Professional identity and the letterhead
For most of my working life the organization field did a great deal of work on my behalf. An institution’s name tells a reviewer that somebody with resources has already looked you over and decided you were a reasonable risk. It stands in for a judgment nobody has time to make from scratch. There is real comfort in that, and anyone who has submitted work into a room full of strangers knows the relief of having something in the box.
The cost shows up slowly, which is what makes it hard to see. You begin to propose the things the letterhead would approve of. You choose the angle that fits the institution over the one that comes out of what you actually know, and you tell yourself it is strategy. After enough years you can lose track of which ideas started with you and which arrived because they were the ones an employer would be pleased to see presented. That is how a professional identity built on affiliation gives way. Nothing is taken from you. You hand it over in small increments, in exchange for something that felt like safety.
Coming to México ended some of that without my having decided to end it. The institutions that hold my working life are all somewhere else now, reachable by video and by mail, and daily life here has nothing to do with any of them. The man at the tortillería has no interest in my title. Distance turned out to accomplish something that intention alone had not been managing, which is that the affiliations became facts about my week instead of facts about my worth.
A refusal that has stood for thirty years
I have a longer history with institutional judgment than the submission form suggests. I have practiced under a supervised license in New Mexico since 1996, and I have been refused independent licensure that entire time, on the sole basis of the accreditation my doctoral program carried. The refusal has never concerned my competence. No client outcome, no supervisor’s evaluation, and no examination result has ever been at issue. A board looked at where the degree came from and closed the question.
Thirty years is long enough to learn something from a standing refusal, and what I learned took most of that time. For a great many of those years I read the decision as information about me. It sat underneath the way I introduced myself, the work I was willing to seek, and the private arithmetic I ran before saying yes to anything visible. What eventually shifted was recognizing that a refusal describes the institution making it. It describes the rule the board follows and the year the rule was written. It says nothing about the thirty years of practice that happened anyway, and nothing about the professional identity built across them.
The same holds when a letter goes the other way. An approval also describes the institution issuing it. If I let one tell me what my work is worth, I have handed back the instrument I spent years taking out of other people’s hands, and I have handed it back in the pleasant direction, which is the one nobody thinks to guard against. Withdrawing a projection works both ways. The favorable direction is easier to miss, because nothing in it hurts enough to make you look.
Choosing among the parts of a long record
Assembling several proposals over the past few days meant going back through a record longer than I usually reach for. Fellowship training in integrative medicine sits in there beside hospital work in behavioral medicine, beside assessment, beside doctoral teaching on the way story and language move a person. Any one of them could carry a session. Choosing among them is a different act from choosing what an employer would be pleased to see presented, and the second one is much easier to do without noticing you are doing it.
Much of A Life Aligned turns on this kind of choosing, and on the step I call commitment. Commitment there means going ahead with something before you have any proof it will work, and then staying with it through the long stretch when no proof arrives. I made that kind of decision about my own work a while ago, when I stopped organizing it around whether a board or a committee would approve. Nothing announced itself on the day. It showed up later, as a slow change in what I was willing to propose.
James Hollis writes that the second half of life turns on a change of question, from what the world asks of me to what wants to live through me. Once that change has taken place, professional identity stops depending on affiliation. It becomes a fact about where you spend your week. It stops being the thing that makes the work legitimate, because you already know what the work is and why you are doing it.
There is a test I have come to trust for this. Ask which part of the work you would keep doing with nobody watching and no line on a record to show for it. For me the answer has been consistent for a long time, and it is the hours given to students and mentees, the ones no schedule accounts for and no promotion depends on. Nobody assigns that work and no institution can take credit for it. It is also the part I would defend first if someone asked me to cut something. Whatever survives that question is the part of a professional identity that was never on loan.
So here is the question I am carrying into the week, and I would be glad to hear how you answer it. Where is your own professional identity still waiting on a field someone else is meant to fill in? And if the form in front of you had no organization line at all, what would you propose?
With care,
Mark
Writing from home in Querétaro