Your business card is weighing you down.

You are not your job.

Seriously.

“So Paul, what do you do?”

“Take a seat mate, this will take a while...”

Give a different answer, get a different response. Tell them I’m a pharmacist (which is true) and you can see the mental cogs turning, making a host of conscious/unconscious assumptions on income, education, likely political affiliation. Tell the next person I’m a personal trainer (which is true) and we get a fresh suite of assumptions. Tell them I drive a forklift in a warehouse (which was true, I also have an MBA and built the company) and the cogs turn again. But the underlying premises are the same, you have a blue/white collar job, degree/no degree, this income, that income, ipso facto you are worth ‘this’.

The real cracker is when I answer with, ‘I’m a stay-at-home dad’.

That tends to grind the cogs to a halt. Generally, I get a raised eyebrow and an ‘oh...’ You can see that they’re doing the mental arithmetic but keep getting stuck. Can he not work? What’s his wife do? Yeah but what else do you do? The mental friction comes from the way we define and therefore value ourselves – especially as men.

Without knowing ‘what I do’ in terms of a paying job, people are suddenly left with no frame of reference for valuing me, my worth,my contribution or my standing among others, especially other men. Suddenly I’m some kind of enigma.

For a long stretch the nature of the workforce helped dictate and reinforce what were long considered standard gender roles – Dad worked and provided financially, and Mum ran the household and shouldered the vast daily burden of raising the progeny. The nature of work, especially through the twentieth century, helped cement that. Industrialisation, manufacturing, primary industry, war – all these fostered an advantage to those better suited to physical labour. Literally, the strong were favoured. In the US census of 1970, a census that covered almost two-hundred million humans, the number of men who listed there occupation as ‘stay-at-home dad’ was…six. That’s not a typo, it was six out of roughly one hundred million men.

Then the workforce dynamics changed as the industrial revolution gave way to the digital one, the workforce ideal moved from a preference for brawn to brain – from hardware to software. As manufacturing jobs moved or vanished and the information age, mobility of work and automation gained greater ascension, men found the ground shifting under their feet and women found themselves no longer behind the strength curve. Unlike raw horsepower and load-carrying capacity, IQ and EQ are not gender biased.

Here’s the rub – if you have valued your ‘worth’ based primarily on your capacity for financial provision and identify yourself as a title rather than a fully-fledged, multi-dimensional human being, then when the goal posts moved (and in an evolutionary sense they moved damn fast) there was a sudden margin-call on your leveraged sense of self-worth.

As men particularly we have a strong tendency to define our own value based on our ability to ‘provide’. If I am not the breadwinner, then who am I? This is brought into stark relief when we move from being partners to parents. The arrival of a new ‘diminutive overlord’ triggers either the opportunity to redefine, or alternatively reinforces stereotypes and stigma.

Looking at the Australian example, in the 1991 census 33% of women identified themselves as stay-at-home mums (SAHM), only 4% of men classified themselves as stay-at-home dads (SAHD). Fast forward to 2016 (not even a generation) and the SAHM percentage has dropped by 6% and the SAHD percentage has increased…by 1%. Where did everyone go? They went back to work – the percentage of households with both parents working went from 52% to 61% for the same period. The drivers behind this are many and varied but I feel that two stand out (and one lurks in the background).

First, those changing workforce dynamics I discussed earlier gave women a greater opportunity to move back into the workforce in a manner and style that started to feel more like a level playing field. The second driver was financial. Everyone loves seeing the equity in their home escalate and their share portfolio climb the ladder, but too often we forget that that comes at a cost. Your home is only worth what the market will pay for it – so if the value is increasing that means that someone is paying, and then having to pay that off. The race to the top of the supposed ‘financial success’ mountain brought with it a simultaneous slide into the darker valleys of endless work. Single-income households with evening and weekends free from pervasive email and non-social social media moved to the pressures of balancing double-income life with permanent connectivity to the office via digital intrusion. We built a temple and then promptly locked ourselves inside of it.

