Is this it?

It's the question a lot of people ask a good way into their agency career – not because anything's wrong, but because everything's fine and there's no obvious reason to change.

I asked it myself a few years ago: a satisfying career in client service, everything good on paper, and still it nagged. Will I ever do anything different? Or will this be it?

I found this dilemma explored in Herminia Ibarra's excellent book, 'Working Identity'. For much of our lives, a default script carries us: school, degree, first job, the next promotion. Then, a fair way in, the script runs out – and we're left to work out who we are, and what we do next, for ourselves.

My realisation is that your working identity is not your job title, or job description (although it's almost irresistible to hide behind these). It's who you are and how you do what you do – specifically you, uniquely, in that role.

The default response to "is this it?" is do I stay, or do I go? But it's a bit of a false binary.

In account management that's easy to forget, because the job description appears so detailed and defined. But becoming the job description is a route to going through the motions: competent, complete, and faintly unsatisfying. The job of client service is ultimately about being a person – the person – your clients and teams relate to. They don't relate to a formula.

Ibarra's insight is about how working identity evolves. We assume we should think it through first – work out who we want to be, then act. In practice it runs the other way – acting your way there through small experiments, led by what genuinely interests you. For me, that curiosity led somewhere I'd never have planned: existential philosophy, then training as a psychotherapist and coach. None of it looked like agency client service, but it fundamentally changed how I see and deliver that work.

So rather than "is this it?", the better question might be, "what's uniquely mine in what I do – and am I developing it deliberately, on purpose, or just running the script?"

For anyone wrestling with this dilemma – either intentionally, or because a change in working identity is coming regardless – I highly recommend reading 'Working Identity'. And I'm always happy to chat and share more of my own experiences.