Facing the corporate midlife crisis
When you hit the *ick* and you stop sounding like yourself.
Everything looks and sounds the same these days. I know you know what I mean, because you’ve probably read it somewhere already. Slop, bland-ification, same-ness… it all points to one truth: we're boring ourselves to death.
And it's not just brands. It’s happening to us — as individuals.
There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that sets in when you’ve been performing professionalism for so long, you forget what you actually do. You hear it in your voice when you introduce yourself in a meeting.
You feel it when you explain your work and catch yourself using words you’d never say outside a pitch deck — and friends outside your industry are left clueless, but impressed.
It creeps in slowly. One buzzword at a time.
We start out with clarity. We say what we do in simple terms: I help businesses solve problems. I design campaigns for products. I analyze data. I manage brand communities online.
Then we start dressing it up. Strategic initiatives. Transformative impact. Human-centered innovation. Insight generation. Eventually we don’t sound like ourselves anymore. We sound like LinkedIn.
And we’re not the only ones. Companies go through the same thing.
A team starts small — sharp, clear, mission-driven. Then it grows. It scales. It becomes more professional, aka efficient. So they bring in someone from a bigger company who has led growth and increased profits. They bring frameworks, best practices, new language. Suddenly the team that used to just solve problems is “leveraging core competencies to drive value-added solutions.”
Ick…
Each step sounds more credible and more sophisticated. It sounds like what a real company is supposed to sound like. The leadership team starts using words they never used before. The employees stop understanding them. The presentations get fancier, slicker. It all feels grand.
Until someone sits in a sales pitch and realizes they might as well be talking about their competitor. Differentiation is as subtle as a 0.5-degree temperature drop.
It’s a corporate midlife crisis.
Unsurprisignly, it’s so gradual, we disappear without noticing, slowly replaced by polished, professional versions of ourselves. One corporate buzzword at a time.
You start explaining what you do and hear yourself using phrases that make you cringe a little, but everyone nods along because it sounds right. It sounds important.
And it’s everywhere.
I've been looking at Georgia O'Keeffe's life and work recently (bear with me). Her journey fascinates me because of the stark contrast between her New York and New Mexico lives, pre- and post-Alfred Stieglitz. In a way, it reminds me of our journey as individuals — and companies. The disconnect from the core, from the roots, seems inevitable when you're trying to fit into someone else's world, i.e. industry or community.
O'Keeffe's "Ram's Head White Hollyhock" captures something about this transition. The bleached skull against the desert landscape. The harsh beauty she found after leaving the sophisticated city galleries behind. The flower as a remnant to the path that lay behind her.
She leaned into something else. Maybe it was the desert, a new environment she tuned into. I believe it was also being away from the performance and hustle of the big city. She had the quiet and space to let herself expand and evolve.
That’s the thing about authenticity: it doesn’t sound like you’re trying to be anything. You just are.
And maybe that’s the path back for us, too.
Most of us are still stuck in our New York phase. Saying what we’re supposed to say. Wearing the blazer. Speaking in bullet points. But under all of it — the titles, the personal brand, the pitch-deck polish — the real reason we do what we do is still there.
If you’ve been in the game long enough, you remember it. Before the buzzwords. When your curiosity knew no borders, and no separation of disciplines.
I believe we need to remember who we were before we became experts — before we learned about positioning and storytelling and influence. Find back to the beliefs and words we used before the industry handed us its vocabulary and code of conduct. In a way, we need to think for ourselves again and practice radical disconnection so that we may give space to our own ideas.
It’s work I’ve embraced myself for the past few years, and I’ve learned quite a few things along the way — both as a professional and in my work for organizations. And I’m here to share with you: Your original voice is still in there. But it’s just been professionally optimized into oblivion. Time to face the slop.
On that note
This isn't just a personal problem — it's a team one. Culture, clarity, and identity don’t vanish all at once. They fade. But they can be found again.
I help small teams name what’s true and build from there. It’s quiet work that makes everything else clearer. And as luck may have it: summer is the perfect time to slow down, take a beat, and tackle the disconnects.
If you're ready, let's talk. Or point your leadership toward my website.