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ENGINEER / FORWARD →
with Izzy House
an original column for Hire Perspectives
When I was 13 years old, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I loved plants. I loved science. And I loved space.
So I developed what seemed to my young self like a perfectly reasonable career plan: I would study botany, become valuable to the space program, and someday be selected for a mission to space.
There was only one problem.
The people around me thought this was nuts. Friends and family questioned the idea and whether it was realistic. We (you and I) receive a lot of valuable guidance from the people who care about us. They can keep us from harm, offer good advice, and help us see things we might otherwise miss. In my case, they meant well. They were trying to protect a young dreamer from disappointment and steer me toward a more stable path.
Eventually, though, their doubts became my doubts, too. I told myself those defeating words: “I can’t do that.”
So I put the dream away. I didn’t stop loving space. I simply learned that this wasn’t who I was supposed to be.
Spoiler alert: I was working with some very incomplete data.
Who Told You Who You Are?
In Outside the Pipeline, I asked a deceptively simple and profoundly difficult question:
Who do you want to become?
Your answer influences the opportunities you pursue, the skills you develop, and even the story you tell on your résumé. But there’s another question we need to ask first:
How do you know the answer you’re giving is actually yours?
Our conclusions about ourselves are shaped by our experiences, grades, teachers, parents, friends, expectations, failures, and circumstances. Each becomes another piece of data we use to understand who we are and what we believe we’re capable of doing.
The trouble is that we often don’t have much confidence in our own data. When we’re uncertain about ourselves, it’s easy to give greater weight to the opinions, expectations, and assessments of others. A bad grade can feel more authoritative than our curiosity. Someone else’s doubt can carry more weight than our own ambition. A failure can seem like stronger evidence than all the reasons we wanted to try in the first place.
The problem comes when we take that information, gathered at one point in our lives and often interpreted through our own uncertainty, and treat it as a permanent specification. A temporary data point becomes an identity.
Think about that with an engineer’s mind. You wouldn’t design a system around incomplete or outdated data. You would question the assumptions, examine what has changed, gather new information, and adjust the design accordingly.
Why would you design your life any differently?
Update the Data
A poor grade in math doesn’t necessarily mean you’re incapable of becoming an engineer. Struggling to speak in front of a class doesn’t mean you can’t someday command a room. Being overlooked for leadership at 25 doesn’t determine your leadership potential at 45.
The information we collected about ourselves may have been accurate at the time, or it may not have been. Maybe we hadn’t developed the skills yet. Maybe we lacked the experience or confidence to recognize what we were capable of accomplishing. Or maybe someone else’s assessment carried more weight than our own, and over time, we adopted it as truth.
The problem is that we continue making decisions based on those old conclusions. We avoid the class, don’t apply for the position, keep our hand down, hold back the idea, or decide not to walk into the room. Each decision reinforces the identity we’ve already accepted until we stop asking whether we could do those things because we’ve already decided we’re the kind of person who doesn’t.
That’s a dangerous amount of power to give old data. We start behaving according to it, and our behavior can then appear to confirm it.
The Person We Learn to Be
Our assumptions about ourselves aren’t the only things influencing how we behave. There is another powerful force shaping who we become: the desire to belong.
We are remarkably good at learning which versions of ourselves are accepted by the people around us, and we adjust accordingly. That’s part of growing up. We learn to consider other people, work within a team, read the room, and adapt to different environments.
But adaptation can become something else. Sometimes we edit ourselves so thoroughly that we eventually forget what we edited out. Interests get tucked away. Dreams become impractical. Parts of ourselves that once felt natural become things we’re reluctant to admit out loud.
That’s what happened to my love of space.
I didn’t discover that I loved space later in life. I rediscovered something I already knew.
That little kernel survived through careers, responsibilities, expectations, and years of doing things that seemingly had nothing to do with space. Every once in a while, it would surface, but I would tuck it away again because somewhere along the way, I had accepted a story about what was realistic for me.
“That’s Just Who I Am”
There is another side to this conversation. Other people’s expectations can limit us, but so can our own attachment to the person we already are.
We’ve all heard someone say, “That’s just who I am.” Maybe you’ve said it yourself. Sometimes that statement reflects genuine self-awareness. Other times, it becomes a convenient way to avoid the uncomfortable work of becoming better, venturing into unfamiliar territory, or doing something that scares us.
I’m impatient. I’m not good with people. I’m not a leader. I can’t write. I hate public speaking. I’m just not confident.
Repeat these things often enough, and they stop sounding like observations and start sounding like permanent characteristics. Instead of asking whether we could change or develop, we accept the limitation as part of who we are.
At some point, “being authentic” can become an excuse for staying exactly where we are.
Being yourself doesn’t mean remaining exactly as you are.
There are two very different questions worth asking:
Who am I today?
Who do I want to become?
The space between those answers isn’t evidence that you’re being inauthentic. It’s where growth happens.
Becoming Is an Active Process
The space between who you are today and who you want to become is where growth happens. But moving through that space requires something from you.
We tend to talk about “finding ourselves” as though there is a finished version of us hidden somewhere, waiting to be discovered. I don’t think it works that way. We discover pieces of ourselves over time through our interests, abilities, challenges, relationships, experiences, and the things that make us lose track of time. Even discovering what we don’t want provides valuable data.
