Purpose: Identity Bridging
Use the past to create your future
What is identity bridging
According to a study done by the Harvard School of Business, people who identified strongly with their work - either their industry, or title or work product - did better in retirement if they could do something called “identity bridging.” Basically, identity bridging is bringing something from your past into your future. It could be a skill or a fascination or an avocation… just something that is familiar in their pre-retirement life. For instance, if you love to write you might bring that skill to your retirement years by writing a newsletter. This identity bridge doesn’t have to be a direct correlation to your work. Just because you are an accountant, and identify as a very skilled, highly educated financial professional, doesn’t mean you have to bridge into retirement as a numbers geek. Maybe part of being a great accountant is being able to organize numbers well and prior to the accountant work you used to organize everybody’s everything. Voila! There’s your bridge! From accountant to everybody’s go-to closet organizer, or the annual church bazaar organizer, or maybe just your grandson’s hero because grandma will organize all of his action figures in his toy box so his mom doesn’t get mad at him.
How do you do it?
There are a few ways to go about finding your bridge. One exercise would be to list all of the jobs you ever wanted to do. What do they have in common? That could be a good bridge into the next thing. Do you have a creative outlet that hasn’t seen much light of day? That’s a great way to find an identity that may be a bit dormant and let it shine! You could also list skills you use at work - especially those that you are utilizing when you’re in a “flow” space. Are there skills you could bridge into something new? Finally, list the things you love to do (whether at work or at play) and then ask yourself WHY you love to do them. That “why” could be your bridge. Let me illustrate.
The Bridge On The River Why
One of my favorite identity stories is about someone I have never met. His name is Mark Bohr and he was an amazing technologist and Senior Fellow at Intel, where I worked. Intel credits him with leading the transition to two major technological advances in the past decade. Big stuff. He has met dignitaries and he has an unusual gift of being able to explain this techy stuff to anybody and everybody so lots of doors were opened for him to travel to wonderful places and meet inspiring people. Pretty life-defining stuff. But then, he was faced with retirement. And he did something I found extraordinary. He went part time at Intel and began to focus on volunteering at a local hospital. Basically, I think he was a candy striper! He was taking orders from others and doing mundane tasks and he certainly wasn’t the expert at any of it. I wondered how he could find any purpose or reward in any of what he now found himself doing. At one of the last open forums he delivered at Intel, I found out. He said that, over time, engineering had become a team sport and he relished being part of a team that changed lives. He said he was volunteering at the hospital to be part of a team that changed the lives of the people he interacted with. He liked the fact that he could be part of immediate change for someone, rather than the societal change he had been leading. His “why” wasn’t being a brilliant technologist who could solve the world’s problems. His “why” was being part of a team and changing lives. What a great bridge he found!
So if you’re winding down your career and talking about retirement as a jump into an abyss, maybe take a little time to think about what kind of identity bridge you could build over that abyss. Eventually, it will no longer be a bridge to the past. It will be your wonderful future!