When Your Work Becomes Part of Who You Are: Understanding Professional Identity

By Kathryn Arbic, RMT
Registered Massage Therapist | ART® Certified Provider
Doctor of Veterinary Medicine (DVM)
Master of Arts in Counselling Psychology — Candidate, Yorkville University

What happens when the role you've built your life around no longer fits quite the way it used to?

For many of us, work is more than a way to earn a living.

Our professions can become part of how we describe ourselves, how other people see us, where we belong, and how we understand our own abilities. Over time, our work can become woven into our identity so deeply that it can be difficult to separate who I am from what I do.

This is one reason professional transitions can feel surprisingly emotional—even when the change is something we have chosen.

You might be starting a new career, returning to school, stepping into leadership, reducing your hours, leaving a profession, combining several professional roles, or simply realizing that the way you have been working no longer reflects the person you are becoming.

Sometimes the difficult part isn't figuring out what to do next.

It's figuring out who you are becoming.

What is professional identity?

Professional identity is the way we understand ourselves in relation to our work and professional role.

It develops through education, training, experience, relationships, workplace culture, professional expectations, feedback from others, and our own understanding of what it means to be "good" at what we do.

Over time, we begin to develop an internal story:

I'm a veterinarian.

I'm a teacher.

I'm a business owner.

I'm a therapist.

I'm the person people come to when they need help.

I'm competent.

I'm reliable.

I'm successful.

These identities can provide an important sense of meaning and belonging.

But they can also become restrictive when the role starts to change.

Research on professional identity suggests that identity is not simply something we acquire through training. It continues to develop through our experiences, relationships, environments, and transitions. In healthcare particularly, researchers have described professional identity struggles as involving tensions between personal values, professional expectations, belonging, competence, and changing roles.

In other words, feeling uncertain about your professional identity does not necessarily mean that something has gone wrong.

Sometimes it means something is changing.

When competence and identity become intertwined

One of the more complicated aspects of professional identity is the relationship between competence and self-worth.

When you've spent years becoming very good at something, competence can become an important source of stability.

You know what you're doing.

You know how to solve problems.

People trust you.

You have accumulated knowledge, experience, credentials, relationships, and a reputation.

Then something changes.

You enter a new environment.

You take on a different role.

You return to school.

You begin learning something completely new.

You become less experienced than the people around you.

Suddenly, some of the things that previously made you feel capable aren't as available to you.

That can be surprisingly uncomfortable.

You may find yourself thinking:

Why don't I feel as competent as I used to?

Have I lost something?

Am I starting over?

What if I'm not good at this?

What does this say about me?

These questions can feel much bigger than the practical situation itself because they are not only questions about work.

They are questions about identity.

The strange experience of being both experienced and new

Professional transitions can create an interesting tension: you can be highly experienced in one area while simultaneously feeling like a beginner in another.

You haven't become less capable.

But the context in which your capability is recognized has changed.

This can be especially noticeable when someone moves between professions, changes workplaces, returns to education later in life, or begins integrating several areas of expertise.

You may know a great deal—and still have a lot to learn.

You may be experienced—and still feel inexperienced.

You may be confident in one room and uncertain in another.

All of those things can be true at the same time.

This is one reason professional transitions can sometimes feel disorienting. We tend to assume that competence should feel like a permanent internal state.

It isn't.

Competence is contextual.

And identity is relational.

How we see ourselves is influenced not only by what we know, but also by the environments we are in and the people around us.

When the professional environment no longer fits

Sometimes the struggle isn't that we've chosen the wrong profession.

It may be that the way the profession is being practiced no longer fits us.

A person can love their field and dislike the culture surrounding it.

They can value their profession while questioning the pace, expectations, hierarchy, business model, workplace environment, or definition of success.

They can be very good at something and no longer want to spend their life doing it in the same way.

This distinction matters.

Because when we experience discomfort at work, it is easy to immediately ask:

"Do I need to leave?"

But there are other questions worth asking:

What exactly isn't fitting anymore?

Is it the profession itself?

The workplace?

The pace?

The expectations?

The culture?

The role?

The amount of autonomy?

The way success is defined?

The relationship between your work and the rest of your life?

Or has your own identity changed?

Sometimes the answer is not "I chose the wrong career."

Sometimes it is:

"I've changed, and I need my work to change with me."

The grief that can accompany professional change

Professional transitions can also involve grief.

This can be difficult to recognize because the change may look positive from the outside.

You may have chosen the transition.

You may be excited about what's next.

You may even know that the change is necessary.

And still, something can be lost.

Perhaps it is the identity you built over decades.

Perhaps it is the feeling of mastery.

Perhaps it is a community of colleagues.

Perhaps it is the recognition that came with being experienced.

Perhaps it is the imagined future you once assumed you were building.

Sometimes we grieve a version of ourselves that we worked very hard to become.

