Although this is often put forward as the mantra for survival in your corporate career, in my experience it’s not what most people do. Actually, it’s more normal for us to put others first, to help our colleagues and co-workers, to put the needs of our staff above our own. Perhaps that’s why we don’t get to the top, you might say. Well, maybe that’s a prize not worth winning if being a selfish arsehole is the cost.

It extends to our private life, of course, especially if we are the main bread winner. We put the needs of our family above our own, putting up with frustration, tedium, stress and pain of life on the Mothership so that we can provide for them. It’s not unusual to curtail our own interests and ambitions for the steady, regular and (we imagine) secure income of a corporate executive. We put in the hours, the travel, the entertaining, and our body and our psyche take the strain. We put aside our hobbies and interests because we ‘don’t have the time’, we try and fit all of our renewal time into our two weeks in the sun. We put ourselves last and neglect our health and wellbeing.

Sometimes, this leads to burnout. More often, it’s a slow degrading of our lives, our energy and our spirit. By the time we leave the Mothership, we are depleted. Unfit, overweight, exhausted, dis-connected from ourselves and generally out-of-sorts.

What’s really important is to actually start doing what it says at the top of this article, to start looking after Number One. Not in a selfish way, but in a self-focused way. Start to take care of yourself, pay attention to your health, physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. Show yourself some self-compassion, be kinder to yourself. Start to love yourself again.

Changing your priorities in this way can seem strange and feel uncomfortable, such is the conditioning we have received about sacrificing ourselves for our family, of putting other first. The reality is, however, that you have put yourself first, you have to put the oxygen mask on yourself before you can help others. What we’ve developed is an unsustainable habit, where the more we give the less we have until we are empty.

In Stephen Covey’s book “The seven habits of highly effective people”, the seventh is ‘Sharpening the Saw”, making time to do the things that replenish and renew you, give you the energy and enthusiasm you need to be successful in your life. What are the interests you had before work and family crowded them out? What lights you when you do it, what are the things that you can completely loose yourself in? Make these your priorities, find space for them in your life. Or have some fun and try some new things.

Start doing things for you.

When I talk to people about this blog I start by describing the sort of people it is aimed at. I say something like “It’s for people who have left corporate life after 15-20 years and it’s about the challenges they face”and I am surprised at how often I get the response “yeah, well, they’re institutionalised”.

They are right, of course. No matter how independently minded you think you are, now matter how much you try to broaden your outlook beyond work, life on the Mothership is an artificial environment. It’s not real life, it’s a construct. The rules, the procedures, the constraints, the expectations, they are all false. The way we dress, the way we behave, the way we see the world is quite unlike anything we do in our private lives or how people choose to behave when they have the choice. After a while you begin to accept all this as normal when, in fact, it’s quite the opposite.

We know this, or course, intellectually but it’s hard to accept. “institutionalised’ is something we associate with people leaving the arms forces, or long-term care, or hospitalisation, nor people like us who have just had a normal job. It’s sounds like a disfigurement, a weakness, a deprecation and it couldn’t possibly apply to us. So, rather than accept and address it, we pretend it’s not relevant to us.

We might partly acknowledge it and make some cosmetic changes. We dress a bit differently (no more ties!), change our work patterns, go to the gym in the daytime (freedom!). However, we don’t ask the really hard questions about what changes living on the Mothership has made to us. We don’t enquire what it is about us that is different to the people who are around us now. So we don’t work out what we need to do to adapt.

Getting over being institutionalised, unlearning behaviours, changing your worldview, de-programming yourself – this is all critical work to re-imagining yourself and creating a new future. Everyone else can see it plainly. So must we.

This is a new way of working in our connected, social age and is explained in more detail by John Stepper, who is a leading proponent of it and has written a book about it.

The idea is that you share your work in progress and explain what you are doing, so that others can give you comments and feedback. That way, you get a better result and faster because you benefit from the wisdom of others and you also develop a network of advocates who understand you and your work.

Sounds terrifying, doesn’t it?

Let people see what you are doing before you’ve finished it and show yourself up as an idiot? Let them comment on your half-formed thoughts and rip them to shreds? Share your good ideas with others who might steal them? This is madness!

At least, that’s what we’ve been taught to think. Keep your ideas to yourself until you’ve got them polished and you can make sure you get the credit. Don’t let other people know how mad they are at the beginning, only let them see the final example of your brilliance.

Our experience has often supported this. We’ve been ridiculed by our peers or bosses when we’ve put a half-formed thought forward. We’ve had our work ripped to pieces by malicious smart-arses. We’ve been shown up and attacked by our rivals. We know what happens when you let your defences down and we’ve got the scars to show for it.

Only that isn’t how it works outside the Mothership. That isn’t how it works in today’s economy. Ion fact, it’s just the opposite.

So I am embracing this concept and I will be working out loud in this blog. And yes, it’s scary. It makes me feel vulnerable. However, I believe that embracing vulnerability is an important part of re-imagining yourself, so it behoves me to ‘walk the walk’, to feel the fear and do it anyway.

