Last week’s piece was about what happens when that gets overdone, when service turns into a good-girl complex running on fear instead of love. That doesn’t mean helping people is bad. It isn’t.
This week is about something related, but different. It’s not that other people only see one thing in you. It’s that you see it in yourself first, and once you do, you start approaching everything through it.
The fixer. You’re the one who stays calm when everything’s on fire. Systems fail, people panic, and somehow you’re the one who steps in and makes it make sense again. You get so good at it that fixing becomes the only lens you know how to look through. So you start fixing your marriage the way you fix a broken process. You start fixing your kids the way you fix a missed deadline. But a marriage isn’t a process, and a child isn’t a deadline. Sometimes what’s needed isn’t a fix. It’s understanding. It’s listening. It’s curiosity.
The listener. You ask good questions. People leave conversations with you feeling seen, and word gets around. You get so good at drawing other people out that you forget how to ask for anything yourself. You help everyone else make their case, get the promotion, find their voice, but you never learned to advocate for you.
Here’s why this matters more than it sounds like it should. If your sense of self is built on a skill, what happens when the circumstances that let you practice it disappear?
Say you’ve spent fifteen years as the go-to fixer at your company. The high flier. The one everyone calls when something’s broken. You’re good at it, and you know you’re good at it, because the whole company keeps proving it to you. Then you quit. Or you get laid off. And now there’s no fire to walk into, no system to save, no one calling your name because something’s broken and only you can fix it.
Where does that muscle go?
This is the part almost nobody prepares you for. It isn’t just “what job do I do next.” It’s “who am I, when the thing I built my whole identity on has nowhere left to be used?”
I used to describe this with the image of a college student turning in a paper written like a grade-school book report. Technically a paper, but the professor can see immediately it’s the wrong tool for the room. That’s true. But it’s not actually the most concerning part. The more concerning part is that the student often can’t see it. She thinks she turned in a strong paper. She’s standing so far inside her old paradigm that she can’t recognize it as old.
That’s the real work here. Not fixing the fixer, or teaching the listener to speak up. Not yet. First, just seeing the cage. Noticing that you’re standing inside a paradigm you built years ago, maybe decades ago, and you’ve used it so long you’ve stopped being able to tell it apart from you.
Here’s the question to sit with this week: what’s the one skill you’ve built your whole sense of self on? And what would be left of you if the circumstances that call for it disappeared tomorrow?
You don’t need an answer yet. You just need to start noticing the shape of the cage. Because once you can see it, you can start asking what’s actually in you that hasn’t had room to grow, which is exactly where we’re headed next.
With you on becoming the person Allah will be proud of.
Coach Gemi, Leadership | Identity Coach
Learn more about me here.
PS: Want to have coffee with me on a regular basis? Consider becoming a founding member. ;)