Lecture on Identity Politics and Professional Fear

Introduction to Identity Politics

• Identity politics are prevalent in society.
  • Examples: Democrat vs Republican, Liberal vs Conservative.
  • Critical importance of these identities.
• Identity in business:
  • Successful professional identity.
  • Personal identity roles: father, grandfather, husband.
  • Professional identity example: Professor at Harvard Business School.

Issues with Professional Identity

• Seeing oneself only through professional success is problematic.
• Reduces life to a limited perspective.
• Professional identity based on fear:
  • Fear of attack on identity equated to death fear.
  • 20% fear death; many fear failing at work.
  • Leads to unhealthy behaviors and relationships.

Fear of Failure in Successful Individuals

• Common in successful business professionals.
• Desire to overcome fear without failing.
• Introduction of a contemplative exercise to address fear.

Mara Nisati Death Meditation

• Origin: Theravada Buddhism in Southern Asia.
• Practice: Contemplation of one's own death.
  • Photos of corpses in decay stages.
  • Monks/nuns acknowledge mortality to transcend fear.
• Application: Professionals afraid of identity death can use a similar approach.

Meditation Adaptation for Work Identity

• Reality exposure to eventual career end.
• Recognizing professional life is not eternal.
• Nine-part meditation exercise:
  1. Feeling loss of edge at work.
  2. Noticing remarks about decline.
  3. Board discussing replacement.
  4. Certainty about career end.
  5. Forced retirement.
  6. Remembered only for being forced out.
  7. Unrecognized by new employees after leaving.
  8. Seen as retired, not asked about past.
  9. Living a new life, detached from past career.
• Goal: Transcend fear by accepting change.

Conclusion

• Normalizing professional life changes.
• Managing life like a project.
• Adapting skills and interests purposefully.
• Engineer new good times under changing circumstances.
• Personal anecdote: Finding peace through acceptance.