The Philosophy Behind the Work and Your Professional Identity
What does this passion reveal about who you are?
A weekly question to ponder what matters in your WorkLife.
Each question is drawn from the School of WorkLife Question Banks.
This is the question I want you to sit with today.
What does this passion reveal about who you are?
Let’s explore the question through a character I created.
Lisa.
Lisa is the main protagonist in the Story Lesson: How to Build Authentic Connections Through Storytelling.
Her story is featured in the episode: The Stories Behind the Stories: Lisa.
Lisa’s story was told in WorkLife Stories: How to Build Authentic Connections Through Storytelling — if you haven’t already, reading that story will help you identify your own passion story and go deeper with this question.
Lisa’s Passion Story
Lisa’s passion was this.
Sustainability works best when it honours what already exists.
Not imposing change.
Finding what’s already there.
Building from that.
What It Revealed
But what did that passion reveal about who she was?
Lisa discovered the answer slowly.
Not in one moment.
Over months of living the passion more consciously.
In client meetings she noticed she never arrived with a fixed solution.
She always arrived with questions.
What did the founder value?
What practices had survived decades?
What was already working that nobody had named?
In collaboration conversations she noticed she was drawn to people who shared that instinct.
Not people who had the same expertise.
People who had the same way of seeing.
In networking she noticed that when she finally shared her passion — the conversations that followed weren’t about what she could deliver.
They were about how she thought.
And slowly — through all of it — something clarified.
Sustainability was where the passion lived.
What Lies Beneath
And beneath it — something deeper.
A profound respect for what already exists.
In organisations.
In people.
In ideas.
She didn’t want to replace things.
She wanted to reveal them.
To show people the value in what they had already built.
To help them see what they couldn’t yet see themselves.
That’s who Lisa was.
Not just a sustainability consultant.
Someone who found the hidden value in things.
And helped others recognise it.
That’s what the passion revealed.
And once she saw it clearly — she understood something important.
The passion hadn’t changed.
It had always been there.
She had just finally found the words for it.
That’s what sitting with this question does.
It doesn’t ask what you do.
It asks what the doing reveals about who you are.
So the question isn’t just Lisa’s.
It’s yours.
What does this passion reveal about who you are?
Today’s question is from Creating Three Fundamental Stories That Define Your Identity: Success, Failure and Passion Stories Question Bank — from the section Discovering Your Passion Story.
Deepen the practice with the WorkLife Compass Guided Programme: The Art of WorkLife Storytelling: Creating Three Fundamental Stories That Define Your Identity Programme Crafting Success, Failure, and Passion Narratives with Powerful Beginnings, Engaging Middles, and Memorable Endings
If this resonates, you’ll find a daily thought on working life in School of WorkLife Reading Room — a LinkedIn group, Monday to Friday.
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