--- title: "Still Being The Person You Chose in a Hurry" id: "21868" type: "post" slug: "still-being-the-person-you-chose-in-a-hurry" published_at: "2026-10-07T23:00:00+00:00" modified_at: "2026-10-07T16:21:28+00:00" url: "https://keithblakemorenoble.com/still-being-the-person-you-chose-in-a-hurry/" markdown_url: "https://keithblakemorenoble.com/still-being-the-person-you-chose-in-a-hurry.md" excerpt: "The snap decisions you made about who to be in a new role rarely get reviewed. Years later, you may still be living by them." taxonomy_category: - "Identity" - "Leadership" - "Mindset" - "Overachieving" - "Patterns" taxonomy_post_tag: - "Habit Review" - "New Role" - "Professional Identity" - "Promotion" - "Work Habits" --- [Skip to content](#content) # Still Being The Person You Chose in a Hurry - Published October 8, 2026 The snap decisions you made about who to be in a new role rarely get reviewed. Years later, you may still be living by them. [PrevPrevious blogThe Notebook Test](https://keithblakemorenoble.com/the-notebook-test/) #### Table of Contents *“You used to be the funniest person in that office.”* Used to be… So many people in professional positions could have a sentence like that levelled at them; not in judgement, but more in lamentation. The worst of it is that they wouldn’t even realise which part of themselves it was about… ## You Guessed You’ve been promoted. A well-deserved recognition of your work and efforts over the years. You’ve shown that you have the skills, the knowledge, and the expertise needed to do a good job in your new role. However, even with the best experience and good support for your new role, there is one thing you don’t know. It’s the one thing that nobody really teaches either. And to make it worse, you don’t have time to figure it out – you’ve got meetings from day one, you’ve got people (your new team, your new manager, your new colleagues, and more) all looking to you to see what you do, you’ve got an email inbox larger than the Library of Alexandria… So you do the only thing you can reasonably do. You guess, and you guess fast. What are you guessing about? How the sort of person in your new role is supposed to “be”, how they (or rather you) are meant to come across. So you make snap decisions about how you should behave and how you should come across. Your emails become more formal. You stop offering opinions in meetings. Your office door stays closed more than the old one used to. You socialise with colleagues less. You share less about your personal life or life outside of work in general. You become more serious. Each of them is pretty minor, when you look at them in isolation, and all seem to be eminently sensible – the right thing to do, after all. ## The Lunch That Stopped To show you what I mean, let’s take the example of Adam (real life example, just the names changed). Adam was promoted from within, and most people genuinely recognised that he was a good choice for his new role. In the years before his promotion, Adam was the team mate that everyone looked to to bring a bit of levity to the day. Well known for his excellent sense of humour, Adam could always be relied upon to bring a much needed laugh when team morale needed a lift. He would usually be found at lunch time hanging out with the rest of his colleagues, where the conversations flowed and, inevitably, great ideas would emerge, without anyone forcing them. After his promotion? Adam guessed what a manager in his position should do, how they should behave, and he acted accordingly. He stopped going on team lunches and ate alone at his desk. He got busy. He had less informal contact with the team. Nothing untoward, nothing formally decided, no grand announcement of a new way of doing things, just a gradual change as he settled into what he guessed was the right way to behave in his new role. A couple of years later, by chance, he bumped into Emma. Emma used to work in Adam’s team and had left about a year after his promotion. As they chatted, Emma delivered that devastating line – “You used to be the funniest person in that office.” People now found Adam not funny but distant and unapproachable, maybe even boring. What hit Adam hardest was the realisation that most of the people he now worked with had never actually met the funny version of Adam (the real Adam), they only knew him as the boring manager who ate at his desk. The manager who the team had stopped bringing problems to early. The only thing Adam had actually chosen was the change in how he ate lunch – everything else simply grew from that over the ensuing two years. ## Adapting, or Being Rewritten? Every new role asks something different of you. For example, you speak differently in a board meeting than you would at dinner with friends. That’s perfectly natural, and is usually a conscious choice you make – and you know the reasons why you made that choice. You are deliberately adapting to the needs of the situation. Which means you can also easily change back when you want to. However, sometimes we don’t adapt, but we end up being rewritten – we make adjustments without really consciously thinking about them or choosing them, and we don’t change them back again afterwards. After a while, we no longer remember even making those changes, let alone remember why we did it. From the inside, Adapting and Being Rewritten can feel like the same thing, which is why the latter rarely gets challenged – after all, if the changes feel like they were probably your choice in the first place, you’re not going to change them. There’s an easy way to tell them apart, though. Pick a habit, something you now do differently, and ask yourself if you can see the original reason for making that change, the reason for the choice you made, and whether the situation leading to that decision still applies today. Drawing a blank on any or all of those strongly suggests you were rewritten… ## No Review Date So much of what we do in our working lives (and even outside of them) gets reviewed regularly. Our targets, our processes, our goals, our own performance. All subject to regular and sometimes rigorous review. Without those essential reviews, how can you be sure they are still doing the job properly – or even know whether their job is still necessary? However, the decisions that you made on your first day in your new role – how to act, how you should come across – they never get a review. Partly because