The Higher I Climbed, the Less I Knew Myself

“It’ll look good on your resume.”

Someone planted that sentence in me back in high school, and it took. For decades it ran quietly underneath my decisions, and it worked. A great deal of what I’m proud of got done with those six words humming in the background. What no one warns you about is the slow cost of living by them. The higher I climbed, the more I became my CV.

We like these stories to turn on a single dramatic moment. The day you walked out. The meeting that broke something. The one sentence that changed everything. Mine didn’t work that way. What happened to me happened slowly, over years, which is the harder kind to notice, because nothing about it announces itself. You’re just gradually becoming someone, and one day you look up.

And here’s the part that complicates the usual version. I wasn’t miserable in a job I hated. I had an administrative role I thoroughly enjoyed, and I wanted to climb. I wanted to go as far in the organization as I could go. That ambition was real, and I’m not embarrassed by it, then or now. But the further I went, the more the work changed into something I recognized less and less. More of my time went to the politics of writing and rewriting policy, to the steady pressure of enrollment, to the external forces pressing in on higher education from every side: funding, competition, politics, the sense that the ground was always shifting under us. The title grew. The work I’d actually come for shrank. And the more that happened, the more disconnected I felt, without quite being able to say why.

Somewhere in there, I lost my sense of purpose. I lost sight of what got me up in the morning, and even of why I’d gone into education in the first place. Worse, I lost the person I’d been before I became an administrator. The one who liked to hike and camp, to barbecue, to travel, to read, to spend time with friends, to drum. I no longer had the time or the energy for any of it. And by climbing, I’d moved away from the very communities where those things had lived. I didn’t just lose the activities. I lost the people I did them with.

What I missed, it turned out, was the work itself. The earlier version of it. Collaborating with colleagues and building things together. Feeling that what we made had a direct impact on students. I knew, in my head, that I was still making a difference from where I now sat. It just didn’t feel the same.

I want to be fair to what those years gave me, because they gave me a great deal. The climb opened doors I would never have walked through otherwise. As an administrator I might meet with a writer in the morning, a physicist before lunch, a musician in the afternoon, and an sociologist before the day was out. I have always loved seeing how the dots connect, how the machinery works, how the sausage gets made, whatever metaphor lands for you. From where I sat, with a view into the inner workings of the whole place, I loved connecting silos that had never spoken to each other and sponsoring the kind of cross-disciplinary work that doesn’t happen on its own. When it came together, there was nothing like it.

And the people. I met and worked beside extraordinary people I’d never have crossed paths with otherwise, several of whom became mentors. The ones I learned the most from were leaders who had somehow stayed themselves inside the role, who carried the title without letting it swallow the person underneath. I admired that more than I understood it at the time. It would be a while before I realized I hadn’t managed the same thing.

But I have to be honest about the proportions. Those were the highlights, and I remember them precisely because they were the exceptions. They were not the shape of most days. Most days were committee meetings, back to back. Budgets. Personnel issues. My whole reason for being in this work was to help and serve people, and instead I spent my time putting out fires. The work I’d done before had been uplifting, to me and to the people I did it with, because we were building and creating something.

I’d always seen leadership as an opportunity to serve and empower people. That’s what I came to it for. What I didn’t expect was the distance that came built into the role. There’s a tension that sits between a leader and the people he’s trying to serve, a certain wariness that attaches to the title itself. An assumption, often, that you’ve got a hidden agenda, that you’re there to undermine someone’s efforts rather than support them. It wasn’t everyone, and honestly it probably wasn’t most people. But it was always there, an undercurrent beneath every relationship I tried to build. I understood the need to say no sometimes; everyone says that’s part of the job. What wore on me was subtler. The work I loved had been about being with people. The work of leadership kept putting a title between me and them. It all stood in stark contrast to the life I’d led before it.

The clearest I ever saw it was at a leadership academy hosted by Georgetown and Arizona State. I’d looked forward to it for months, expecting to grow as a leader. Instead I arrived and found myself quietly struggling with the whole idea of myself as a leader, though I’m not sure I could have told you that at the time.

One of the exercises asked us to list our passions. A simple thing. And I sat there and couldn’t come up with a single one.

That evening I called my wife, Amy, and I called my best friend, Phil, and I asked them both the same strange question. What is it I’m passionate about? They came to my rescue. They reminded me that I love music, that I love to drum. I’m still not sure how I’d managed to forget that. But maybe that’s just evidence of how far I’d drifted from the things I actually cared about.

I’d been losing that ground for a long time without naming it. The first break came when I became a department chair and suddenly found myself supervising the friends and colleagues I’d worked alongside. That changed things. Some of the communities I’d belonged to simply closed to me. But I was still at an institution where I’d already spent a decade, so I had roots, and I still felt part of the larger place.

The erosion accelerated when I moved on. Each new place I went, I went chasing the next title and the next salary, and the cost of that chase, though I didn’t tally it at the time, was paid in community and belonging. I want to be clear about this, because it matters. The places that took me in were good places, full of good people, and none of this is a complaint about any of them. The outsiderness I felt was something I’d set in motion myself. I’d traded my way out of belonging one rung at a time. I belonged, I suppose, as an administrator. But from that point forward I felt further and further from how I saw myself, from who I believed I really was. I’d reinvented myself in the image of an administrator who no longer resembled me. I couldn’t talk, walk, dress, act, or even relax as myself anymore. I did all of it as Rob the administrator. Rob the leader.

I’ll tell you now, so you’re not left in the dark, that this isn’t where the story ends. I did find my way back to the person underneath the title. But that’s a different post, and I don’t want to rush past this part to get there, because this part is where a great many people are standing right now, and it deserves to be sat with rather than solved.

So I’ll leave you where I was that evening, with a list of passions I couldn’t begin to fill in. In his book The Second Mountain, David Brooks describes two mountains. The first is the one we climb for achievement and status and the outline of a successful life. The second is the deeper one we turn toward afterward, the one about purpose and the people and things we actually love. Most of my career was spent climbing the first.

If you’ve climbed high and find yourself, against all logic, less sure of who you are the higher you get, I’d ask you the question I couldn’t answer that night. What are you passionate about? What brings you joy? What do you truly value? And what might your second mountain be?

I’m Rob Sanders, the founder of Ultreia, a coaching and pilgrimage practice for professionals standing at the threshold of their next chapter. If these questions are sitting heavier than you expected, that’s often where the real work begins. You can find me at www.walkwithultreia.com.