Sometimes I lie awake at night and ask why me? Then a voice answers nothing personal, your name just happened to come up.
—Charles M. Schulz
Names. Everyone has one, most people have a vague idea what their own name means, but few of us give much thought to names and their importance in our life. Onomastics, the study of names, is a field that traverses a variety of disciplines including linguistics, history, anthropology, psychology, sociology, and philology. When people refer to the “meaning of a name”, they are most likely referring to the etymology, which is the original literal meaning of the word. The historical significance of your name can be fascinating, but, in reality, the words that join together to give you a label that people call you tells you very little about who you are, your past, present, or your future. At most, it might tell you what your parents were thinking about; their hopes, fears, and dreams for you, at the time of your birth or the panic that overwhelmed them when writing your name on the birth certificate.
My name isn’t actually my name, not legally anyway. To my friends, family, colleagues, and clients, I am Carrie. On the front of this book, the author’s name is printed as Carrie Foster. It is what I am known as. However, to the passport office, DVLA, doctors, solicitors, mortgage company, and banks, I am Caroline; which can be confusing and disconcerting when I am faced with an official demanding my personal details and I struggle to correctly answer the first question they ask; “name” or stutter over what my own name actually is.
I was first called Carrie by my form tutor when I was 12 years old and despite being called Caz by my Mum, Dad, and brothers, I chose to be ‘known as’ Carrie, when I started work in my first ‘proper’ job after leaving university. As names go, there is nothing wrong with the name Caroline, which means free man, other than the haunting memory of it being screeched loudly by my Mum who used my full moniker to call me to attention when I was in trouble, which was often. My proper name, as opposed to my known name, therefore, somehow seems formal and comes with the added stress of only being used on forms and for legal transactions. Carrie has become more than my professional name, it is the name that I have chosen for myself, it is who I am.
Names are needed for several reasons. Firstly, they help us to distinguish ourselves from one another, which becomes more difficult if you have a team with three people who share a name, but is easier than asking to speak to the short brown-haired chap who deals with human resources. Names, therefore, separate who we are and identify us from those that we share space with and allow us to know when it is us that a personal interaction is being directed at. Nicknames are given as a form of endearment of insult. They have the power to add a description, positively or negatively, about someone as a person. This might be a reference to their appearance such as ‘Little John,’ their pecking order in a family or group setting; ‘junior’ or ‘governor’ or similarly their character ‘Mad Tony.’ Some names carry information about our roots, such as family or clan names, which are generally inherited, or reflect trends and fashions of the time. Carrie was a popular name in the 1970s because of Carrie Fisher’s role in Star Wars. I am a child of the 70s, so, therefore, the moniker for me has connotations of a strong woman fighting for a just cause. And yes, I do sometimes get mail addressed Fisher instead of Foster. Other names have negative connotations and are best left to history. Children of parents who committed fiendish acts very often change their name or surname to disassociate themselves with their history. The name Adolf was fairly common before the Second World War, increased in popularity during the war, and then disappeared almost completely in the years since. Interesting fact, any associations with Nazism are pretty much frowned upon, so even car license plates avoid the letters SS and AH.
So names matter, and it isn’t just your forename and surname, but the names you are known as. Online handles and usernames, names in email addresses, and anything that you use as an identifier has an impact on how you are perceived by people. Calling your twitter account @BigBoyChops has consequences as to how you perceived by other people perusing your online footprint. Sometimes, your name might not be available, but you do need to understand that the online world is a public space. Think about what impression your colleagues might have if you had your online handle instead of your real name on your identity badge at work. If it’s an impression you would rather not give, then it is time to change. The same is true for email addresses. At school, it might be funny to have an email address that has your address as [email protected], but this might not go down very well with potential recruiters, if it is typed out at the top of your curriculum vitae or resume.
