Our close contacts don’t just blind us

Our close contacts don’t just blind us, they also bind us to our outdated identities. Reinventing involves trying on and testing a variety of possible selves. But our long-standing social networks may resist those identity experiments. Remember Gary McCarthy’s chagrin when he learned, three years out of college, that his family had already pegged him as a “finance person”? Without meaning to, friends and family pigeonhole us. Worse, they fear our changing.

In brainwashing studies—obviously one of the ultimate forms of identity change—standard operating practice is to separate subjects from all those who knew them previously, so as to deprive them of grounding in the old identity. Brainwashing tends to fail when subjects are allowed to return at night to their fellow prisoners (who knew them before) after a day of indoctrination.^[4] We are all more malleable when separated from people who know us well. The same dynamic explains why young adults seem to change when they go away to college and interaction with family members and prior friends is necessarily reduced.

Of course, we don’t need to subject ourselves to brainwashing in order to change careers. But we need to realize that our intimates—spouses, bosses, close friends, parents—expect us to remain the same, and they may pressure us to be consistent.^[5] Most people who have made big career changes have heard loved ones tell them, “You’re out of your mind.” Sabotage is not their intention, but a shared history has entrenched certain expectations, and reinventing oneself can amount to breaking the implicit “contract.” People who have quit smoking, lost weight, or gotten divorced are familiar with the mixed reactions of friends, who see the change as loss.

For Harris, the hardest thing about quitting Pharmaco was ending a long-term relationship with his mentor, the company’s CEO, who saw Harris’s leaving as a personal betrayal:

I had planned out my little speech. I said, “Alfred, I have really learned a lot from you, you’ve given me tons of opportunity. . . .” His reaction was worse than anything I imagined. He said, “I’m very disappointed. How can you do this to me after all I’ve done for you? I was grooming you for my job. Here I was training you to be a number 1 and you’re going to go be a number 2. What are you doing to the organization?” By the time his tirade was over, I felt like a wet rag. I really love the company and he’s like my father. His disapproval was hard to bear.

Pragmatically, a career change requires weak-tie contacts outside the daily grind to provide leads, referrals, job information, and entrées to organizations and decision makers. And, emotionally, it is hard to get validation for a new self without making shifts in our social relationships. When change entails rethinking our very identity, we need substitutes for the people and groups we have to leave behind and role models for whom we might become.