Have you ever been asked the age-old question, “who are you” and you just stare at the person blankly because all your thoughts exited your brain? I used to be able to easily answer this question, at least I thought I could. I would say that I worked for such a such company with such a such role doing such a such job...but is that who I really was?
After leaving the corporate world and embarking on my own, I’ve been struggling with this lack of identity and feel like each day is a crisis of identity without my safety net of who I was or who they wanted me to be as a corporate employee. Now, as I lay the foundation of my own company, I am forced to do a deep dive, on my own, into my core: Who is Betsy Powlus? Complicating the internal reflection is that fact that my eldest ventured off to college this year. How much of my identity is also wrapped up in being a proud parent?
I understand why people warn that mid-life is difficult. For me, it’s proving to be a pivotal transition point. Do I hang my hat on the barely surface-deep identity that I accepted the narrative of for half my life or do I take the time that I’ve been awarded to understand my strengths, passions, purpose, and calling?
Women’s Leadership Program’s Key Takeaways
Staring at a blank sheet of paper, just willing my identity to be revealed felt like an overwhelming and crushing task. Then I remembered I had already done an exercise like this before. In early December of 2023, I was invited into a leadership program for women. Even though the timing was sub-optimal (during the hustle and bustle of my kids’ Christmas concert season and the usual holiday stress), it was the first time in my career that I felt like I was with my people. I had a sense of belonging. Many of these women were just like me: balancing motherhood with the ambition of progressing our careers, feeling passed over time and time again, and looking for a formula to move out of individual contributor into a people manager role. Reflecting on that program, the following 3 key learnings came to mind when trying to articulate who I am:
Understanding Your Core Values: Knowing and understanding your core values is critical when evaluating career moves and working through conflict.
Unlocking Potential: We all have hidden potential. Whether you’re a youth sports coach, a manager, a parent, or a spouse, you see it in the people you interact with and coach each day, and it is satisfying to watch the growth that you help to unlock in others.
Peer Coaching: Whether it’s in the classroom, the office, or a field, harnessing the collective intelligence from a peer group can help expedite your learning and diversify your outcomes.
Core Values
In the nearly two decades that I’d been working, I never participated in an exercise that helped me to understand my core values, nor did the thought ever cross my mind. The program paired us up with a special coach. The exercise seemed simple, but the outcome was profound. My coach asked me to tell her about myself but not the typical “tell me what your job is” exercise. She asked me to tell her the story about my life. Interwoven in my story was the fact that I was the child of two chemists who grew up in a very small town, married my high school sweetheart, and had big city type dreams. She noted the details and the times in my life that brought me excitement but also noted the facts that brought me frustration and pain. At the end of the exercise, which only took about 45 minutes, she was able to extract from me my core values:
Family
Accountability
Authenticity
Integrity
Grit
Equity
Experimenting
Knowing my core values was life changing. In 2024, when I was exploring new opportunities, I used my core values to help me determine if the roles I was seeking were aligned with my core values. When I felt myself getting frustrated with coworkers or team members, I would ask myself, “Am I struggling because what they are asking me to do goes against my values?” and most of the time, the answer was yes. Suddenly, after nearly two decades in corporate, I finally started to understand who I was and what made me tick. If you have never done this exercise before, I would highly recommend finding a coach who is willing to guide you through it. It was a lightbulb moment for me.
Unlocking Potential
When I finally was given the pleasure of leading the most amazing direct report, she and I read a book together called Hidden Potential by Adam Grant. At the time, we were responsible for building a people manager community, but Adam’s concept of building scaffolding resonated with us and helped us to create the structure and framework for what eventually became our People Manager Community. Reflecting upon it now, during the women’s leadership course, we all knew we had hidden potential, but we lacked the tools, common language, and knowledge for how to unlock the potential. Not until I became a people manager did I yearn to understand how to unlock the potential in someone else. In order to grow, you need to be comfortable being uncomfortable, but you also need help building the scaffolding so that you have the freedom to experiment and fail.
This second-act-phase of my life is a giant experiment and with this economy, taking a bet on myself feels incredibly risky and scary most days. I also know that there are leaders, former colleagues, and friends in my life who are actively building the scaffolding for me so that I can scale the mountain of entrepreneurship, and I’m grateful for their temporary support structure.
