Title & Identity

I had a title. And I had no idea who I was without it.

There was a moment, not dramatic, not cinematic, just a Tuesday afternoon in a room I had been in a hundred times before.

Someone introduced me. They listed my roles. Economist. Cultural Transformation Advisor. Event Producer. The words landed in the room like credentials on a table.

I smiled. I said "Thank you." And somewhere inside, very quietly, something tilted.

Because I had been in that room before as all of those things. And I had never once asked myself: which one is actually me?

I had built the titles carefully. Earned them. Stacked them like armour. And the armour had served me well, it opened doors, it started conversations, it gave people a reason to listen before I had said a single true thing.

But that Tuesday I noticed something I could not un-notice.

I was performing the introduction before the person had even finished giving it.

I want to tell you something I have never written down before.

For most of my adult life I was extraordinarily good at becoming what a room needed.

Walk into a boardroom, become the economist. Walk into a studio, become the dancer. Walk into a community, become the connector. Each version was real. None of them was the whole thing.

And the cost of that, the thing nobody talks about when they talk about being adaptable and versatile and multifaceted, is that after a long time you genuinely lose track of what is performance and what is you.

Not because you are dishonest. Because you are good. Because you learned early that the full version of yourself was too much, or too strange, or too difficult to explain in the time it takes someone to decide if they are interested.

So you edit. And then you edit again. And eventually you are standing in a room being introduced by your titles and thinking, quietly, yes, but who is that, exactly.

This is what I know now.

Identity is not a fixed thing you discover once and carry forever. It is not your CV. It is not your titles, your roles, your achievements, or your reputation.

Identity is what remains when all of that is temporarily gone.

It is what you reach for in the early morning before the day starts telling you who to be. It is what surfaces in a dance class when no one knows you are an economist. It is what you feel in your body when you walk into a room and, for once, you have nothing to prove.

Strong Core, in MBI, is not a metaphor. It is a literal question.

When the title is gone, who is standing there?

I spent years not being able to answer that.

And the reason I built the methodology, the reason I wrote the book, the reason I am writing this letter to you now, is that I eventually found a way to ask the question differently.

Not: who am I?

But: what in me has been consistent, across every room, every role, every country, every version of the performance?

The answer, when I finally stopped moving long enough to hear it, surprised me.

It was not the economist.

It was not the event producer, or the cultural advisor, or the head of entrepreneurship.

It was the one who notices. The one who walks into a room and feels it before she understands it. The one who reads bodies before she reads words. The one who has been dancing since she was six not because she was told to, but because movement was the first language that made complete sense.

That has been consistent. In boardrooms and in dance studios. In Singapore and in Malaysia and in Hungary. In meetings I ran and meetings I sat quietly in and meetings I left early because something felt wrong before I could name it.

The dancing economist is not a personal brand.

It is the truest description I have ever found.

If you are reading this and something in you just tilted, I want you to know that is not an accident.

That tilt is the question.

Who are you when the title is gone?

Not a crisis. A direction.

In the next two issues I am going to take this further. Into the moment the old identity broke down completely, and what I did with the pieces. And then into what comes after, when you stop performing and start integrating.

If this landed somewhere real, the De Journal comes every Saturday. It is free. It goes further than the posts. Subscribe below and I will see you there.

With a warm embrace,

Andrea 💃

The only Dancing Economist in the world

Dare to dance your way in life and business.