they were never written down anywhere, and partly because on the surface they seem to work; nothing goes obviously wrong, so there’s no real reason to revisit them. Before you realise it, the people who knew the “real” you from before have moved on, and the new people who have replaced them over time only ever meet the you in the current role. Soon enough, the only person who actually remembers that you used to be the funny one is you. ## Out Of Practice So what can we do about it? The good news is that we don’t have to do anything dramatic. No major changes and grand re-evaluations. Which is just as well, because not only are they hard work, the reality is that if you walked in tomorrow as your old self, that’s going to cause more problems than it solves (not the least being some of your team wondering if you are having some sort of midlife crisis!). Let’s also not forget that some of the changes you did make were actually helpful and useful, the right thing to have done. So rather than grand sweeping changes, I invite you simply to pick one habit which you had changed, and ask yourself “What problem was this habit designed to solve at the time?” Get really curious about what answers might come up. Accept them all without judgement, and encourage them to flow. If necessary, ask yourself “and what else?” a few times – it’s interesting how often that can cause the really deep answers to suddenly spring from seemingly nowhere. Once you’ve got what feels like the full answer, consider whether that habit is still relevant now. Truth is, some of them will be, and that’s worth knowing just as much as it’s worth knowing about the ones which aren’t. Repeat the process as often as you feel necessary – you don’t have to do it all in one sitting, you might spread them out, perhaps one per week. There’s no rush, after all. You’ll find some of the habits are still doing a very useful job, so keep them but this time with the benefit of knowing why. Others you might find are solving a problem which no longer exists (or perhaps never actually existed in the first place), these are the ones you can quietly drop or change as needed. > Which of your habits at work are still answering questions which nobody has asked for years? ## So What Now? If you were starting your role again tomorrow, knowing everything you know now, which of those early decisions would you make again? If you fancy going into much more depth about this, and finding some powerful answers, then check out “[Leading Without Losing Yourself](/courses/leading-without-losing-yourself/) “, which is part of [The Overachievers Club](https://KeithBlakemoreNoble.com/work-with-me/the-overachievers-club/) – it’s a course of 8 modules about the gap between you and the version of you who leads, what that costs, and leading with your own judgement and humour back in place.. On the other hand, if you prefer something a little more relaxed and fun, take [The Overachiever Quiz](https://KeithBlakemoreNoble.com/work-with-me/the-overachievers-club/what-kind-of-achiever-are-you/?#quiz) – 10 fun questions to find out what kind of overachiever you are, and what to do with that information. ## Connected Podcast Episode ### Episode 037 – The Role and the Person Did you decide who to be at work in your first fortnight, then never look again? Discover why early guesses in a role stick, and how to review them. [https://keithblakemorenoble.com/podcast/009-operating-from-inherent-worth/](https://keithblakemorenoble.com/podcast/009-operating-from-inherent-worth/) [Listen…](https://keithblakemorenoble.com/podcast/episode-037-the-role-and-the-person/) [https://keithblakemorenoble.com/podcast/episode-037-the-role-and-the-person/](https://keithblakemorenoble.com/podcast/episode-037-the-role-and-the-person/) ## Relevant Related Blogs and Episodes [https://keithblakemorenoble.com/self-image-guilt-and-the-quiet-rules-youre-living-by/](https://keithblakemorenoble.com/self-image-guilt-and-the-quiet-rules-youre-living-by/) ### Self-Image, Guilt, and the Quiet Rules You’re Living By Feeling overwhelmed doesn’t always mean you lack capacity. A thoughtful look at self-image, values, guilt, and why effort can feel heavier than it needs to. [Read more…](https://keithblakemorenoble.com/self-image-guilt-and-the-quiet-rules-youre-living-by/) ### The Weight You Carry Without Realising You have been carrying this weight so long it feels like personality. But it is a pattern. And once you can see it, everything changes. [Read more…](https://keithblakemorenoble.com/the-weight-you-carry-without-realising/) [https://keithblakemorenoble.com/the-weight-you-carry-without-realising/](https://keithblakemorenoble.com/the-weight-you-carry-without-realising/) [https://keithblakemorenoble.com/podcast/episode-035-the-identity-beneath-the-pattern/](https://keithblakemorenoble.com/podcast/episode-035-the-identity-beneath-the-pattern/) ### Episode 035 – The Identity Beneath the Pattern Your critic returns to the same accusation for years. That consistency is the clue. It is guarding a belief about who you have to be. [Listen…](https://keithblakemorenoble.com/podcast/episode-035-the-identity-beneath-the-pattern/) ### Episode 029 – Performing for an Audience of One You’ve stopped working on the work and started working on how it will be received. Discover the invisible audience driving that shift and what it’s costing you. [Listen](https://keithblakemorenoble.com/podcast/029-performing-for-an-audience-of-one/) […](https://keithblakemorenoble.com/podcast/005-how-responsibility-quietly-expands/) [https://keithblakemorenoble.com/podcast/029-performing-for-an-audience-of-one/](https://keithblakemorenoble.com/podcast/029-performing-for-an-audience-of-one/) #### Keith Blakemore-Noble Keith Blakemore-Noble is The Overachiever’s Coach. For over sixteen years he has worked with driven, capable individuals to identify and restructure the internal patterns that keep them stuck despite their success. A former Chartered IT Professional and Fellow of the British Computer Society, Keith brings a systems thinker’s precision to mindset change. He is the founder of The Overachievers Club, host of The Overachievers Podcast, and author of six published books including The Masks We Wear and AntiManipulation, with his forthcoming Overachiever-based book in development. He uses Mindset Mastery, his bespoke blend of hypnosis, NLP, and coaching, to create rapid, deep, and lasting change.