Engaging with Who You Are
Sometimes, of course, you name isn’t one that you would necessarily choose for yourself. Perhaps you are one of those people who has to live with an annoying name that becomes a butt of other people’s jokes, such as Hugh Man, Al E. Gater, Joe King, or Kay Oss. As a parent, choosing a name that your child will be stuck with for the rest of their lives is a big responsibility. We called my son, Ioan, which is pronounced Yo-anne. The fact that I even have to explain how the name is pronounced should have been a warning that perhaps the choice of name for our eldest son was misdirected. We had good reason for choosing the name. We live in Wales and wanted a good Welsh name, and discovered the name through the Welsh actor, Ioan Gruffudd. It means chosen by God, and is the Welsh version of the name John, which happens to be my Father’s first name, so seemed the perfect choice. My son is growing up fast, and part of me winces when other people say his name. Ewan or Johan are common mispronunciations, and I regularly witness the flicker of a wince and exasperation as he once again has to correct someone, or complains later that eventually he gave up with someone who just didn’t get it right, all day. His friends call him Yo-Yo, which is a play on his name, but also suitably describes his inability to sit still, rather than being a reference to him having a temperament that is up and down. What I do know is that every time he introduces himself for the first time, people end up saying “Pardon?” After which he has to repeat his name several times before the new acquaintance gets it and he can move on from the greeting phase of a meeting. I now realize that I have burdened him with the experience of his name being misheard and mispronounced for the rest of his life. It doesn’t help that he also has a double-barreled surname, that has also got a Welsh spelling and has to be carefully relayed over the phone to avoid the repeated mistake of too many or too few letters being included. As parents, we have lumbered him with forename and a surname, which no one can pronounce or spell. He will curse us every time he has to fill in an official form, or spell his name out, again and again, over the phone. However, this does have a positive side effect. It draws out the greeting process, so the people he is meeting for the first time have to pay attention and cannot get away with a cursory acknowledgement whereby they quickly forget who you are. They are forced to engage properly, and, in having to repeat his name, and get their mouth around the pronunciation the interaction means they take notice. They place the face with the name. His ‘too long name’ may be an annoyance at school when writing his name out on official forms or attempting to fit it onto a school jumper label, but it does call attention to him.
Finally, for my son, it has taught him to pay attention to others. When greeting people for the first time, he leans in, and listens closely to ensure he gets the name right. This courtesy is one we can all learn from. Our names are important, they serve an important social function, it only take a few extra seconds and a moment of concentration to hear someone’s name properly. Knowing someone’s name and using their name is important. In my role as facilitator or tutor, I am regularly confronted with situations where everyone in the room knows my name because they only have one name to learn, and I am still trying to figure out everyone’s name at lunchtime. I am reasonably good at remembering names, but I hate being in the situation where I miss someone’s name on introduction and it has passed the point of politeness to ask them to remind me. Worse still is where I muddle someone’s name up. Recently, there was a participant called Andy and, in my head, his name was Ieuan. I worked with the group over a twelve-month period, and I still continued to get his name wrong. He accepted my inability to get his name right with good grace. I suppose the fact that I was calling him the same wrong name consistently perhaps helped him realize that I remembered who he was even if the name I’d labeled him with was wrong. As a development practitioner, I do, however, believe that remembering names is important. It acknowledges that you have ‘seen’ that person in the widest sense of its meaning. In the Avatar movie, the phrase ‘I see you’ means I bring you into existence and for me that is what a name does in our society. In our society, our names bring us as a person into existence within the social setting, and, for that reason, we shouldn’t treat someone’s name disrespectfully or disdainfully.
Our Identity Is Tied to Our Name and Our History
A mistake is only a mistake if you don’t learn from it. So when choosing my daughter’s name, we steered away from Welsh names and chose Lily Grace. It’s not double-barreled because, like my son she has been lumbered with a double-barreled surname, so we thought a double-barreled forename and surname was going a little bit overboard. However, Grace is not a middle name; it is the second part of her forename, although it often gets dropped. I now find myself calling her Lily Grace when disciplining her, and Lily at other times, along with a number of nom de plumes including sweetheart, sausage, and lulu. Which perhaps proves that we all turn into our parents in the end. But annoyingly, even members of my family still can’t spell her name right, inscribing Lilly as a shortened version of Lillian on birthday and Christmas cards. There’s only two L’s for goodness sake, she’s a Lily like the flower, meaning pure. The mis-pronounciation or mis-spelling of names teaches us something important about how our identity is tied up in our name. I have heard people say “she/he looks like a [insert name]” and I often wondered what assumptions are made about a person to make such a statement possible. But, regardless as to whether Lily Grace and Ioan look like their names, their name now has a meaning beyond what is written in the history of names book. Who we are as people is associated with the name by which we go by. Caroline is, in my mind, associated with being naughty and getting into trouble. Carrie is by the same token a professional businesswoman. They are separated in my mind as much as I am separated by time from my childhood self. I am no longer that person even though my birth certificate very plainly identifies me as such. My parents still believe that I am like my childhood self, even though I have changed and grown to be the adult that I am today. Circumstances have knocked the rough edges from me, and learning about myself, and engaging in self-development practices have taught me to temper some of my negative traits and foster my strengths. The danger for us as individuals is crossing paths with people from our past who engage with us as if we were still the person they knew way back when. Shakespeare wrote a speech which is referred to as the seven ages of man, which captures the changing position of an individual through the different stages of their life: infant, schoolboy, early youth, the obligations of late youth, the justice sought in adulthood, the slowing down into middle age, and the frailty of old age as we face our death. As we traverse life, it becomes apparent that we do change who we are as we get older, and possibly wiser. The cares and worries of our youth are replaced with changing ideas as we learn more about life, and ourselves. We carry part of who we are at each stage of life, into the next, but we do change and some people change more than others. Unfortunately, people from our past make assumptions about our character, and who we are based on their knowledge of us. However, we are different. Imagine someone who used a computer during the 1970s, and then did not use a computer again until today. The machine is still a computer, but its functionality is leaps ahead; for a start, we don’t need floppy discs to start the computer and the hard disk capacity has increased millions of times over. In many ways, the new generation of computing is a completely new thing. As human beings, our development is of a similar trajectory. As we learn, grow, and experience new things, we change and evolve. Some experiences are what Mezirow (1990) termed as transformative learning, they fundamentally change our understanding of ourselves, our beliefs, and convictions about what is true and the way we live our lives. Therefore, although our name may remain the same, our identity is flexible. Unlike a number, which remains fixed in meaning, our identity can change, and with it the experience people have of you.
