What Do You Do?

Someone asked me that question last weekend. Casual setting, new acquaintance, the standard adult opening line.

For 28 years, I had an answer. School name, role, done. The other person nodded, made a connection of their own (”oh, my niece went there”), and we moved on to whatever came next.

That’s not how it goes anymore.

Now I open my mouth and watch the other person’s face for the first sign of confusion. Digital marketing. Independent schools. K through 12. Strategy. Helping schools that can’t afford a full-time marketing director get marketing support without the full-time salary.

By the time I’m done, the conversation has shifted. They’re being polite. They’re nodding. But the easy back-and-forth that used to happen after my old answer is gone.

I used to think this was a marketing problem. If I could just tighten my elevator pitch, I’d land it cleanly. So I worked on it. I rehearsed different versions. I tested them on my wife. None of them solved the problem, because the problem wasn’t the pitch.

The problem was that I had spent 28 years letting an institution do the explaining for me.

When I said the school name, the school did all the work. Everyone had a frame for what a school was. They knew what a director of admissions did, even if they didn’t know the specifics. They had stories about their own school days. There was shared ground before I said anything personal at all.

Now there’s no shared ground. I’m a person nobody has heard of, doing a job most people don’t have a category for, serving a niche that requires explanation. The institution used to fill in all the blanks. I have to fill them in myself, every time, with someone new.

What surprised me was how much of my identity was wrapped up in that shortcut.

I didn’t realize, when I was working at a school, how much of who I thought I was depended on the school being the thing that introduced me. The school was the noun. I was the adjective attached to it. People knew what the noun was, so they assumed they knew what I was, even when they didn’t.

When the noun went away, I had to become the noun.

That has been one unexpected, difficult piece of this transition. Not the money. Not the schedule. Not the workload. The slow, ongoing work of being someone who has to introduce himself from scratch instead of being introduced. Mind you, this is not about ego for me; it’s about identity and how much of our work, and what we do, is who we are.

I’ll be honest. I’m not great at it yet. Three and a half years in, and I still stumble through the answer at parties. I still over-explain. I still see the polite nod and feel the small pang of missing the days when my title was a complete sentence.

But here’s what I’ve started to notice. The people who do this work well, the consultants and entrepreneurs I’ve watched closely, share something in common. They’ve stopped trying to translate their old institutional identity into a new entrepreneurial one. They’ve built a new identity from the ground up, one that stands on its own.

That’s the work I’m doing now. Not just building a business. Building an answer to a question that used to take me half a second.

If you’re thinking about leaving a school, or any institution that has carried you for a long time, this is worth knowing in advance. You’re not just leaving a job. You’re leaving the shortcut that lets you walk into rooms and have people understand who you are without you having to say it.

Be ready to do that work yourself, for yourself.