yourself you present at work has moved so far from how you think that the gap has become exhausting to maintain.

That is when it starts to matter. The cost of managing the distance becomes something you can feel even when you cannot quite name it.

What influences you without necessarily knowing it

Every one of us arrives at adulthood, and at leadership, and at the various roles we inhabit, having already been shaped by things we did not consciously choose.

This might be the family we grew up in, the culture around us, the education system, our first professional environment. The messages, explicit and implicit, about what success looks like, what is expected of someone like you, what is acceptable to want, or what you should prioritise. These things condition how we see ourselves before we have had much opportunity to examine whether any of it is actually ours.

The lens through which we see ourselves may well have been handed to us by someone else at some point. Examining that lens is one of the most useful things we can all do, both to understand ourselves better and to lead the kind of life that actually fits with who we are.

The conditioning shows up in practical ways. Perhaps in the standard you hold yourself to that nobody else imposed on you but that you feel is non-negotiable. Maybe in the version of success you are measuring yourself against that you never consciously chose. Or in the guilt you feel when you say no, or the anxiety you feel when you receive praise. In the assumption that asking for help means weakness, or that uncertainty means you are not ready.

None of these are set in stone. They are worth knowing about, because they run in the background whether we are aware of them or not.

The Identity of Success and What It Is Built On

It’s a cliché but we all know that one person's version of success might be different to another's. Yet there is an identity wrapped up in what success means to all of us specifically.

Success means something different to everyone. It is personal, contextual and deeply tied to your own values. When your idea of what success looks like has been inherited rather than chosen consciously, it can undermine your sense of yourself regardless of what you achieve.

For some people, success means getting to a certain title, the CEO, the Director, or, the Partner. For others it might mean building something independent, or having the flexibility to be present for their family, or being able to pay the bills without anxiety. For some it is a large house or a particular kind of car. For others those things are entirely beside the point, and success looks like doing work that feels meaningful in a different way.

All of these are valid. The difficulty comes when the definition of success you are measuring yourself against was never actively chosen by you.

Professional environments have their own success narratives, the promotion trajectory, the revenue milestone, the industry recognition, and it is easy to absorb those narratives as your own without ever stopping to examine whether they align with what you value. When they do not, you can find yourself achieving things that feel hollow or falling short of markers that were never really yours to begin with, and feeling like something is wrong with you because of it.

Research on entrepreneurial identity and wellbeing has consistently found that founders and leaders who define success in terms that align with their own values report significantly higher satisfaction and psychological functioning than those who measure themselves against externally defined markers, even when the external markers are achieved. (Lin, Liu and Zhou, Frontiers in Psychology, 2023)

Getting clear on what success genuinely means to you, rather than what the environment suggests it should mean, is one of the most practically useful pieces of identity work available. It changes the filter and it changes which decisions feel right and which ones feel wrong.

How your current circumstances and relationships influence you right now

Identity is also being actively formed by the context you are in right now, not just something carried forward from the past. This matters because the work I do is always about the present and the future.

The organisation or environment you work in has a culture, and that culture carries a version of who you should be in it. Over time, without noticing it happening, people often find themselves adapting to that version. Adjusting a direct communication style because the culture rewards diplomacy. Performing certainty because the environment does not tolerate visible doubt. Prioritising speed because the culture equates pace with value. Each adaptation is individually reasonable. Collectively they can add up to a version of yourself that has moved a long way from the one that feels most accurate.

Research on organisational culture and identity consistently shows that the environment people work in actively shapes their self-perception, their values in practice and their sense of what is possible, often in ways they are not aware of until they step outside it. (Tandfonline, Organisational Culture Systematic Review, 2024)

Relationships do the same thing. The people closest to you, professionally and personally, reflect a version of you back. When those relationships are healthy and honest, that reflection is useful. When they are not, when the people around you have an investment in you staying as you are, or when the dynamic has moved in ways neither of you has named, the reflection can be distorting. You can find yourself operating from a version of yourself that belongs to a relationship or a context rather than to you.

This is more common than most people realise. The question is simply whether you are aware of it, and whether the version of yourself being shaped by your current context is one you would choose.

