A transition becomes meaningful when we stop trying to recover an earlier version of ourselves and begin integrating the person the journey has produced.
Coming home sounds like a return to something known.
The landscape may be familiar. The names, humour and rhythms return quickly. People who knew you earlier in life can place you without needing the full explanation.
But no one comes home unchanged.
After years working across Asia-Pacific, Europe and the Middle East—and leading businesses in Germany, Austria and Switzerland—returning to New Zealand has not felt like reversing a journey. Nor has establishing Bevan Gray Advisory been a simple continuation of an international executive career under a new name.
It has been a transition: a process of deciding what to carry forward, what to release and how to bring different parts of a career into a more coherent next chapter.
That experience has reinforced something I have observed in other leaders. The visible move may happen on a particular date. The identity transition does not.
The title changes before the identity does
Senior roles create more than responsibility. They create rhythm, status, community and a reliable answer to the question, 'What do you do?'
When a role ends—by choice, circumstance or design—the formal authority disappears immediately. The habits and identity built around it remain. A calendar that was once crowded can become strangely open. Decisions that came to you now belong to someone else. Relationships formed around the role may change shape.
This is why career transition is often harder than a rational decision analysis suggests. Herminia Ibarra's research on working identity shows that people do not simply think their way into a new career. They experiment with possible selves, activities and networks.[1] Her later work also emphasises that transition is embedded in family and social relationships, not undertaken by an isolated individual.[2]
The question is not only, 'What should I do next?' It is also, 'Who am I when the previous role is no longer organising my life?'
A coherent story is discovered, not manufactured
Leaders are often encouraged to create a compelling narrative about their next chapter. That can be useful—but it can also create pressure to make the transition look cleaner than it feels.
Research by Ibarra and Roxana Barbulescu describes how self-narratives help people reconstruct identity through major work-role transitions. Importantly, those narratives develop through interaction and feedback; they are revised as the new identity becomes more real.[3]
In practice, the story may begin as a set of fragments. Professional rugby taught me about preparation, resilience and collective performance. Leadership advisory work taught me how to assess capability and support difficult decisions. CEO roles brought direct accountability for strategy, integration, growth and people. International experience made context impossible to ignore. Governance work sharpened the importance of stewardship and judgement.
The transition has not required choosing one of those identities. It has required seeing the thread that connects them.
Coming home changes the meaning of both words
Home is not static while we are away. Neither are we.
That creates a subtle tension. Others may understandably meet the version of us they last knew. We may also arrive with assumptions formed elsewhere—about pace, directness, scale, hierarchy or what professional contribution should look like.
The work is not to decide which context is right. It is to become more conscious of what each has taught us. International experience has value when it expands judgement, not when it is used as a credential to override local reality.
For me, coming home means bringing a wider set of experiences into a place where relationships, contribution and long-term purpose feel particularly tangible. It also means listening again: to how organisations here define value, to the constraints leaders are actually navigating and to what should not be imported simply because it worked somewhere else.
Transition through experiments, not declarations
The temptation in a career transition is to announce the answer too early. A new title can reduce uncertainty for others and for ourselves. But premature certainty can lock us into a version of the future before we have learned enough.
Ibarra's work recommends action and experimentation: trying new activities, building new relationships and allowing experience to inform identity.[1] Harvard Business School's work on identity transformation similarly describes career change as a process in which side projects and emerging alternatives can become viable paths.[4] McKinsey's discussion of reinvention also challenges the myth of abrupt transformation.[5]
Small experiments create evidence. A conversation reveals where experience is useful. A piece of writing tests whether an idea resonates. A teaching or advisory engagement shows which work creates energy and value. A new routine reveals what the next chapter requires from us personally, not only professionally.
This is not indecision. It is disciplined discovery.
Carry forward capability, release the old operating system
Not everything that created success in one chapter should govern the next.
An executive environment may reward speed, scale, visibility and constant availability. A portfolio, advisory or governance chapter may require a different rhythm: deeper preparation, fewer but more consequential commitments, greater patience and the willingness to create value without controlling the outcome.
The capability carries forward. The operating system may need to change.
This is where transition becomes more than a career move. It becomes a choice about how we want to contribute, what kind of relationships we want to build and which measures of success still deserve authority over us.
A homecoming can be an integration
Transitions are often described as leaving one identity and adopting another. My experience feels less like replacement and more like integration.
The adviser and the operator. The international executive and the New Zealander. The leader shaped in corporate settings and the person shaped in sport. The ambition to make an impact and the growing appreciation that impact can be quieter, more selective and more personal.
None of those pairs has to be resolved by choosing one side.
Coming home is not going back. It is meeting a familiar place as a changed person—and accepting that the next chapter will be built from both continuity and change.
Perhaps that is the deeper work of any meaningful career transition: not to invent a new self, but to become more deliberate about the whole self we now bring.
Questions for a leader in transition
- Which part of your identity is tied to a role that is changing or ending?
- What capability should travel with you—and which habit belongs to the old operating system?
- Which small experiments would give you better evidence about the next chapter?
- Who still sees an earlier version of you, and what conversations might help both of you update the story?
- What would a more integrated definition of contribution and success look like now?
Sources and further reading
- Ibarra, H. (2003/2023), Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career, Harvard Business Review Press; related INSEAD overview, How to Stay Stuck in the Wrong Career. https://www.insead.edu/faculty-research/publications/journal-articles/how-stay-stuck-wrong-career
- Ibarra, H. (2024), Reinventing Your Career—When It's Not Just About You, Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2024/01/reinventing-your-career-when-its-not-just-about-you
- Ibarra, H. & Barbulescu, R. (2010), Identity as Narrative: Prevalence, Effectiveness, and Consequences of Narrative Identity Work in Macro Work Role Transitions, Academy of Management Review, 35(1), 135-154. https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/amr.35.1.zok135
- Harvard Business School Faculty & Research, Identity and Transformation in Professional Careers. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?research=6810
- McKinsey & Company (2023), Author Talks: Create your reinvention road map in four easy steps. https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-on-books/author-talks-create-your-reinvention-road-map-in-four-easy-steps
- Center for Creative Leadership (2020), How to Transition Through Change. https://www.ccl.org/articles/leading-effectively-articles/adapting-to-change-its-about-the-transition/