When I first took a Director role at Adobe, I thought I knew what I was saying yes to.

I was saying yes to the next level. To the promotion I had worked for. To the version of my career the last five years had been pointing at. Everyone I talked to about it - my manager, my mentors, my wife - agreed it was the right yes. It looked exactly like what someone on my trajectory was supposed to say.

And in one sense it was the right yes. I did the job. The feedback from my team was good. I had earned my way there, and I could hold the role.

But underneath that, something else was true, and I knew it from the first quarter: I was in over my head - not in the way people usually mean that. Not in competence. Not in the size of the org or the complexity of the work. In something more diffuse. In the shape of the role. In how it wanted me to be available. In how it wanted my evenings to feel and how it wanted my mornings to start and how it wanted my head to work when I was home with my wife and sons.

I could do the work. I couldn't do the shape. And I didn't have language for that yet.

Last week I wrote that the question underneath every stuck career decision is who am I becoming, and does this decision serve or refuse that? This week I want to name the two ways honest people answer that question wrong.

Because it's genuinely a harder question than it looks.

Ask most executives who they are becoming, and they will answer with a role. "I'm becoming a CEO." "I'm becoming a founder." "I'm becoming a coach." These sound like identity answers. They aren't. They're activities dressed up as identities. The question is asking for something underneath the role - a way of being that persists across whichever role you happen to hold. When we answer with a role, we've heard the question but flinched from it. Call it the role trap.

The second trap is more subtle and often looks like depth. Someone sits with the identity question and eventually says something like I'm becoming someone who won't be treated the way I was treated in my last job. Or I'm becoming the kind of leader I never had. Those answers feel profound because they're honest about pain. But they're reactive - defined by what's being avoided, not by what's being chosen. An identity built entirely against something is smaller than an identity built toward something. Call it the wound trap.

I fell into both, in sequence, in my first Adobe chapter. And I didn't see either of them until years later.

The Director role was the role trap.

I took it because it was the next level. I named my own becoming with a title. I answered "who am I becoming?" with "someone at that level" - not because I had thought through what that person's actual life looked like or whether that life fit me, but because that was the next visible step and I was oriented toward next visible steps. The role told me who I was becoming, which is exactly backwards.

I might have caught it if I'd asked, before taking the role, what disposition I actually wanted to bring to my work in that season. Whether the availability the role required matched the availability I could sustain. Whether the shape of the days was the shape I could actually live inside. I didn't ask any of that. I asked whether I could do the job. Which, as it turns out, is a completely different question.

Leaving Adobe the first time - for a Catholic apostolate I felt genuinely called to - was the wound trap.

The calling was real. It honestly was. The mission year (and a few months) was one of the most formative chapters of my faith and my family's life, and I don't remember it as a mistake. But the calling was also doing double duty. It was calling and it was exit. It was mission and it was escape. Both were true, at the same time, in the same act.

If I had been able to name that at the time, the calling would have gone forward more cleanly - because I would have understood that the mission was going to answer the vocational question but was not going to answer the disposition question. What I actually needed to sort out - what I was really being asked to sort out - was the shape my work life was going to take when I came back. Whether that shape would fit inside the same after-hours-availability model I had just left. Whether I was willing to keep saying yes to that model in exchange for what it offered me.

I couldn't sort that out then because I had answered the identity question with a wound. I was becoming someone who was leaving something. I hadn't yet asked what I was becoming toward.

Here is what I now see: the identity question doesn't want a role. It doesn't want a wound. It wants a disposition.

Disposition is a Catholic word for the interior stance beneath your actions. It's the way you show up in the world when you're most yourself - the through-line that persists whether you're leading a team or teaching your kids or walking with a friend. In vocational terms, it's the shape of the life you want your work to fit inside, rather than the shape of the work you want your life to accommodate.

Once I finally asked the disposition question honestly, years later, some things became clear that had never been clear before. The size of the org didn't matter to me the way I thought it did. The seniority of the role didn't matter to me the way I thought it did. What mattered was whether the work fit inside a life where I was available to my family in specific ways, present at the parish in specific ways, and free from the anxiety of being reachable at every hour. That was the disposition. Everything else was negotiable.

Which meant that a lot of decisions I had labored over as career decisions were actually easier than I made them. Some were also harder - because a disposition answer often reframes the options, and some roles that looked appealing at the level of ambition become clearly wrong at the level of shape.

If you're sitting with the identity question right now, watch for the two traps.

You will be tempted to answer with a role - because roles are easier to name than dispositions, and they let you feel like you're being specific when you're actually being vague. Notice when your answer to "who am I becoming?" is a title.

You will also be tempted to answer with a wound - because pain is real and articulating it feels honest. Notice when your answer to "who am I becoming?" is a description of what you're leaving. It might still be true. But it isn't the answer.

The real answer is a disposition. A way of being that would persist even if the role changed, even if the wound healed, even if the circumstances shifted. That disposition is the ground of every good career decision you make from here on. Get it clear, and the what questions get simpler.

Naming disposition rather than role or wound is some of the most important work I'm building now for executives in transition. Because almost no one comes in already knowing which trap they're in - and most people can't see it until someone else asks the right question.

Coming next Tuesday: On what to do once you've named the disposition - and why the first months of building around it are harder than you'd expect.

What I'm Reading

The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life (David Brooks) Brooks's argument that most careers involve two mountains - the first climbed for status, achievement, and self-construction; the second climbed for commitment, character, and self-donation - is the cleanest cultural articulation I know of the move from role identity to disposition identity. The book is uneven in places, and Brooks writes from outside the Catholic tradition (though clearly moved by the Christian one), but the central architecture is worth the read. Especially the chapter contrasting the "moral bucket list" with the "résumé bucket list" - which is another way of naming what disposition is versus what role is.

Leisure: The Basis of Culture (Josef Pieper) Short, dense, and one of the most important books I've read on what actually undergirds meaningful work. Pieper argues that beneath all work is a receptive, contemplative disposition - "leisure" in the classical sense, not the vacation sense - and that a life organized entirely around work eventually becomes incapable of even doing the work well. If you have ever felt that the pressure to be constantly available was hollowing something out of you, Pieper names what was being hollowed. It's the disposition.

One Ask

If this essay landed, someone in your life is probably in the middle of one of these traps right now.

You've watched them describe their next chapter as a role, or as an escape. You've felt that something wasn't quite clicking underneath their answer, without being able to name what.

Forward this to them. Not with a pitch. Just: "This made me think of you. Might be worth ten minutes."

That's how this work grows - one person handing it to another because they think it might help. If someone just forwarded this to you, subscribe here to get the next one directly.

In fieri. Ad alta. In the making. To the heights.

Michael

Ad Alta Weekly - vocational discernment and integrated leadership for the second half of the climb. Reach me anytime by replying to this email.