The final lurking background driver hides in that conundrum of ‘parental leave’. Regardless of the moniker we attach to it – maternity leave, parental leave, primary carer leave, secondary carer leave – it shines a light on what we have come to value. For men parental leave can bring with it a surreptitious undertone of ‘loss’. What am I giving up? Don’t get me wrong, as men the unbridled joy of being with your newborn, of that immediate sense of a new family is magical. But for many, lurking in the back of our minds, is that thought that while I am here, I am not there – that innate modern societal drive that I should be/need to be breadwinning, not allowing the corporate deck chairs to rearrange themselves in my absence. The mortgage doesn’t change, our household budget has just taken a radical left turn – there is that hidden sense of urgency to get back to the ‘status quo’. In the face of crippling uncertainty about our ability to suddenly master new skills – everything from nappy changing to the not-so-subtle art of living with sleep deprivation – our workplace seems like a safe haven. There are rules, expectations, traditions – and co-workers tend to manage their own bowel movements rather than requiring your close-action support. More importantly I know who I am there, where I fit and – this is a big one – I know my value. And all financial arguments and pressures are real and pressing – but perhaps deeper into that valley, far from the light on the mountain top, is that nagging fear that if I’m not the breadwinner, if I have lost that responsibility, then what is my value? How do I derive my sense of self-worth? Where is my place in my tribe if I am no longer seated at the head of the table?

And finally, all of this is coloured with two overtones – money and masculinity.

Let’s start with money. Tyler Durdin was right – you’re not your job, or your khakis, or your furniture. But for many that metric of net financial capacity or position has become all consuming – primarily because we don’t have an alternative metric that we are comfortable with. Or perhaps more importantly – a metric that everyone in our circle seems to be comfortable with. If I hand over the keys for financial provision and all the decision making associated with that title – what do I have left? Workforce dynamics used to make this decision easier to negotiate – ‘he’ who earns more should remain at work to provide financially. That argument has all but vanished as brainpower is favoured over brawn, so on a purely financial basis, often the best decision is that Dad does stay at home.

 That brings us to the second overtone – masculinity.

 My goal here isn’t to delve into the murky depths of ‘toxic masculinity’ or the (to me) inexplicable rise of the #dadbod. Not to say that these issues aren’t real or require rigour – that’s for another time and place. Side stepping the heat, emotion, and hyperbole, just consider for a moment the traditional concept of masculinity and the reality of where many of us find ourselves now. From the scientific to the fictional, the classic male was the Freudian archetype – psychologically (and physically) strong, dominant, assertive, decisive and ‘successful’. The alternative depictions in the realms of fiction saw us devolved simply to either the dad-bodded comic relief, the anti-jock or finally the broken and dangerous.

So, what the hell do we do now?

We re-define ourselves.

Not in terms of our job. Not in terms of our earning capacity – but in terms of what we really, honestly, bring to the table. And that process can be scary as hell.

In my experience, developing (and considering) yourself to be multi-dimensional serves not only as a great hedge against feeling like your value is lost due to one single seismic shift, but it also allows you to see how deep and far your abilities run.

More and more I find myself using the phrase, ‘I’m the father of two young boys’. A strong component of my self-worth is increasingly derived from my capacity and part in raising them both as a SAHD. I often use the example that when I was in Year 12, I had my life planned out – I was going to get a medical degree, become a doctor and my business card would reflect as such. Decades later and my business card is devoid of the term ‘doctor’, but it carries a myriad of others – mountain climber, adventurer, entrepreneur, pharmacist, speaker, husband, father, son, brother, nerd. All those personas bring value and joy into my life – at varying times and in varying ways.

Take some time to reflect on who you are and what you do beyond the narrow definitions of your title at the office, or the role that society has deemed you fit to fill. Revel in your complexity – it is your shield against the storm and your banner in battle.

And there is no rule that says once you have come to some semblance of comfort with your identity and value that it’s suddenly carved in stone. All manner of nature and nurture will contrive to shift the sands beneath your feet so that your role, and strengths and weaknesses, will rise and fall with the tides.

As we negotiate the labyrinth of a COVID-19 world for many of us that has meant that work is either remote, on hold or just straight up cancelled. If you had identified as the household breadwinner out ‘in the trenches’ every day and may now suddenly find yourself in unfamiliar territory.

Your ‘office’ looks a lot like home and your significant other may well be the ‘alpha persona’ running a tight ship – suddenly your role has drastically changed. If you don’t carry with you a strong internal sense of the value you bring beyond your job then this may be some very confronting times indeed.

You are more than your job.

You bring values beyond your resume – remember that. Embrace it.

Find ways you can bring those values and skills and strengths to play in the new environment – it may mean some humble pie, some false starts, some discovery of ‘gaps’ in your resume for the ‘new normal’. That’s ok – it just makes you human. The key is to see this as evolution, you are not a finished product nor a static beast, cast in stone. You retain the right, at all times, to recast the bones, to push all your chips into the pot, to recast your future.