In this ninth installment of the 30‑day "30/30 Career Transformation Challenge," Margaret Spence, founder of the Employee to CEO Project and the 10X Leadership Academy for Women, poses the bold question: “What label defines you?” She explains how professionals often adopt job titles or other external labels—manager, director, caregiver, speaker—and let those labels dictate their identity, behavior, and self‑worth. Spence illustrates the pitfalls of over‑identifying with a label, such as losing one’s sense of self after a role ends or internalizing negative feedback that becomes a self‑fulfilling label. She emphasizes that titles do not equate to leadership; one can lead without a formal title, and it’s essential to remain aware of how labels shape personal ego and interactions. The video encourages viewers to reflect on the labels they have accepted, to consciously release limiting ones, and to recognize their intrinsic value beyond any external designation, while reminding them that more daily challenges await throughout September.
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Day 9 of the 30/30 Career Transformation Challenge. Thank you for joining me along this journey. Um, for those of you who are joining for the first time, my name is Margaret Spence and I'm the founder of the Employee to CEO Project and the 10X Leadership Academy for Women. And I'm running this 30/30 challenge, uh, to ignite and change the way you view your career and to do a reset before the end of the year. I'm asking 30 bold questions over the 30 days of September, um, to ignite your career and to help you move forward and set new goals, new visions for where you want to go. So today's bold question is: what label defines you? What label have you taken on and own so much that you've forgotten who you are? You know, for me, my label is mom, my label is daughter, my label is caregiver, my label is business owner, my label is speaker, author, and all the things that describe the things I do, but none of those labels actually describe me. It doesn't say who I am. Within the context of work, we often take on the label, and the label is what we live up to. So if we're a manager, we take on the manager label. We wrap our entire lives around that job title, and we ultimately forget that underneath that job title, we're human beings. But a funny thing happens when that label goes away. You forget who you are and people are easy— can easily forget about you. So here's a good example. You're a manager. You take on the label of manager or director or vice president, and one day you lose the label. You're terminated, or you took a job that doesn't have that label, but you've spent all of your time living up to that label. And now you have no idea who you are. Labels are something that we have to learn to let go of. Here's an interesting one on labels. Let's say you have your performance review tomorrow and your boss says you're not a cooperative member of the team. Now cooperative member or uncooperative member is planted in your head. That label becomes the one that you live up to. So we have to be careful about the labels we accept and the labels that we want to be known for, especially when the label allows people to not see the genuine person underneath that label. One of the focal areas about managing your career is to not get caught up around your title. Your title means nothing. Every organization comes up with a neat, nifty title that they assign to their employees. You've been assigned a title. The title doesn't make you, nor does it break you. You don't have to have a title to be a leader. You can demonstrate leadership without a title. But if you have a title, you have to be cognizant of what you're living up to. You have to be conscious of what the label has done to you personally. Has it allowed you to forget who you are? Has it allowed the ego to come in and bolster you to the point where you're so about that label that you forget that the people you're encountering every day are people? Today's bold question: What label defines you? And if a label is defining you, why are you allowing the label to define who you are? Because you're way better than any label that anyone could add to you. Thank you for joining me on the 30/30 Challenge. This has been an amazing 9 days. I appreciate your being here. Stay tuned. There's more videos to come as we challenge you through the 30 days of September. Thank you.
