Letting Go of My Exes

Ex-Google? Ex-CEO? It doesn’t really matter if those identities no longer serve you.

I had two friends at summer camp whose parents were divorced: One had a different last name than her mother which made it very hard for my mother to find her mother in the phone book when I wanted to invite her to a sleepover at my house. The other friend’s mother kept her married name, even in the years that followed her split. 

I was confused by this and asked my mom about it: If my friend’s parents were divorced, why did her mother go by her married name? I didn’t get a good answer. My mother told me she didn’t know; maybe it was too administratively difficult to get her name changed back. Maybe she liked her married name. Maybe she wanted her kids’ friends’ mothers to be able to find her in the phone book…

Later I concluded that my friend’s mother had developed emotional equity in being Mrs. Daworski (not her real last name) and she was not interested in unloading it. Perhaps, even in the wake of her failed marriage, there were aspects of her past identity as Mr. Daworski’s wife that she associated with that name and wanted to keep, such as being a resident of Southwest Skokie, IL, or being mother to the three Daworski children. Still, I never squared for myself why someone would choose to keep a vestige of a former identity.

I come back to this example as I contemplated my own recent decision to drop my “ex” titles from my LinkedIn tagline, only leaving my current occupational foci and a previous co-founded company in view (I’ll add Optionality when we officially launch). I had been adhering to a trendy practice of listing out in my LinkedIn tagline, directly under my name, some of the notable roles and organizations I had worked for and departed. You’ve seen this before in many a profile: “ex-Google,” “Ex-Meta,” “ex-POTUS,” “ex-Supermodel.” You get the gist.

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It’s a practical matter, some will argue, to place high-profile former roles and employers in your tagline, as so few recruiting gatekeepers bother to refer to the actual details of one’s resume so much as keywords and corporate brands.

The language we often speak in business is a language of association, more than actions.

Recruiters refer to your past companies as qualifiers of the work you do now. And of course, on a document such as a resume including your past roles and companies is imperative. So many in the workforce can say they are innovative, or bold, or strategic, but not everyone can back up their claims by saying they were all these things for Apple. The brand can supplementally suggest such things as boldness, attention to excellence, and competence.

Still, I found myself  questioning the veracity of associating my professional identity with former employers, even the ones I was proud of. 

In one case, the company didn’t embody the principles I stand by today. 

In another case the role required exercising a set of muscles I don’t care to use any longer.

And yet for years I kept my Exes front and center, as part of my identity, just in case. For options I didn’t want.

Do we insert our Exes into our other identities? Does your Facebook profile indicate who you used to be married to? “Ex-Wife of Jim Johnson”? Do you list the “good ones” you dated, or the successful ones, even if they cheated on you and ran off with your best friend?

I’m not naive to the importance of professional pedigree. Like any other entrepreneur seeking venture capital, I’ve dropped the names of ex-employers, ex-customers, and ex-professional roles in my decks all the time not because they mean anything to me, but because they are currency in the world I’m playing in.

At some point, however,  my Exes confined me; they created confusing subplots in my narrative. I wondered if I was saying to the world, I USED to matter. This other stuff I’m doing now, doesn’t.

I needed to let the Exes of my professional past go.

I found it somewhat painful pruning my profile and resume. After all, you never know when that stint as an advisor to a crypto wallet might come in handy. And all of those advisory solicitations I got for my time in cloud services suggested a perception of having deep expertise in something, even if I would never choose to leverage this expertise ever again. I did keep the identities that I still embody – Founder, Board Member, Fractional Executive – and the verticals and expertise that I care about. The only company names I kept were those I started myself. Even after I exited this company, it’s still part of me.

The changes were not that physically noticeable, accounting for maybe an inch of space in my profile. But those Exes represented years of belief in others’ perceptions of competence over my own preferences for how I wanted to be known — personally and professionally. 

And how about you? Do you have any professional dead weight, Ex-employers, professional habits that you need to let go? Join the Open Thread discussion.