What Do You Do?
🎧 Prefer to listen? Click the audio below to listen to me narrate this post.
Last month, I attended an online visioning session to help imagine the future of a local organization that is near and dear to my heart.
As we circulated through different breakout rooms, we introduced ourselves. Every time the introductions began, I felt my body tighten, not because I don't like meeting people but because I knew what question was coming.
“Liz, what do you do?”
Cue mild panic mode.
I could already feel myself sorting through the possible answers. “Which version of my work would make sense in this room? Which one would require the least explanation? Which one could I say before everyone else started wondering why I was still talking?”
A conversation with a good friend this week reminded me that I’m not alone in this struggle. She dreads the “what do you do” question, too. At some point, she started answering people with a one-word answer: “Nothing.”
My friend and I don’t like this question because the question is incomplete. As such, it leads to incomplete answers.
When I respond to “what do you do” with the answer “spiritual director,” it’s kind of misleading. No one can “direct” someone else’s spirituality, yet that’s one title for the ministry of sacred accompaniment.
The answer “I teach rhetoric and writing” is met with blank stares or “Oh, that’s nice. It must be really challenging to teach writing now with AI being everywhere.” (Sidebar: Yes. Yes, it is.)
So, I find myself editing, sharing some version of, “I teach all forms of writing except creative writing” or “I'm an English professor, but I don’t teach what you expect.”
Both answers are true. Neither one tells the whole truth.
Lately, I have started wondering what happens to us when we repeatedly offer the versions of ourselves that are easiest for other people to understand but don’t tell the whole story.
Here’s a whole story I’d love to tell:
“I spend my days helping engineering students learn how to explain what they know. I also help graduate students think about work, identity, and purpose. I also accompany people through their spiritual development. I also teach Ignatian discernment, a 500-year-old practice for navigating uncertainty and interpreting what is happening within and around us while fostering our relationship with the sacred. And I write about all the above.”
None of those items in that list feel complete on its own.
For years, I thought the problem was that I needed a better elevator pitch. This summer, I realized the problem was the question. And I’ve been circling that same problem in my teaching for years.
I started writing workbooks for my career discernment classes and workshops because I wanted my students and participants to have something practical. I wanted to help them use Ignatian discernment when they were facing the questions, “What do I want? What should I do next? Where am I going?”
But the longer I taught career discernment and the more people I accompanied through spiritual direction, the more those questions started to feel too small.
People weren’t just choosing jobs. They were navigating identities, relationships, financial realities, family expectations, grief, uncertainty, desires, their relationships with the sacred, and lives that didn’t always unfold according to plan. Those things weren’t simply influencing their career decisions.
They were shaping who they were becoming.
That realization changed the workbooks I was writing. They stopped being only about how to make a career decision and started becoming something larger: a way to notice how work participates in forming our life and how the sacred invites us to participate in that formation.
The question I asked people started to change, too.
I stopped asking “What do you do?” and started asking, “Who are you becoming through your work?” That question is what eventually turned the workbooks into a book about career formation.
Career formation is the lifelong process through which our work—and our relationship to work—shape who we are becoming within the realities of our identities, relationships, circumstances, and communities.
For me, that formation cannot be separated from the sacred. The sacred is present within and around the identities, relationships, circumstances, communities, and interior movements that shape how we experience work.
We do not leave those parts of ourselves at the office door or Teams meeting. We bring our whole selves, our lived experience, and our interior lives with us into our work. And our work, in turn, becomes part of how we experience ourselves.
Ignatian discernment has become the way I participate in that process. It helps me notice what is happening within and around me, listen for how the sacred may be communicating through those experiences, interpret what they might mean, and respond with as much interior freedom as my circumstances allow.
What I do and who I am are connected. They are not interchangeable.
So, the next time someone asks me, “What do you do?” I still don't know what I’ll say.
I might say I’m a professor. Or a spiritual director. Or a writer. “Nothing” is starting to sound pretty good.
But I know the question I’d rather answer: Who are you becoming through your work?
Apparently, I needed to write a whole book to learn how to answer it.