That doesn't mean we made the wrong decision.

It means the transition matters.

Professional identity doesn't have to be singular

There is another possibility that can be particularly useful during periods of change:

Maybe you don't need to choose one identity.

Increasingly, people are working across disciplines, developing portfolio careers, returning to education, combining clinical and educational roles, building businesses alongside employment, or bringing previous professional knowledge into entirely new contexts.

Professional identity can therefore become less about answering:

"What am I?"

and more about asking:

"What are the different parts of my experience, and how do they fit together?"

Your previous career doesn't necessarily disappear because you develop a new one.

Your years of experience don't become irrelevant because you enter a new field.

Skills such as listening, pattern recognition, communication, problem-solving, leadership, observation, adaptability, and working with people often travel with us—even when our job title changes.

Sometimes a transition is less about abandoning one professional identity and more about integrating what you've already learned into something new.

So what do we do when our professional identity feels unsettled?

There is no single formula for navigating professional identity.

But it can help to slow down before immediately trying to solve the problem.

Instead of asking only, "What should I do?", consider asking:

What parts of my work still feel meaningful?

What parts no longer fit?

What have I learned about myself through this experience?

Which professional expectations actually reflect my values—and which ones have I simply absorbed?

Where do I feel most like myself?

Where do I feel I have to perform a version of myself?

What kinds of environments allow me to do my best work?

What do I want to carry forward from my previous professional identity?

What am I ready to leave behind?

And perhaps most importantly:

Who am I becoming that my previous professional identity doesn't have room for yet?

These questions aren't necessarily about making a five-year plan.

Sometimes they are simply about creating enough space to notice what is happening.

You don't have to have it all figured out

Professional identity development is not necessarily a straight line.

We often tell ourselves that successful people know exactly who they are and what they are doing.

Real professional development can look much messier.

There can be periods of certainty followed by questioning.

Expansion followed by discomfort.

Excitement followed by doubt.

Confidence followed by feeling like a beginner again.

And sometimes the uncertainty itself becomes part of the growth.

Recent work on professional identity has emphasized that identity development involves exploration, negotiation, relationships, belonging, and the ongoing integration of personal and professional values. Struggle is not inherently evidence of failure; in some circumstances, it can be part of developing a more authentic and sustainable professional identity.

Perhaps the goal isn't to find one permanent answer to the question:

"Who am I professionally?"

Perhaps it is to become increasingly comfortable asking:

"Does the way I am working still reflect who I am becoming?"

And if the answer is no, that doesn't necessarily mean you have failed.

It may simply mean that your professional identity is ready to evolve.

A note from my own experience

I have experienced professional identity from several different angles: as someone who spent many years developing expertise in one profession, as someone who entered another health profession later, and as someone continuing to explore what it means to bring different areas of knowledge together.

Those experiences have taught me that professional change is rarely as simple as changing a job title.

There can be questions about competence, belonging, confidence, purpose, expectations, and whether the person you have become still fits comfortably inside the professional identity you once built.

I'm increasingly interested in that space—not just because of my own experience, but because I see how often people struggle with it quietly.

Sometimes we don't need to abandon everything we've built.

Sometimes we need to understand what we've built, decide what still belongs with us, and give ourselves permission to build something that fits better now.

Your professional identity is allowed to change as you do.

References

This article draws on research and professional literature related to professional identity formation, career transitions, reflection, and allied health education.

Lewis, A., Jamieson, J., & Smith, C. A. (2025). Professional identity formation in allied health: A systematic review with narrative synthesis. Teaching and Learning in Medicine, 37(1), 24–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/10401334.2023.2290608

Sarraf-Yazdi, S., Pisupati, A., Goh, C. K., Chin, A. M. H., Iliakis, D., Tan, B. K. J., & Teo, D. B. (2024). A scoping review and theory-informed conceptual model of professional identity formation in medical education. Medical Education, 58(10), 1151–1165. https://doi.org/10.1111/medu.15399

Snape, S. (2024). The MAP (Me-As-a-Process) coaching model: A framework for coaching women's identity work in voluntary career transitions. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1364134. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1364134

Sternszus, R., Steinert, Y., Razack, S., Boudreau, J. D., Snell, L., & Cruess, R. L. (2024). Being, becoming, and belonging: Reconceptualizing professional identity formation in medicine. Frontiers in Medicine, 11, 1438082. https://doi.org/10.3389/fmed.2024.1438082

van Oorschot, F., Brouwers, M., Muris, J., Veen, M., Timmerman, A., & van Dulmen, S. (2025). How does guided group reflection work to support professional identity formation in postgraduate medical education: A scoping review. Medical Teacher, 47(3), 425–435. https://doi.org/10.1080/0142159X.2024.2339409

© 2026 Kathryn Arbic / Callisto Therapeutics. All rights reserved. Ottawa-Carleton Place, Ontario, Canada.