Many, if not most, of us by the middle of our lives have a sense for how we come across to others as a professional.  We can anticipate what people will say are our strengths, and where they might see us as less strong, the contexts where we stand out most from our peers, the qualities they most rely on us for. 

This familiar picture often settles to become our sense of professional identity and can be a source of comfort.  We feel the horizons that bound this familiar landscape mark out our authentic selves. 

None of this is necessarily a bad thing as such, except that we often take one more step to say that this well-understood territory defines our potential.  In that scenario, to expect us to go beyond those boundaries can therefore appear to risk being false to who we really are.

If we let this happen, then we inadvertently transform the limits of what we are used to, or what we can see, into the hard edges, the limits, of our capacity.  We tell ourselves we cannot go any further and be truly authentic.  And yet the evidence is that through life for many reasons we have actually chosen not to use much of the capacity that we were born with.

At the time this self-narrowing may have been a sensible source of focus. But as we become older and our context changes, some of the qualities that were central to our early success become less important, and others we maybe did not need so much earlier on become more important. 

In fact we may discover that seeking out further horizons, to go beyond where we have gone thus far in some areas of our life, is not to be inauthentic or deny who we really are.  It is in fact to seek to recognise and use more of our inherent capacity, it is to be more fully the person who we have always had the potential to be. 

There are as many different life journeys as there are people in the world, but there are some patterns of skills that are readily discernible across the professional lives of many senior executives. Those whom I coach often describe the skills that got them to the threshold of the executive team, or even to CEO, as fundamentally about understanding what was asked of them, working out how to solve any problems standing in the way, and then ensuring that action was taken by themselves and their team members to deliver a successful outcome.  Crudely put, being smart, insightful and action-oriented was often key to promotion in the first half of their careers.

There was clearly personal growth. Two decades or more of deploying these skills over a larger and larger scale would not have been achieved without it.  However, that growth may not have challenged the executive concerned to evolve their professional identity to any large degree along the way.

As the most senior roles get closer, many sense a significant inflection point, with new requirements that have not really been asked of them before. And the comfortable boundaries that they have operated within up to then risk stifling their growth rather than channelling their energies.  They are expected to demonstrate new skills, like shaping strategy or connecting personally with an ever-larger team, often for the first time.

These are moments when further horizons need exploring, when the familiar boundaries of our identities need to be reforged. My experience is that this exploration can provide clarity about what needs to change and how to go about changing it. In this way senior executives can reshape themselves authentically to meet the challenges they are facing as a member of the executive team or as CEO or Chair.