I hired a coach recently. Not to sharpen my strategy or refine my messaging. I hired her to help me find my personality.

That probably sounds strange coming from someone who spent four decades standing in front of rooms and running organizations. But here is the truth. For most of those years, I was hiding.

Behind a title. Behind a set of responsibilities so large they became a kind of armour. Behind uniforms of every kind. The literal ones and the ones we build for ourselves out of seniority and status and sheer busyness.

The person underneath all that? She was in there. I just wasn’t sure anyone was supposed to see her.

I chose this coach deliberately.

She is not North American. I wanted someone whose view of the world had been shaped by something different from the culture I spent my career inside. Same values, different lens. That combination turned out to be exactly what I needed.

In our first full conversation, she asked me something I was not prepared for. What is the most important thing you have learned in your life?

Nobody had ever asked me that before.

My answer came without much hesitation, and it surprised me a little by how clear it was.

All humans are very much alike. All humans deserve respect. And none of us should be defined by our title, our paycheque, our earnings potential, or the company we work for.

That’s it. Nearly forty years inside some of the largest and most complex organizations on the planet, and that is what stayed. Not the deals. Not the strategies. Not the org charts.

The people.

Twice, once before and once after that conversation with my coach, I had similar conversations about a different topic. Both went the same way. Both people told me they were no longer calling themselves by their title. No longer was it the deputy director of the organization or the head of a such-and-such department. They had switched to I am working as a or I am heading up a such and such team.

Yes, it’s a small change. But here’s why it matters.

The phrase, I am, has real power. It’s about YOU. So why on earth do you limit yourself to only the title and the money you make?

On my desk, I have a circle with the words “I AM” written directly in the middle. All around the outside of the circle are phrases of how I view my life and the goodness I have. There is zero mention of my business. Nothing about the specifics of what I earn or what I do. The only thing I ever say these days is that I work as a business and executive strategist.

Most of us struggle to answer the question, “What is the most important thing you have learned in your life?” We are too busy answering a different one. “What do you do?” We answer it so many times it starts to feel like the truth. I am a vice-president. I am a manager. I am a forklift driver. We become the answer. And somewhere in the process, the actual person disappears behind it.

But you were not born with a job title. You came into this world as something else entirely.

That is the synchronicity that keeps showing up in my life lately. The coach, the conversations, the circle on my desk. All pointing at the same thing. The other synchronicity that continues is the right things appearing at the right time.

A few hours after that initial conversation, an article about Viktor Frankl appeared in my Substack feed. You remember that name, right? Well, while Frankl was in the concentration camps, he discovered the single reason that defines how people survive and thrive. Hint: they have a compelling reason to continue. We’ll get into that next week.

For now, spend 15 minutes looking inward. What is the most important thing you have learned in your life?