I see a lot of advice online about how to craft a resume for a specific job, or how to trim out the uncomfortable bits of your life to present a smooth and polished persona. A shiny, gapless resume and maybe an AI-generated headshot will turn you into Corporate Barbie, ready to post on LinkedIn about how thrilled you are for the new opportunity.
But if you’re completely over the corporate world, Corporate Barbie looks like a different person from you entirely. What are the effects of resume editing, and how deep do they go?
What Your Resume Edits Are Really Hiding
Your resume might be evidence of a bigger editing project that’s been running the show for years.
Real life might look much different than what someone can read on paper. Maybe the last six years were a hot mess. You got laid off during Covid, you had family health issues that soaked up a lot of time. Or you had a full-on breakdown and spent months clawing your way back to mental health. Your resume now shows that profound change as a “sabbatical.”
On the other side of the equation, your volunteer work could be misunderstood or invite judgment, so that stays off even though it’s the thing that matters more to you than anything else. Or you’re very into a hobby that not only sharpens your skills and connects you to an entire community of people, but seems completely unrelated to your work life.
The corporate environment, and especially recruiting, broadcasts clearly what it wants and what it doesn’t. And then once you’re there, they trot out the whole “bring your whole self to work” line, but don’t tell you which parts of yourself are ok to bring.
You edit your life for corporate consumption because you know how to present information to a particular audience. That’s a skill, and it’s worked for a long time. But as you get older and wiser, it takes more energy to maintain and sell. Your interest in keeping up the facade is fading.
The Adaptive Personality
You quickly learned how things got done in your corporate job. It required you to maintain relationships with these people but not those other people. Appear tough and decisive in meetings. The standards were high enough that mocking people for low-quality work was considered acceptable, even encouraged.
Some cutthroat environments thrive on political maneuvering, and you learned to do exactly that. Your empathy was soon on the chopping block, especially as you recognized its emotional cost. Having compassion for everyone around you makes it harder to deliver terrible performance reviews and lay people off. So you numbed yourself to moral injury in order to survive.
All of the ways your personality changed were adaptations that served a purpose. When people come to me for coaching, many of them say that they don’t like who they’ve become. How did I get so mean? They ask. How is it that I’m offending people during meetings?
The cracks in the adaptations are starting to show.
The Traits You Borrowed
It can be easy to forget that the adapted, corporate version of you is not the actual you. The traits you adopted were in response to a specific culture and a set of incentives. You can look at the behaviors more as tools than as characteristics.
You were probably strategic about the work you took on. If someone asked you for help with a project, you calculated whether it would impact a future promotion, or lump you in with people you didn’t want to be lumped in with. So you declined to help, even though you’re a helpful person who probably would have enjoyed working on the project.
I’m not saying this to undermine the person you became to get through that job. Your ability to morph into what the company needed probably paid your expenses and helped you climb a ladder, even if you don’t really care about that ladder anymore. But letting go of it can feel scary – wasn’t that persona the one who got you the promotion?
Sort of. The persona helped in a system where everyone knew they were playing a game. When you take your leave, the person you were before you acquired those tools is still in there. And that includes everything you left off your resume, your tattoos, and the grief you still carry.
That grief piece is real: shedding the persona could mean acknowledging a lot of lost time spent upholding someone who wasn’t quite you. And many of the work relationships you developed won’t survive when you leave. Those are real losses.
Two Paths Out of the Corporate Persona
I spoke with a friend the other day who is in final interviews for jobs at two small companies. They are more values-aligned than the big tech firm that is about to lay him off. We were talking about what he should wear to his last interview. Will he wear long sleeves that cover his tattoos? Nope, he said. If I have to hide those, it isn’t the right culture for me.
Getting to that point required some emotional work on his part. He had to let go of our culturally-entrenched idea that people with tattoos, piercings, or rainbow hair wouldn’t be taken seriously. That he’d have to tamp down who he was and be Corporate Ken to get in the door. He worked through those fears and will go into his interview as a more authentic person.
Going to a smaller corporate firm is a valid option, especially for people who don’t have the entrepreneurial spark or an idea for a business. Smaller companies are training grounds for going out on your own. You get to wear several hats and learn once again how to get things done without the big bloated infrastructure that supported your work for years.
The second path, where you step entirely outside the employer construct, will let you incorporate all of your skills and life experiences into what you build.
The Full-Life Resume
I know from experience that you can’t just flip a switch and turn off your corporate persona. It accumulated over many years and it can feel unsafe to just drop the traits that helped you succeed in previous jobs.
If you can start to appreciate how those traits were protective shields that you no longer need to feel safe in the world, the shield can start to come down. It might take a while, but you’ll feel it happening.
As you mull over what will come after this corporate phase of your life, consider a full-life resume. What would you add, and what does that say about what you’ve been hiding?
If you want some help with that exercise, Own Your Edge is a 90-minute session where we do exactly this kind of work together. You can find it at burnthemapcoaching.com. Or if you’re not ready for that yet, the free guide — 4 Moves to Get Unstuck — is at burnthemapcoaching.com/guide.
Burn the map. Build what fits.
Related episodes
The 4 Phases of Reinvention (And Where You’re Stuck)
Wanting to Want: Why You Can’t Get Excited About Your Job Anymore
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