Just like a parent gets excited when they teach their child a new skill or helps them to overcome an obstacle, I finally got a taste of how it feels to help another individual discover their hidden potential, and I can’t wait to incorporate my passion to help others in my own business.
Peer Coaching
For most of my career, I wrongfully thought coaching meant solving problems for others. It wasn’t until I participated in the leadership program that I discovered that coaching was a skill that required practice, patience, and extreme listening skills. Being the “listen to respond” type of personality, I found the coaching module of the program to be quite challenging. Active listening requires restraint, selflessness, and an open mind. The program provided an opportunity to do peer coaching. While we were in a group of 5-7, one person was the coach and one person was in the hot seat, presenting a challenge, and everyone else was an observer. The hot seat individual spent a few minutes outlining the challenge they were facing. The coach could ask clarifying questions, but they could not be yes or no questions.
It seemed simple enough, but we all found ourselves wanting to jump in and offer solutions as the coach. After weeks of practice, I grew to love the role of coaching in the safe peer setting because it was satisfying to watch one of my peers bring a challenge to the table, think they didn’t have the solutions and hoped that we did, and by the end of the coaching session, they formulated their own solutions. The pleasure of seeing them implement their solutions between the sessions and reporting the outcomes the next session made me realize that coaching is my passion.
Who Am I
With the loss of employment and the send off of my daughter to college, I still struggle with my identity on a weekly basis. But during this decompression phase, I have learned that my degree and my job title do not define me. While both gave me the skills, knowledge, and experience to succeed, they are only surface deep. After a bit of self-reflection, I learned the following about myself:
I am a woman who puts her family first. If my child calls and asks me to drop off their forgotten choir folder at school before choir rehearsal, I’m running it over to the school. If the soccer team needs parent volunteers, I’m there - not because I want accolades but because my kid spends more time with the team than he does at home and that team qualifies as his family. I hate to miss my kids’ sporting events, concerts, or doctors’ appointments (says the lady who drove 2 hours to be there for her daugher’s first root canal). It’s a non-negotiable for me. When I was in a role that required a lot of travel, I felt conflicted more times than I care to think about.
Lack of accountability is my biggest pet peeve. Seeing it or hearing about it will get me fired up every single time. I am understanding, patient, empathetic, and kind...until someone doesn’t accept accountability for their actions.
I am my authentic self and value when others are as well. I don’t treat people differently based on their title, role, social status, celebrity status, etc. You get the same “me” no matter who you are, and I have never been able to change this core value, for better or worse.
I believe that integrity can never be earned back once lost. I am who I am no matter whether someone is watching.
While some call it stubbornness, I like to say I have grit. I seldom give up without a valiant fight. Did I know how to manage my own Microsoft tenant? Absolutely not. Was I super frustrated trying to figure out how to set up my own Microsoft business account? You betcha. But I watched many YouTube videos, had a few screaming matches with my computer, and leveraged a few people in my IT network to battle the connection of my web domain and Microsoft email account.
My second biggest pet peeve is lack of equity. I am passionate about leveling the playing field. I hate watching others suffer if they lack the skills needed to succeed. I love teaching tech tips, productivity hacks, and digital compentency skills to help others level up in this constantly evolving technology-driven world we are living in. As a nerdy child, I often felt excluded, which shaped me to fight for inclusion or speak up when there is lack of it.
Finally, experimenting daily fuels my curiosity and need for continuous learning. I am a button-pusher by nature. I love to try new ways of working, new gadgets, new foods, and new technology. I am comfortable being uncomfortable.
My core values make up my identity. They are agnostic of the role I’m in, at home or in the office. They shape my daily interactions and inform my decisions. While I have felt lost the past 10 months without my “identity”, I wasn’t lost at all. What was lacking was my sense of belonging.
After doing the reflection of who I am, I spent the past few weeks putting pen to paper refining my business model. With the opportunity to turn my passions into a business comes the weight of trying to get it right first time. But after a think tank session with a great friend who forged a similar path, she emphasized something that I’ve known all along: I don’t have to start perfectly. I just need to start and iterate as I evolve. The countdown begins now, with you as my accountability partners. Will you help me find my new sense of belonging as I take my next step into my career journey and officially launch my coaching and consulting business on November 2nd?
