Confusing Identity and Reputation Creates Extraordinary Suffering

By Jackie Leon

No one prepares you for closing a 30-year-old family business.

Not for the moment you realize the ship is sinking and you're holding on until the very last second, not for yourself, but for the people who will lose their jobs.

Not for the loss of control. The denial. The desperate search for "there must be another way."

Not for closing the doors on three decades of service after you've been to your employees' baptisms, weddings, and funerals.

I lived through this with my family, in a business I was deeply involved with, an international IT manufacturing company. Memory for printers, high-grade portable hard drives, USB devices with biometrics.  Thirty years of building something that mattered.  Serving governments and their military departments.

Then 2008 hit. They diversified. Adapted. But the semiconductor market is ruthlessly volatile. Trade wars, natural disasters sent microchip costs skyrocketing. They were still recovering when COVID hit. Shipping costs went through the roof. Clients closed down. Overhead costs became impossible to contain.

I watched them suffer through this. And now, years later, the same pattern emerges with my clients.

They confuse the business closing with them failing as people. They make the company's inability to survive market forces into a statement about their identity. Their worth. Whether they're enough.

This is what you need to know:

The business is a vehicle for your values, innovation, service, caring for people, building something meaningful. That vehicle can run beautifully for years, even decades. Then market forces, global crises, and industry shifts make it unsustainable.

The vehicle fails. You don't.

You can't see it because you're drowning in what others will think. What the industry will say. How your legacy will be remembered. What it means about your name. Whether you let everyone down.

That's reputation. External stories you can't control.

Your identity, your capacity to build, to lead, to innovate, to persevere, to care deeply, remains intact the entire time.

This is the work I do as a coach. Helping high-achievers separate who they fundamentally are from the vehicles they create. Your business, your project, your title, these are expressions of your values and character, not definitions of your core self.

The business failed. You didn't. And from that truth, you get to build again.  

Wiser, stronger, more aligned.