A few years after I retired from skating, I was at a dinner in New York with a group of people I didn't know well. Successful people, interesting people, the kind of room where everyone has a story. And someone asked me the simplest question in the world.
"So what do you do?"
I froze. Not visibly, not in a way anyone would notice, but internally everything just stopped for a second. Because the honest answer was I didn't know.
I was figuring it out. I was in the messy middle of building something new and I didn't have a clean sentence for it yet. But that's not what came out of my mouth. What came out was "I'm a former Olympic athlete" because that was the only identity I had that felt solid enough to stand on in a room full of strangers.
I leaned on a title I no longer held because I didn't trust the person underneath to be enough.
If you've just left a job, a sport, a company, a uniform, or a role that used to answer the question "who am I?" for you, this post is for you. What you're feeling has a name, there's research on it, and there's a way through it. I know because I had to walk it.
There's a version of retirement they prepare you for and a version they don't. The version they prepare you for is logistical - financial planning, career transition, what to do with your time. I had advisors and agents and well-meaning people helping me think through all of that.
The version they don't prepare you for is existential. It's the morning you wake up and realize the thing that organized your entire sense of self for two decades is gone. Not competition, not training - the identity, the structure, the daily answer to "who am I and why does it matter?"
For 20 years I knew exactly who I was. I was the kid from Federal Way who became the most decorated American Winter Olympian. I was the guy who got up at 4am, who trained when he was sick, who lived and breathed and bled short track speed skating. Every decision I made, every relationship I formed, every room I walked into - I had a clear identity that preceded me and I could lean on it.
And then it was over. And I had to figure out who I was without any of that scaffolding.
This isn't just an athlete problem. Swap "skating" for the company you built, the title you held for fifteen years, the practice you sold, the military unit you left, the kids who just moved out. Any identity that's built on a role has an expiration date, and almost nobody does the work before the date arrives.
Sports psychologists have a term for what I did to myself: identity foreclosure. It means committing to one identity early and hard, and never exploring who else you might be. Researchers studying athletic identity have found that athletes with a high, exclusive athletic identity are especially prone to it - a 2025 study in Frontiers in Psychology describes how these athletes avoid cultivating interests and social roles outside their sport, and found that among the most specialized young athletes, high athletic identity went along with higher anxiety and depression scores.
The costs show up most brutally at the exit. Research on athletic retirement notes that a high and exclusive athletic identity predicts psychological distress after sport ends, and that involuntary or unplanned retirement can drive down wellbeing even further. In plain language: the more completely the role was you, and the less you chose the ending, the harder you fall.
I was a textbook case. I chose skating at 14 (barely - that's a story involving a payphone), and from that point forward every alternative version of me was shelved. That's the deal elite performance demands, and I'd make it again. But nobody told me the bill arrives the day you stop, and that corporate life runs the same scheme: the harder you fuse with the title, the better you perform inside it and the more it owns you when it's gone.
I participated in a leadership exercise during a program at Wharton that cracked something open for me. Simple format - you pair up with someone and they ask you "who are you?" over and over for two minutes. Then you switch partners and do it again. Then a third time.
First round is easy. You give the resume. Name, title, accomplishments, highlights reel.
But by the second round you've used up all the surface-level stuff and you start reaching deeper. By the third round people were admitting things I doubt they had ever said at work: that they were afraid they had peaked in their mid-thirties, that they were fathers who didn't know if they were doing it right, that they were tired of pretending to have it all figured out.
Six minutes. That's all it took to get past the armor. And what came out underneath wasn't weakness - it was the person. The one who'd been hiding behind credentials and titles and carefully curated professional identities.
I've sat in three-week executive offsites that never got to the depth that exercise reached in six minutes. Because titles give us a place to hide and most of us will hide there as long as we're allowed to.
What I've learned watching leaders operate over the last decade: titles don't just describe what you do. They limit how deeply you connect, how honestly you communicate, and how much of yourself you bring to the work.
I've seen teams where the CEO's title creates so much distance that nobody tells them the truth. Where "VP of Whatever" becomes the ceiling of someone's identity and they stop growing because they've fused with the role instead of the person beneath it. Where everyone in the room is performing their title instead of contributing their actual thinking.
Worst version of me as a leader was when I was most attached to being "the Olympic champion." Because that identity demands you be confident all the time, have answers all the time, project invincibility all the time. And real leadership doesn't work that way. Real leadership requires you to say "I don't know" and "I was wrong" and "help me think through this" - things that feel impossible when your entire sense of self is built on a title that implies you've already figured it out.
The question "who are you without the title?" isn't about titles at all. It's about whether you've done the work of knowing yourself beyond the external labels. Whether you have a sense of identity that doesn't depend on other people's recognition of it.
I didn't have a map when I retired. Here's the one I'd hand you now - five moves you can start this week, whether your transition already happened or you can see it coming:
This past February I was at the Winter Games in Italy covering Milan Cortina for Yahoo Sports. Sixteen years after my last Olympic race, walking venues with a media credential where I used to walk with a team jacket.
Here's what nobody tells you about the Olympics: every single Games quietly manufactures thousands of retirements. For every athlete who leaves planning another cycle, there are others who compete knowing it's their last one, and some who find out in 40 seconds that it is. Standing in the mixed zone this February, I watched athletes answer questions minutes after the version of themselves they'd spent 20 years building reached its finish line. I knew exactly which interviews would be the easy part of their year.
And I felt the distance. Not grief anymore - clarity. I'm not "former Olympian trying to still be one." The Games are something I did and something I love, not something I am. It took me years to be able to say that sentence honestly, and the difference between visiting your old identity and living in its ruins is the whole game.
The shift that mattered most was realizing the most interesting, most effective people I've met are the ones who lead with who they are rather than what they've done. They don't need the title to fill the room because they bring something titles can't manufacture - the real version of themselves, including the parts that are uncertain and unfinished.
That's not a weakness. It's the thing that makes other people trust you enough to bring their real selves too. And you can't build anything meaningful - a team, a company, a relationship - with a room full of people hiding behind titles.
This is the heart of the change and reinvention keynote I give now, and of a lot of the conversations that happen offstage when I speak to organizations going through their own transitions. I go deeper on all of it in Hard Pivot - the messy, honest version of what reinvention looks like.
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--AAO
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