Identity is not static

One of the most useful things to understand about identity is that it changes. Who you are at 25 is not exactly who you are at 45, and who you are before a major transition is not exactly who you are after one. People often treat identity as if it should be fixed, as if uncertainty about who you are means something has gone wrong. It has not.

Identity adapts because life requires it. This might be changing a role, or a business growing into something different from what you built. Perhaps a relationship ends or a new one begins. You become a parent, or take on more responsibility than you expected, or something in your health changes. Each of these moments asks some version of the same question: who am I in this now?

The ability to adapt is one of the most important things a leader or founder can do. What I have noticed, though, is that in the middle of adapting, people can lose the thread of what does not change: their specific point of view, their values, the particular way they see things that nobody else quite replicates.

Values are the operating system

If identity is the broader picture, values are what run underneath. The interesting thing about values is that people often have them without being fully aware of what they actually are.

When someone takes the time to name their values honestly, something often becomes clear that was not visible before. It is usually quite simple. The things they care most about at work tend to be the same things they care most about at home. The same principles running in every context, even when the context looks completely different.

Worth noting too: your personal values and the brand values of your business do not have to be identical. What matters is having enough awareness of both to know where they work together and where they do not.

When the decisions being made and the way time is being spent are pulling away from those values, even when it is hard to articulate why, there is a cost. A persistent low-level sense of operating slightly out of alignment. Decisions feel harder than they should and energy drains without an obvious reason for it.

Once someone names a value that has been running their decisions without being visible, something tends to click. Choices that previously felt confusing suddenly make sense. So do the ones that felt wrong. Everything can be read against the same simple thread. That is what naming values does. It makes the filter visible.

What the blur actually is

This is where The Unblur gets its name.

The blur is not one single experience. It shows up differently depending on where you are.

For some people it is a direction question. What is the right next move? Which way from here? The clarity that used to feel available has gone somewhere and decisions that should feel straightforward keep reopening.

For others it is an identity question. The role, the business and the life are all going well enough by most measures, and yet the version of yourself operating in it feels slightly more managed, slightly more performed, than how you actually think. Something about it no longer quite fits.

For others still it is a confidence and authority question. The experience is real, the track record is there, and something underneath is still not fully settled. The gap between what you know you can do and how you actually feel in certain rooms.

Sometimes it is all three at once.

The blur tends to grow gradually rather than arriving suddenly. The pace of professional life, the decisions, the demands, the expectations, the comparisons, creates conditions in which the distance can widen without being noticed until it is wide enough to feel.

Getting clear again on who you are and what you are building means the decisions you make and the way you lead are coming from the right place.

How coaching helps with this

My coaching creates the thinking space and the right kind of conversation to do this work, with someone alongside you who has no stake in the outcome, enough experience to read what is actually happening, and the specific skill of asking the question that has not been asked yet.

One client described the experience as speaking with a wise owl, a sounding board, and someone who will not simply tell you what you want to hear. Another described it as having a trusted brain to think with, and a space to be heard.

Both of those descriptions point to the same thing. A space where you can think clearly about who you are and what really matters, without the usual pressure to perform, decide or manage how you come across.

The clearer that picture becomes, the better the decisions that follow. The more you trust your own thinking, the less you need the room to confirm it. That is what this work is actually for.

When you are ready, a free discovery call is the starting point.

Book a discovery call or email penny@katherineashmore.com

References

Manzi, C. et al: Multiple social identities and wellbeing, insights from a person-centred approach. British Journal of Social Psychology, 2024. https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjso.12704

Lin, S., Liu, S. and Zhou, W.: How entrepreneurs' identity influences their wellbeing in the entrepreneurial process. Frontiers in Psychology, January 2023. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9850138/

Frontiers in Psychology: Between Multiple Identities and Values, Professionals' Identity Conflicts in Ethically Charged Situations, 2022. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.813835/full

Rashid, M. et al: Organisational Culture, A Systematic Review. Tandfonline, April 2024. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311975.2024.2340129

Annual Reviews: Career Transition and Professional Identity, Dynamic Processes, Multiple Selves and Nonlinear Trajectories, 2026. https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-020924-071546