The old sentence still plays every time someone asks who you are. It describes a woman who no longer lives here.
I have been running an old voicemail greeting for about two years.
Not a real one. The other kind. The recording that plays automatically whenever someone asks who I am, what I do, how I am going. My mouth opens and out it comes, word perfect, in a voice that sounds like mine, describing a woman who no longer lives here.
People leave messages for her all the time. She is very popular. She is just not home.
The Four Sentences
If you could hear the recording, it would go something like this.
I am the go-to person. I am the one who fixes everything. I have everything under control. I am the yes person.
Four sentences. I could say them in my sleep, and for years I more or less did. They have been true at various points in my life, and they have been useful at every single one of them. They built careers, kept teams together, held families through hard seasons, and earned me a reputation I was proud of.
The problem is not that they were lies. The problem is that they were true for so long that I stopped checking.
Somewhere in the last two years, I have shed a great deal. Roles, habits, ways of working, and yes, some ties I thought I would never cut. And yet every time someone asks who I am, the old greeting plays. I hear myself describing the go-to person in the same week I have finally learned to let a call go to voicemail.
That is not me any more.
You may know your own version of this. The sentence you say at dinner parties. The way you describe yourself in the first five minutes of a meeting. The line in your bio you have not reread in years. Read it back slowly, as though a stranger had written it. Does it describe the person reading it?
For What Reason?
Here is the question I have been sitting with, and I would like to hand it to you because it is not comfortable to hold alone.
If these stories no longer serve me, for what reason am I keeping them alive?
The honest answer is that they once served me very well. The go-to person is never left out. The fixer is always needed. The one with everything under control is never the one being worried about. And the yes person is always, always invited.
These are not personality traits. They are entry tickets. Somewhere early on, many of us learned that being useful was the surest route to being wanted, and the four sentences are what that lesson sounds like when it grows up and gets a job.
There is also a less flattering reason, and it is not only ours. A well-established body of research on how people maintain their sense of self has found that we tend to prefer feedback and relationships that confirm how we already see ourselves, sometimes even when the view is not a flattering one. Being known, even known wrongly, feels safer than being misunderstood. Much of that work comes from laboratory studies, so it describes a tendency rather than a rule, but most of us recognise the pull.
And the people around us do it too. They know where to find the go-to person. They have her number saved. When you stop answering in the old voice, some of them will keep ringing the old number anyway.
That is not me any more. So why do I keep saying it?
Because the old greeting is the version everybody already knows how to love.
So here is a harder question, and it deserves an honest answer rather than a generous one. Who benefits from you staying exactly as you were described? Write the names down if you dare. Then notice whether your own name is anywhere on the list.
The Illusion of Being Finished
There is a strange trick our minds play about change.
In one large study, researchers asked more than nineteen thousand people, aged eighteen to sixty-eight, how much their personalities, values and preferences had changed over the past ten years, and how much they expected them to change over the next ten. At every age, people reported a great deal of change behind them and expected surprisingly little ahead. The researchers called it the end of history illusion: the quiet belief that the person you are today is the finished article. The study relied on people’s own reports rather than measuring change directly, but the pattern held across every age group they looked at.
Think about what that means for your introduction.
You were shaped, and reshaped, and reshaped again, and at some point you wrote down the result and stopped. The greeting froze the person at the moment you recorded it. Everything since then has been happening to someone the recording does not mention.
You can hear it in the way people talk about themselves. The woman who still calls herself the shy one, twenty years and three promotions after anyone saw her blush. The man who introduces himself as hopeless with money while quietly running the finances of a small charity. The leader who says she is not creative, then spends the afternoon redesigning an entire department. The greeting outlives the person it describes, often by decades.
Which is why, when real change finally arrives, it can feel less like growth and more like trespassing. As though you are not quite allowed to be someone the greeting has not announced.
“But People Need Me”
You might be thinking: this is self-indulgent. People genuinely rely on me. Somebody has to be the one who holds it together.
Perhaps. And there is nothing wrong with helping, fixing, holding, saying yes. The question is not whether you do those things. It is whether you can still choose not to.
If being the go-to person is something you do, you can put it down on a Tuesday and pick it up again on Thursday. If it is who you are, you cannot put it down without feeling that you have disappeared.
Not how much you give, but what happens inside you when you stop.
So try this question on, slowly. If nobody needed you to fix anything for a month, who would be left?
When that question first landed for me, the honest answer was a long silence. I had looked after everybody else so thoroughly, for so long, that I had quietly lost track of the one person I was supposed to be looking after. Everything had been external. Everything had been about other people. Somewhere in all that usefulness, I had mislaid my own identity, and I had not even noticed it was missing, because the greeting kept playing and everyone kept leaving messages.
No New Label, Thank You
Here is where most articles about reinvention would hand you a shiny new introduction. Out with the fixer, in with the visionary. Record a better greeting. Practise it in the mirror.
That would be a lie dressed up as a conclusion, partly because I do not have one.
I do not know yet who the new Catherine is. I know she looks after herself before she looks after the room. I know she thinks of herself without needing to apologise for it. I know she lets some calls ring out. Beyond that, I am genuinely still meeting her.
And I have come to believe it is not my job to put a label on her. Not yet, and possibly not ever. The old greeting was a label, and a label is just a smaller room you agree to live in so that other people can find you more easily.
The most honest introduction I have right now is an unfinished one. It sounds something like: I am in between. I am letting a lot go. Ask me again in a year.
It is not a very good sentence for networking. It is the first true one I have said in a long time.
That is not me any more, and I am in no hurry to replace her.
Leave the Line Blank
So here is the one thing I would ask you to try this week.
The next time someone asks who you are, or what you do, listen for the recording. You will hear it start. The first word, the familiar rhythm, the sentence you could say in your sleep.
Stop halfway.
Not dramatically. Just let the old sentence trail off, and say something truer instead, even if the truer thing is only, I am working that out at the moment.
Then notice how it feels to be seen without the greeting. It may feel exposed. It may feel slightly rude, as though you have broken a promise to be predictable. It may also feel like the first deep breath you have taken in a conversation for years.
Some people will not know what to do with your unfinished answer. Let them not know. They will adjust, or they will keep ringing the old number, and either way, you will have stopped answering in a voice that is not yours.
The Greeting Ends
I have not recorded a new message. I am not sure I will.
For now, when the phone rings, there is a short pause where the old voice used to be. Then a tone. Then nothing at all, just space for whoever is calling to say something real, and space for me to answer, if I choose to, as whoever I am today.
The person I kept introducing left years ago.
I am only now getting to know who stayed.
If this resonated, I would love to continue the conversation. You can explore 1:1 coaching with me here, or keep reading on the blog.
Catherine
