The Question Underneath Everything
There is a version of this question that shows up at every career transition, every layoff, every time the role you have been playing for years just ends. It sounds simple: who are you when the job is gone?
Katie Erikson spent ten years as a content marketer inside the Microsoft Business Central and Biz Apps world, survived a revolving door of bosses, watched AI move into her lane, and built something real in that space. Then her position was eliminated. And she said something honest: I know my job does not define me. Now I am having to put that into practice.
That gap, between what you believe and what you live, is the thing I keep returning to.
We Have Been Rehearsing This Longer Than We Think
Katie talked about holding loosely to identity all the way back to high school. Cheerleader. Oldest of five. Journalist. Marketing writer. Mom. Each one a real part of who she was. Each one something she eventually had to set down or transform. She said: life is all about transitioning, and you have to hold loosely to whatever your identity is at the time, because it is very likely to change.
I think most of us know this. We have lived versions of it. The job that ended, the role that changed, the season that closed. But knowing it and being genuinely unshaken by it are two different things. The rehearsal is not the performance.
Katie is not performing. She is in the middle of a real transition right now, and she is applying what she has been building toward her whole life. That is not a small thing.
Flexibility Is a Skill, Not a Trait
This is something I actually said in our conversation and I want to say it again here because I mean it. Flexibility is not a personality type you either have or do not have. It is something you build, and you build it through the hard chapters.
I am not a naturally flexible person. I have had to learn how to be. Katie said the same about herself. She likes a schedule, likes to know what is coming, and finds uncertainty genuinely uncomfortable. And she has built, through a decade of change, a real capacity to go with the flow when she needs to. Not because she stopped caring about stability but because she learned what is actually worth holding onto and what she can let go of.
That discernment is what flexibility actually looks like in practice. Not having no preferences. Knowing which ones to defend.
What You Protect When the Ground Shifts
Katie blocks her calendar every day from three to five. Not because she stops working. Because that is when her teenage boys come home and she knows the window is short. She said: if you miss it, it is gone. By five-thirty they are off in their own world.
That is not a work-life balance tip. That is someone who knows her priorities so well that they show up in her calendar before anything else can fill it.
She talked about faith the same way. As the thing that holds everything together when everything else is moving. The connective tissue, I called it in the conversation. She said: if I did not have my faith, I think I would be a very insecure person. For Katie, faith is not one item on a list. It is the frame around the list.
I think that kind of clarity, knowing what you will not negotiate on, is actually what makes it possible to be flexible about everything else. You can bend because you know what cannot break.
The Behind-the-Scenes People
Katie described herself as a good second. Someone who does the work that makes everything flow, even when no one notices it is being done. She said: you do not necessarily know the importance of it until it is gone.
There are a lot of people in this industry like that. People who are excellent at something that does not come with a spotlight. And they can sometimes spend years measuring their worth by whether the recognition shows up. It usually does not, and that is its own kind of hard.
What Katie has is something I think you only get through doing the work and deciding, over and over, that it is worth doing. A confidence that does not depend on whether it gets seen. That is not something you are handed. You earn it.
What This Conversation Left Me With
I always say that your job is not your purpose. I say it because I believe it and because I have watched people I care about tie themselves so tightly to a role or a title that when it changes, they do not know what is left.
Katie's story is a good reminder of why the work of knowing yourself beyond your job title is not optional. It is not something you do when the transition comes. You have to be building it all along, through the stability and through the hard chapters, so that when the ground shifts, you have something to stand on.
She is doing that work right now, out loud, in the middle of it. That takes real courage. And I am grateful she came on and shared it.
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