Capturing What You Are About
When I started my first business, a training consultancy, I had to choose a name for the business. Most of the advice I read about naming a business said that you should call your consultancy after your own name, something along the lines of ‘Foster Consultancy,’ but I didn’t find that particularly inspiring. I found choosing a name for my business was difficult. I needed to get it right because potential clients would infer a lot from the name and first impressions count, and being a limited company meant I couldn’t just choose any name because it might be registered by someone else and, in the digital age, I had to also consider availability of website names too. At the time I wanted a name that captured what my business was about, building capability to perform, and so Fortitude Development was born. It was a good solid name, but the name doesn’t make it obvious what services I offered, giving me scope to change and flex according to what opportunities came my way. More than that though the business name was a statement of purpose. It drew a line in the sand regarding the type of business I wanted to have and the reason why the business existed in the first place. I also had to choose a title for myself. As a Director, I could choose to call myself anything I wanted; but let’s be honest, the consultancy hasn’t exactly got 1,000 employees, so my job title doesn’t really represent my ‘day job’. Some years later and the season of Fortitude Development came to an end. My work has moved away from fortitude to a greater focus on Organization Development and writing. My job title has also changed. I now label my job role as ‘Woman of Many Businesses,’ a reflection perhaps, not only of the fact that my pathway is constantly changing, but a confidence in who and what I am.
What I do know is that when I was younger, my job title mattered a great deal, and as a young graduate in my first corporate role I was striving for the job title of manager; as I have got older, I have realized that the only name that really matters is my name, Carrie. What my business is called, what my job title is, is actually irrelevant. My business is who I am, it is my identity that enables me to sit at my laptop and share my thoughts and ideas with you, or stand in front of a leadership team and support them in their learning journey and team development or perhaps working on a large whole organization intervention coopting employees to deliver value for their organization. One of my clients suggested that my business was carrie.com, since what I am doing is an extension of my identity, of who I am, just as my name is an extension of the legal person that my birth certificate certifies. For me, this is the epitome of the challenge to be and not to do. My authenticity of self is because I am fully myself in the work that I turn my hand to. In my youth, I would put on a suit, and with it play a character. Today, I am what I am, the good bits and the bad bits. The difference is, that my identity is not threatened by the work that I do, instead I am comfortable in the skin I am in. Criticism and feedback are received in the spirit with which it is given and doesn’t threaten my understanding of who I am. I am more relaxed and more at peace, I still have the same drive and enthusiasm about the work I do, but there is a calmness because I am not trying to prove that I am something that I am not. The closer you can get to authenticity in the workplace, the happy you will be. It is a choice you can make. To be who you really are, or to settle for a social construction of who other people think you should be.
The same is true when taking on roles and responsibilities. We don’t have to pretend that we can do something that we can’t. When I first started my business, my mobile phone provider suggested I speak to our IT department when I was struggling to get my work email connected to my smartphone. I told the customer service representative of the phone company that my IT department were pretty useless, and they should all be sacked. I have since outsourced IT to friends and my husband when I can’t work things out for myself. Very often at work, we feel that we can’t say we can’t, that we somehow have to be good at everything and deliver outside of our abilities. The Peter Principle (Peter, 1969) states that individuals are selected during interview or for promotion based upon their ability to do their current role. Therefore, individuals eventually reach their level of incompetence when they are promoted to a role beyond their capabilities. When I work with dysfunctional organizations, I very often find individuals in management who were brilliant in their previous roles, but have been promoted into a role that they aren’t able to do, and that they end up doing a very bad job in. These managers not only feel stuck and frustrated, but do an awful lot of damage to the people who are reporting to them. It is, therefore, incumbent upon us, as individuals, to be honest about our capabilities. Now, of course, you might not know you can’t do something until you try, realistically that is what secondment and project roles are for. The onus, however, is to admit when we can’t do something, or when something sits outside our area of talent. At the same time, organizations need to not condemn people for being honest about the limit of their capabilities, and also provide opportunities for individuals to grow in their current position. Hierarchical organizational structures have prevented this honesty, but the measure of success in regards to your career development isn’t whether you have got the fancy title or the big pay packet. Instead success is about whether you are being fully you within your own position.
