You Are Not Your Job: Reinventing Yourself in a World That Keeps Changing

A reflection on identity, layoffs, reinvention, adaptability, and why generalists thrive in uncertain times — inspired by my interview on The Generalists podcast.

Something unexpected happened during a recent interview I had on The Generalists podcast. I’ve spoken about my career many times before — the shifts, the industries, the continents — but this time, as I heard myself speak, a realization surfaced that I had never articulated, not even privately.

We often tell our story as a sequence of accomplishments, as if life was a ladder and we simply climbed it. But mine was never a straight ascent. I began in aviation security back in Ukraine, checking passengers and inspecting luggage. Then I moved into retail entrepreneurship, then trade diplomacy on behalf of Malaysian government, then into technology leadership at Microsoft, VMware and Broadcom, and now at Cisco leading a regional sales across Asia Pacific, Japan, and China.

For years, I thought these transitions were disconnected, abrupt left turns, opportunities stumbled upon, reinventions forced by circumstances. However in that conversation, I finally saw the through-line.

It wasn’t just ambition or planning or strategy that carried me across these worlds, it was identity, or rather, the constant shedding of it.

When Your Job Becomes Your Identity

We don’t talk enough about what happens when the job title we wear begins to feel like our entire sense of self. We don’t talk about how fragile that identity becomes when companies restructure, when industries shift, when the ground moves beneath our feet.

I’ve been laid off twice in my life, and the hardest part wasn’t the financial uncertainty. It was the silence that followed, the question of who I was without a business card to point to.

No one teaches you how to navigate that void.

Most people try to fill it with another title, another achievement, another external marker to hold onto. But reinvention doesn’t begin with a new role, it begins with the uncomfortable moment when the old one falls away and there is nothing left but yourself.

The Power of Reinvention Beyond Titles

During that interview, I realized that what some people call being a “generalist” is really the ability to stay intact while your outer world rearranges itself. It is the capacity to step into new domains without losing your center, to adapt without fracturing, to evolve without erasing who you have been.

For years, I believed that competence and progression were my anchors. But when I started dancing, when I immersed myself in strength training, when I discovered the Chinese tea ceremony, something shifted. These weren’t hobbies, they were doorways back to intuition, embodiment, and inner grounding. They reminded me that identity can be fluid without being unstable, expansive without dissolving, self-authored rather than externally assigned.

Staying Whole While the World Changes Around You

We are living in a time when AI is reshaping industries faster than universities can update their curriculum. Job descriptions are becoming obsolete before suitable candidates come on board. Entire professions are dissolving while new ones emerge overnight. People are terrified, not of change, but of losing the identity they attached to consistency.

AI won’t replace humans who think, feel, imagine, interpret, and synthesize. It will replace the ones who allowed their minds to atrophy inside the borders of their job description. The ones who equated routine with safety. The ones who forgot how to reinvent.

Why Adaptability, Not Expertise, Defines the Future

The truth I arrived at, the one I had never put into words until that interview, is that resilience is not built through specialization. It is built through adaptability, curiosity, and the willingness to redefine yourself without collapse.

If you have ever felt the whisper that you are meant for something different…

If you have ever looked at your life and felt like you outgrew it…

If a part of you is quietly dissolving while another part is trying to be born…

then you already know what reinvention feels like.

It is not a leap.

It is an unfolding.

And perhaps the most rebellious act in a world obsessed with titles, labels, and expertise is to remember that you are allowed to become someone new… more than once, and without apology.

If you’d like to hear the conversation that opened this realization for me, here is the link to the full episode:

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