The Gap Between Versions

Part One

The gap I want to describe is the one that almost every senior person I work with is sitting inside, and that almost none of them have language for until someone else provides it.

On one side of the gap is the version of you the world has built a relationship with. This version has a reputation. People have expectations of it. It has been reliable for a long time. It has done the things that got you here. When you walk into a room, this version is what the room is greeting. Most of your working life, this version has been who you are in public, and for long stretches it has been who you are in private too, because there was not much daylight between the two.

On the other side of the gap is a version that has been forming, usually quietly, usually for several years. This version is not a repudiation of the first one. It is not a rebellion. It is more like a slow internal shift in what matters, how time is spent, what feels worth doing, what has become too expensive to keep doing the way you have been doing it. The shift is not dramatic. It is directional. If you tracked it carefully, you could see it moving. You do not usually track it carefully, because the first version is the one that has your attention.

What makes the gap difficult is that both versions are real. The first version is not a mask. It was, and often still is, an honest expression of who you were and what you could do. The second version is not a truer self hiding underneath a false one. It is who you are now, and who you are continuing to become, because a person at forty-five is not the same person as at thirty-five, and a person at fifty-five is not the same person as at forty-five.

The gap is the distance between who the world has been relating to and who is actually there. The longer the gap is left unattended, the more costly it becomes, not in any dramatic way, but in the way that a small discrepancy between your map and the territory becomes harder to correct the further you have walked on the wrong bearing.

Part Two

The work I do with senior people is largely work done inside the gap.

It is not work to dismantle the first version. That version is still often useful, still often loved, and still often the version that pays the bills. It is work to let the second version come into focus, to listen to what it has been asking for, to begin to represent it more accurately in the life you are actually living. Over time, and often more quickly than people expect, the two versions start to come back into alignment, with the outside expression becoming a more accurate rendering of the inside reality.

This is not a rebrand. It is not a pivot. It is not a midlife adjustment in the language the culture uses to describe it. It is something quieter and more substantive. It is the slow return of a person to themselves, and the slow rearrangement of their life to hold who they have actually become.

Most senior people do not do this work, because the gap does not announce itself as urgent. It is easy to keep deferring. The cost of deferring is that the gap widens, the life becomes more and more a performance of an outdated version, and the inside version quietly loses patience with the outside one. People reach me, most often, after the inside version has been quietly losing patience for several years.

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