The Roles We Learn to Carry
Most of us accumulate roles over the course of a working life. We become employees, teachers, clinicians, managers, consultants, writers, business owners, or some changing combination of these. Each role has its own expectations, language, responsibilities, and measures of success. Over time, it becomes easy to organize our professional identity around the positions we happen to occupy.
I have done this myself. My work has moved through academic settings, clinical work, coaching, writing, scholarship, program leadership, and other forms that have changed across the years. Each one has mattered, and each has asked something different of me. For a long time, the practical question was often which role I was in and what that role required. Lately, another question has become more interesting: what is the same person bringing to all of them?
That question has changed the way I think about meaningful work. The work that feels most alive to me now is work in which the distinctions among roles become less important than the qualities I bring into them. Curiosity, accompaniment, reflection, teaching, making sense of experience, and helping people see what may already be present in their lives appear in more than one part of what I do. The job titles change. Those ways of working remain recognizably mine.
When Separate Things Begin to Belong Together
One reason this became visible was that several projects were moving at once. My coaching work was becoming more satisfying. I was writing more regularly in several places, including Mexico Featured and Mexico News Daily. The book was advancing. I was also paying closer attention to my own development and to decisions about what kinds of work I want to carry forward.
I had initially experienced these as separate areas. Coaching belonged in one category, writing in another, academic work somewhere else, personal development outside all of them. As I continued working, I began to see more continuity among them. The same interests kept appearing in different forms: meaning, identity, change, belonging, transition, and the relationship between the life we say we want and the life we are actually living.
Once I noticed that continuity, meaningful work began to look less like a career category and more like a pattern of expression. I no longer needed every activity to fit under one professional label in order for the larger picture to make sense. The relationship among the activities mattered more than whether they shared a title.
I can see something similar in my move from Santa Fe to Querétaro. That move changed far more than my address. It altered the context in which I teach, write, work with people, and think about the next part of my own life. I have written elsewhere about coming to understand México as home, and one thing living here has given me is a different vantage point from which to see the work I carried with me and the work that has emerged since.
Meaningful Work and the Person Doing It
There are many legitimate reasons to work. We need income, stability, structure, contribution, community, and the other practical things employment can provide. A job can be good work without becoming a complete expression of identity. I am interested in another layer of the question: what happens when the work we choose begins to reflect more of who we are?
For me, that has meant paying more attention to the relationship between the person and the role. A title can describe the setting in which I work, while it tells me relatively little about how I actually meet another person, approach a problem, teach a student, write an essay, or sit with uncertainty. Those qualities arise from somewhere deeper than the job description.
This has changed the way I think about professional change as well. A role may end, an institution may reorganize, a contract may disappear, or a field may shift. Those changes matter. At the same time, the capacities we have developed and the ways we have learned to contribute often travel with us. Meaningful work can continue in another form because the source of the work was never located entirely in the position.
That realization has been useful at a point in my own life when I am considering several possible directions. I am less interested than I once was in identifying the single correct professional label. I am more interested in whether the work I accept, build, or create allows the parts of myself that matter to me to participate in it.
The Value of a Place to Return
The mastermind conversations have helped make this easier to see. Their usefulness is not that someone else tells me what I should do. What matters is the recurring opportunity to hear myself speak about the same questions over time. A commitment named one week can be revisited the next, and a pattern that would be easy to miss inside my own head becomes more visible once it has appeared in several conversations.
This kind of structure matters because intention alone can be surprisingly fragile. We can care about something and still give our attention to whatever arrives first. We can decide that a project matters and then watch it disappear beneath meetings, messages, deadlines, and the thousand small demands that fill a working week. A recurring conversation creates a place where those intentions have to reappear.
I have noticed that this reduces mental clutter. Projects become decisions, decisions become actions, and some possibilities are released because they no longer belong. The change is less about doing more than about giving different things a clearer place. That has created more room to notice which work feels connected to the life I am trying to live.
In that sense, meaningful work has become closely related to attention. What receives regular attention begins to take shape. What is repeatedly deferred tells us something too. The mastermind gives me one way to observe that pattern, although I suspect there are many others: supervision, consultation, journaling, conversation with a trusted friend, a weekly review, or any practice that gives us a place to return to the questions we say matter.
What Remains When the Title Changes
I do not know that there is a final version of this question. The work I am doing now will continue to change, and so will I. Some roles will probably become more important and others less so. New forms may appear that I cannot see yet. I expect that meaningful work will continue to mean something slightly different as those changes unfold.
What feels clearer to me is that I want the work to come from the same person. I want the way I coach, write, teach, speak, and make professional choices to feel related because they are expressions of the same life. That does not require every project to look alike. It asks for enough continuity that I can recognize myself in what I am doing.
This may be one reason I am less preoccupied with finding the perfect professional definition than I once was. A definition can be useful for a website, a biography, or the practical work of telling someone what we do. It becomes less useful when we ask it to contain the whole of a working life. The person is always larger than the role.
I find myself returning to that thought when I consider the parts of my life that currently matter most to me. Coaching, writing, teaching, the book, conversations with friends, and the work I am doing on myself may look like separate activities from the outside. From where I stand, they increasingly feel like different expressions of one person trying to live and work with greater coherence.
Perhaps that is one way to recognize meaningful work. We begin to notice that what we are doing belongs to us because we can see ourselves in it, even when the setting changes. What part of your own work feels most like an expression of who you are, and what part may be asking to come closer?
With care,
Mark
Writing from home in Querétaro