The Evolving Nature of a Job Makes Job Titles Redundant
The name jobs are given is absurd anyway. A few years ago, I studied my MA in Human Resource Management. During my studies, we explored the transition from Personnel, to Human Resources to Strategic Human Resources. Research shows that as the name has changed, it has been followed by changes in the professionalism and focus of the HR function and people working in the department. I have noticed in my own field of practice that there was a transition about 10 years ago from Training and Development to Learning and Development, and, more recently, many development professionals have been given the moniker of Organization Development. Along with it has been a change in responsibility, an alignment with the business strategy, and a widening of focus to a more holistic and humanistic approach to development, but many Organization Development Directors are still operating as training and development officers. These transitions aren’t limited to the people side of the organization either. When I started my career, I was a sales representative. Today, you have customer relationship managers, account managers, and business development consultants because the job role has shifted from selling to partnering with clients. Factory managers are now operations managers as silos are broken down and the interconnected nature of the job role has been understood and utilized. Sometimes, the job title change will come first, alongside a shift in job role responsibilities; but even when this structural change happens, you notice that most individuals grow into their job title and then, over time, begin to outgrow their job title. My view, therefore, is that we should look beyond titles and instead focus on what it is the individual is doing. Very often, a job role morphs and changes over a period of time, to such an extent that the job description and job name bear very little resemblance to the work being done. Like our own name, therefore, assumptions cannot be made about the character of the work that a person does; however, as explored in the introduction, of all the components of our professional life, our job label matters. The organization’s name, the individual’s name, and our job titles have a significant influence. Almost from the moment it is first written down, a name begins impacting perceptions, traits, and talents. With time, the vibration of the name plays a major role in establishing relationship patterns and communication style.
Names, therefore, aren’t just labels or mere words of identification; they take on a whole new energetic purpose and reality. They create a personality for the organization, for the individual, and for the role holder. A name is a thing of great power that molds who we are and who we will become. So choose wisely.
Manage Your Career Tool #4 – Developing Your Identity
Developing an understanding or self-awareness of who we are begins with a process of self-inquiry. Your understanding of your identity, the words you would choose to describe yourself drive our perception of self, and our subsequent behavior based on that perception. Self-awareness requires you to reflect regularly on yourself and your actions to understand why you do what you do. This can be achieved by asking powerful questions to grow your understanding of self and deepen your awareness.
Developing your identity is not a one-time thing. It is an iterative process, of constant inquiry, which needs to be repeated at regular intervals. Moon (2004) states that “reflection is a type of thinking aimed at achieving better understanding and leading to new learning.” Because we change, our self-perception will change over time. Being aware of what those changes mean, and whether those changes require us to take a different direction are an important part of developing our learning process and will help us to develop self-confidence and authenticity in the workplace. Most important of all is that we must be honest about what we are thinking and feeling and we need to find an outlet in which we can express ourselves. Strong emotions are toxic if they are bottled up, and can lead to negative consequences such as tension and stress, both at the workplace and at home.
Regularly writing down your thoughts in a personal learning journal provides you with an opportunity to explore, reflect, and make decisions based upon what you truly think and feel.
- Who am I in this situation and is it who I want to be?
- Why do I feel this way?
- What is the origin of some of the thoughts and feelings that I have?
- What assumptions am I making about a situation/person, and are these assumptions true?
- What further information do I need to avoid false assumptions?
- Who could I speak to get clarification?
- Why am I doing what I am doing?
- What is the main purpose behind my actions?
- Am I losing sight of the bigger picture?
- What would happen if I stopped what I was doing and did something else instead?
- What is the most important thing for me right now, this week and this month?
It is recommended that you make self-inquiry a habit. This means setting time aside, preferably at the same time each week to exercise self-inquiry and reflection. If you like stationary, take time to select a beautiful journal, but taking the time to reflect and capture your thoughts and ideas is what is really important.