Monday morning does not loom anymore. There is no agenda, no planned meetings and no unexpected absence to cover. That’s because the work is done. The business has closed, the end of an era.

Without realising it, daily life has been a series of tasks and actions, the daily commute (short for me as I generally worked from home), responses to emails. Rewriting the emails before sending them so they appear less snarky. The essential meeting that has simply vanished into the ether. These seemingly important things that now matter little, took another very important thing with them when they went.

Purpose.

But wait a second. Isn’t this exactly what you wanted all along? Revelling in the idea of all the free time that you would have to complete your own projects, enjoy a cheeky lunch with friends or taking a stroll midday without having to rush back? And yet it is so easy for the days to drift past, not feeling like you are taking advantage of this golden time, making the most of the opportunity, the freedom.

So why does it feel so weird?

Well, we place expectation on ourselves that can sometimes be extraordinarily high. Remember telling yourself you were going to bang out that novel in the first couple of weeks? It would take a well-known writer time to produce enough for a short novel and yet you believed that it was entirely possible in half the time.

If we are not careful it is easy to fill the time we have with action that does not improve the feeling of worth. Tasks around the house are necessary, but every action can feel like you are taking time away from the task you should be focussing on, regaining employment or setting up on your own perhaps. That’s when the guilt kicks in. Suddenly you are not owing an organisation an explanation for your inaction. You owe it to yourself.

Work is not just about the money (even though that’s nice!). Work provides people with structure to their lives. For some it provides status. Without realising it you have been provided with a daily routine, physical and mental challenge, skills to learn regularly and social contact. All of this is removed the moment you close the laptop on that final day, and that can leave an emptiness that the brain can struggle to fill. It doesn’t matter if you loved or hated your job, these are the things that it gave you. Purpose and identity.

These days if someone asks me what I do for a living I would have to say nothing, nothing at all. It feels hollow after so many years of having that HR Consultant badge attached.

But wait, what’s that on the horizon? A new identity, a new direction? Possibly, it could just be the postman.

So why does it feel so unsettling to not have that employment, that role? It might be because our sense of purpose has not always been driven by our true feelings, but has been shaped by the organisational needs of wherever we worked. Reconnecting with your own sense of purpose and drive can take some time, but there is something in the process that feels important.

How much time have you spent actually thinking about your purpose? It is not as simple or transactional as needing a certain amount of money to survive. That is survival. Purpose and drive is about what you spend your time doing giving you fulfilment and meaning. The things that you can look back on and be proud of.

If you were to put a figure on it, what percentage of time you have spent at work doing meaningless tasks, or even worse, things that you now don’t even remember doing?

Rebuilding identity

You will certainly have heard the phrase, dance like nobody is watching. Now I am no dancer. If people were watching, they would likely want to look away very quickly. But the point is that right now, in this space between employment is the opportunity to ask, what if I was not that identity that the last job gave me. What if there really was more to me than that.

Now is the chance to explore this, because right now, nobody is watching. It is the opportunity to experiment with what you tell people about yourself. What if instead of saying I am a HR Consultant I said I was a published writer. What if I said I was a dolphin trainer? Ok no one would believe the second one unless I somehow managed to convince an unsuspecting pod to swim up the Leeds Liverpool canal but you get my meaning.

At this point the only person who is evaluating me and my performance is me. There is no measure for how you spend your day, whether it was useful or not to reorganise your kitchen cupboards or instead apply for new jobs. That is up to you. That feeling of self determination is both liberating and terrifying and how well you hold yourself to account is critical to how you move forward.

I regularly ask myself the question:

If you are not that today, what will you be tomorrow?

Or some other version of the same principle.

Heraclitus argued that:

You cannot step into the same river twice.

The meaning behind this is simple. The river has changed, you have changed. You are not the person you were yesterday and neither is the river.

Now replace ‘river’ with ‘job’. And ask yourself, if you were to go back to the job you left, would it be the same? Would you be the same? Even if it is only a short time since you left, the work will be different, the team will be different without your dynamic, and you will have changed since you left. So would you still want to go back.

There is no going back, only going forward.

We spend the majority of our lives at work. We need this, not just for compensation, but for purpose, meaning and the need to do something valuable with our time. But it is still only a part of our identity. We are not our job roles, we are much more complex than that.

I already have in my head the things that I want to take forward into future work. The space to think has helped me to reconnect with that identity that I am working towards. If given the opportunity, what part of you would continue into the next chapter of your career, and which would you gently place in a box and leave behind you?

Whatever you decide, remember the river is not the same and neither are you.