Who Are You When the Title Is Gone?

Ask someone to tell you about themselves at a networking event, and watch what happens. Almost without fail, the first sentence is a job title. “I’m a VP of Marketing.” “I run operations for a logistics company.” “I’m between roles right now” - said with a small flinch, as if the sentence itself costs something.

This isn’t an accident of small talk. Pew Research Center found that 51% of employed Americans say they get a real sense of identity from their job - not just income, identity. That number has actually fallen over time: when Gallup first asked American workers this question in 1989, 57% said yes. We are, if anything, slightly less fused with our jobs than workers were thirty-five years ago, and even so, more than half of us still answer the question “who are you” with “what do I do.”

The number climbs sharply with seniority and education - 77% of people with a postgraduate degree say their job gives them a sense of identity, compared to 38% of those with a high school education or less. Which means the more successful you become by conventional measures, the more likely you are to have quietly let your title become your identity’s load-bearing wall.

I want to spend this issue on what happens to that wall when the title changes - because it always does, one way or another.

Six titles, one person, twenty-four years

I have been a pre-sales executive, a B2B enterprise sales manager, a partner ecosystem manager, a channel hardware sales lead, a category manager for laptops and displays, a head of online sales, a sales director, and - for a stretch in 2023 - the person responsible for both the online and offline business of a major smartphone company in India, with close to 300 people reporting into that structure. That’s not a résumé line. That’s roughly eight different job titles across four companies over twenty-four years, before I added a ninth: founder.

I started at Novell in Kolkata in 2002 as a pre-sales executive and moved into direct enterprise sales within six months. From there it was Oracle in Bangalore, managing partner relationships for about four years. Then IBM, selling hardware through channel partners for two more. Then Samsung, where I spent over a decade - starting in a B2B role managing laptops, printers, and large displays through distributors, then, midway through, going back to business school at IIM Kozhikode while still working full-time, and using both to move into an entirely different part of the company: building Samsung’s direct-to-consumer e-commerce platform from nothing. Then OnePlus, recruited in 2021 to do something similar for them. I stayed there until March of this year, building Boundless quietly in parallel for the last stretch of it.

Here’s what strikes me looking back: at almost every one of those transitions, for a few weeks or months, I did not know quite how to answer “what do you do.” The title on the new business card hadn’t caught up with who I actually was yet, and the old title didn’t apply anymore either. Almost none of us stop to ask what was true about us in that gap, when no title applied at all - because sitting in that in-between space, unlabeled, feels like a kind of professional nakedness most of us would rather skip.

The quiet grief nobody names

There’s a reason that gap feels bad, and it isn’t just vanity or ego. A 2024 study published in BMC Psychology found that when people lose their organizational affiliation - through a layoff, a restructuring, a role elimination - it produces genuine identity disruption, with grief-like symptoms: shock, sadness, anger, and a kind of disorientation about who they are now that the professional self they’d built is gone. This isn’t a fringe reaction. It’s a well-documented psychological pattern, and it shows up even in people who weren’t especially attached to their job on paper.

I’d add - carefully, because this isn’t something I’ve seen formally studied - that a version of this grief shows up even in title changes nobody would call a loss. A promotion. A lateral move you asked for. A pivot into a new industry. Even when the change is good, even when you chose it, there’s often a quiet mourning for the version of yourself that made sense under the old title. We don’t have language for that kind of grief because we’ve decided, culturally, that only losses “count.”

Self-worth that rises and falls with a title

Psychologists have a name for the deeper pattern underneath this: contingent self-esteem - self-worth that depends on external validation, performance, or status markers, rather than resting on something more stable. Research on contingent self-esteem consistently links it to greater emotional volatility: when the external marker goes up, you feel good; when it dips, or disappears, your sense of yourself dips or disappears with it.

A title is one of the cleanest examples of an external marker there is. It’s printed on a card. It’s visible on LinkedIn. It’s legible to strangers in a way that “I’m patient with my team” or “I notice things other people miss” never quite is. Which is exactly why it’s so easy to let the title do the work that a more durable sense of self should be doing.

On average, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics research tracking the same group of workers over decades, people hold somewhere around 13 different jobs between the ages of 18 and 58. Thirteen. If your identity is rebuilt from scratch each time the title changes, you are signing up for roughly a dozen identity crises over the course of a working life, whether you notice them as crises or not.

What doesn’t move when the title does

When I finally sat down, in the middle of that OnePlus stretch, to work out what I actually valued - separate from whatever role I was performing that year - six things came up that had nothing to do with a job title: significance, authority, influence, excellence, freedom, health. None of those require a specific designation to exist. You can express significance as a sales director or as a father teaching his son to ride a bicycle. You can express excellence running a national business unit or running a small consulting practice of one. The values were constant across eight titles. The titles were never the constant.

Looking back at Novell, Oracle, IBM, Samsung, OnePlus - different logos, different bosses, different KPIs - the throughline wasn’t any of the job descriptions. It was that I kept showing up wanting to build something that mattered, wanting to get better at the craft of selling and leading, wanting some measure of freedom in how I did it. That throughline is what a title can never capture and what a layoff, a restructuring, or a career pivot can never take from you, because it was never stored in the title to begin with.

Three questions that have nothing to do with your business card

If you want to test how much of your identity currently lives in your title, three questions do the job better than any framework. What do you do that you would still do even if nobody paid you for it? Who comes to you for something that has nothing to do with your official role - advice, calm, a second opinion - and what does that tell you about what you actually offer people? And if your title vanished tomorrow, what would still be true about how you think, what you value, and how you treat people?

None of those questions have a job title as the answer. That’s the point. The title is the costume; these questions are trying to find the person wearing it.

Why this matters more right now

This isn’t an abstract exercise in 2026. Restructuring, AI-driven role redesign, and shorter tenures mean more people than ever are moving between titles faster than they can rebuild a sense of self around each one. Job titles themselves are shifting shape underneath people who haven’t changed employers at all - the same desk, the same badge, a role description that’s been rewritten twice in eighteen months.

If your footing depends entirely on the label on your business card, every one of those shifts becomes an existential threat instead of a Tuesday. Build the footing somewhere sturdier, and the title becomes what it should have been all along - useful information about your current role, not the whole answer to who you are.

If any of this is landing because you’re mid-transition right now, a certified Boundless You life coach can help you work through it. You can book a discovery call at boundlessyou.in.

Next week: what I call the growth paradox - the strange fact that the very growth we chase can require us to let go of the identity that got us here in the first place.

- Ranjeet

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Sources

• “How Americans View Their Jobs.” Pew Research Center, October 2016. pewresearch.org
• “Pre-job loss grief reactions and work attachment among sick-listed employees.” BMC Psychology, Springer Nature, 2024. springer.com
• “Number of Jobs, Labor Market Experience, and Earnings Growth.” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, NLSY79. bls.gov