I want to build an audience for this blog and engage with the Post-Executives so that they can be helped through the process of re-imagining themselves. I would love to be able  to connect people so that they can support each other, and to help each other make the greatest contributions that they are capable of. I would love this to grow into a movement and be much more than just me and my thoughts, to harness the talents and energy of the Post-Executives and bring positive change to the workplace and to society.

I don’t know how I am going to make this happen, exactly. But by sharing it here and working out loud, I hope to get some help and ideas and find others who share my vision.

Yeah, I want to change world. Cheesy, I know, but there it is, I’ve said it. Now, who wants to help me?

I don’t know about you but when I joined the workforce you only really talked about having one career. It wasn’t unusual to have that one career with one company or organisation, either. My first ‘proper’ job was with BT and I remember my Dad saying “That’s a good company, you’ll have a good career with them.”

The world of business was just starting to change and it became more common for people to move around but they mostly stayed in one career. I considered leaving BT but only to move to other companies in the same field where I would do the same sort of thing. I didn’t leave because I believed in what I was creating at BT and, with a young family, it made sense to stay put.

I ended up stayed with BT for 15 years, considered a short spell back then when people had 35 and 40 years service. Today, it would be thought an eternity to be with one company and it’s definitely the exception. The idea of a single career appears similarly outlandish and my children can expect to change career a dozen times or more in their working lives.

Of course, I understand that I need to change my career but emotionally, I am still wedded to the idea of a single thread, a single arc, because that’s what I was conditioned to expect. So even whilst I was intellectually open to changing, I was still clinging on to the hope that I could somehow continue my career, to reconnect with it and revive it in some way.

In the language of William Bridges’ 3-stage model of transition, you must fully process the ‘ending’ of what went before before you transition into the ‘new beginning’, otherwise you drag a load of baggage with you and simply repeat what happened before. Letting go of the past is a critical precursor to moving forward into a new future.

It’s not just about realising that your career is finished, I got that years ago. It’s about accepting it, grieving for it, celebrating what was good and laying it to rest. That’s taken me much longer to do, largely because I didn’t realise I needed to go through that process, that I had to acknowledge my loss, accept my feelings about it and experience my emotions.

Now, I have spoken the eulogy, had the wake, put it in the grave and erected the headstone. It reads “Here lies my glorious career. Snatched away in its prime, its potential still a promise. Bitter sweet memories are all that remain. R.I.P.”

Reaching acceptance has been extremely hard. I have had ‘unlearn’ a lot of things, unpick the social conditioning and create a new mindset. I still have lapses back to my old thought patterns but I can recognise them and get myself back on track quite quickly. However, once I realised I needed to go through this grieving process, it was quite easy to let go and I quickly felt ready to move on.

Remember to put your career to rest first. Mourn your loss, work through your grief and learn to accept that it is in the past. Then you ready to start re-imagining yourself and your future.

I have been looking for a word that properly describes the process you go through after the mothership that isn’t too overblown, or trite, or freighted with unhelpful meaning. Having run through the options, I hadn’t found what I was after.

Transition doesn’t quite work for me and has been overused by the organisational consultants. In the way that every deliverable is a ‘solution’ these days, every change has become a ‘transition’, with the overblown expectations and fees to accompany it. It’s also a bit impersonal (hence the need to prefix it with the word ‘personal’).

‘Career Change’ is another term with an industry of consultants built around it. It also seems too narrow. When I left the mothership I had had a career and that came to an end. I had to start something new.  Career change sounds to me like something you do in your twenties and thirties, a reset of your career path. It just doesn’t sound right at forty or fifty.

Re-invention is a word that has got some popularity, partly through Dorie Clark’s book “Reinventing You”, but it sounds a bit trivial. It’s what they do on those make-over shows on the telly. A new haircut, have your colours done, invest in some decent tailoring and bingo! – the new you. This is not about superficial changes, there’s no big reveal at the end of this.

‘Starting again’ could apply but it infers that you are beginning anew, from the bottom. Now, I certainly felt like a beginner in much of what I did (actually, more like a naive, gauche, clumsy teenager, to be honest) but I started with 25 years of business experience and a whole load of life skills. Even if I wanted to ignore them (and I didn’t), others could not and there was no way they could regard me and treat me like a teenage school leaver or a recent college graduate. It just doesn’t work like that.

No, none of these words seem to quite fit for me or the people I have tested them with.

The thing is, you have to change and become a different person in many ways but you also want to keep who you really are and what makes you special and unique. There are many things you need to discard and unlearn but also much that you need to keep and continue to use. On top of that, you need to add new skills and ways of thinking, building upon what you have retained, to create the new you.

Then I remembered a favourite talk of mine by Tom Peters, called “Re-imagine”. “That’s it”, I thought, “that’s the word”.

Like when you mash together all your lego kits into a big pile of stuff and build something completely new. You keep some of the bricks but discard others. You use some of the building techniques you have learnt but not others. You come up with some new ideas of your own and, voila, a new masterpiece. It’s not old, it’s not completely new, it’s an evolution.

(I discarded evolution as a word, by the way, because it’s too passive. We don’t make evolution happen, it happens to us.)

So, this is what you have to do. Reimagine you. After all, you imagined yourself to where you are today (whether consciously or unconsciously or a bit of each), so you can do it again.

Now, doesn’t that sound exciting?