Those pieces help us understand who we are today, but they don’t dictate who we must remain. You are both the existing system and the system under development.
We can learn new skills, build confidence, develop as leaders, change direction, and revisit things we dismissed years ago with new information.
Becoming isn’t simply about discovering who you are. It’s about deciding what you want to build from what you discover.
When Two Versions of Me Met
Sometimes revisiting those old assumptions can lead you back to something you knew about yourself long before you learned to question it. For me, that moment happened at Kennedy Space Center.
I had first stood there as a 13-year-old girl with an enormous dream. Decades later, I returned as an adult who had spent more than a year trying to figure out where I belonged and what I wanted the next chapter of my life to look like.
Standing there, those two versions of me suddenly collided. The girl who had known exactly what she loved met the woman who had spent years trying to figure it out, and something became incredibly clear.
Space.
I was a space nerd. More accurately, I had always been a space nerd. I had just spent a long time believing that part of me wasn’t practical and that the world of space wasn’t really for me, but for someone else. Standing there, something shifted. I could suddenly see the possibility in that dream I had put away years ago, and I loved what I saw. There was this burst of excitement, possibility, and recognition all at once. This was a world where I wanted to belong. This was a life I wanted to build.
For years, the answer had been, “I can’t do that.”
Standing there, I finally began asking a different question: “Why not me?”
“Why not you?”
For the first time, I gave myself permission to believe that maybe I could.
I didn’t leave Kennedy Space Center with a renewed plan to study botany and fly into space. I wasn’t trying to become my 13-year-old self again. I had decades of experiences, skills, successes, failures, and lessons she couldn’t possibly have imagined. The dream had evolved because I had evolved.
But the kernel underneath it had never really changed: curiosity, exploration, science, discovery, and the desire to contribute to something bigger than myself. Those were the clues that had been there all along.
Thirteen-year-old me hadn’t been wrong. She simply couldn’t see yet what that truth would eventually become.
Give Yourself Permission
That day didn’t change my life overnight. What it changed was the story I was willing to believe about what my life could become.
Sometimes that’s where change begins. Not with a detailed plan, a dramatic leap, or absolute confidence, but with permission to question something you’ve accepted as true about yourself.
Maybe there is something you’ve quietly known about yourself for years. Maybe an old failure convinced you that you weren’t capable, someone else’s well-intentioned advice became a limitation, or you’ve simply become very good at being someone you no longer want to be.
You are allowed to question those assumptions and look at the evidence again. Something you believed about yourself at 15, 25, or 45 may have been true then, may never have been true at all, or may simply no longer describe the person you’ve become.
And you are allowed to decide that the person you are today isn’t the finished version.
Determining who you want to become is one of the most difficult exercises you can undertake. It can also be one of the most freeing because it gives you something incredibly valuable: direction.
Changing Lanes
Knowing who you want to become doesn’t magically transform your life. For me, changing lanes took about five years. There were skills I needed to develop, relationships I needed to build, things I needed to learn, opportunities I needed to create, and plenty of moments when I wondered whether I was being completely ridiculous.
But something fundamental had changed: I knew which direction I was going, and I felt a determination I hadn’t felt before. I had seen the possibility of a life filled with purpose, and I wanted to build it.
That clarity began influencing my decisions. I became more intentional about what I needed to learn, where I spent my time, the people I wanted to meet, and the opportunities I pursued. I started asking whether my choices moved me closer to the life I wanted to build or continued taking me somewhere I no longer wanted to go.
The destination wasn’t always clear, and I certainly didn’t have a map for getting there. But I had a direction, and that was enough to start moving.
Knowing where you want to go doesn’t eliminate the road between here and there. It gives you a reason to start traveling it.
Questions
So I’ll leave you with the question that started all of this: Who do you think you are?
But don’t stop with the first answer that comes to mind. Ask yourself where that answer came from and whether you’re still working with information that deserves to define you.
Who have I believed I am?
Which parts of that story are actually true?
Who do I want to become?
What would I start doing differently today if I believed becoming that person was possible?
That last question may be the most important. You don’t have to change your entire life tomorrow or have every step mapped out before you begin.
Sometimes moving forward begins with something much smaller: a question, a decision, or one step toward something that sets your heart pounding.
It might mean questioning an assumption you’ve carried for years, revisiting an interest you dismissed, trying something you’ve always believed you weren’t good at, or walking into a room where you aren’t quite sure you belong. It might simply mean allowing yourself to imagine a version of your life you’ve never seriously considered before.
You don’t need absolute confidence to take that first step. Sometimes you just need enough curiosity to challenge the negative voice in your head that says you can’t and replace it with “What if I could?”
Actions & Outcomes
Reading about change is one thing. Applying it to your own life is another. Give yourself some time with these questions. Write your answers down, and try not to edit them based on what feels practical, expected, or comfortable. The goal isn’t to create a five-year plan. It’s to gather better data.
1. Who have I believed I am?
Start with the story you already tell yourself. Write down the words and phrases you use to describe who you are, what you’re good at, what you’re bad at, and what you believe is or isn’t possible for you.
Then go a little deeper. Where did those beliefs come from? Which came from your own experiences? Which came from a parent, teacher, boss, friend, grade, failure, success, or expectation? Which have you simply repeated for so long that you’ve stopped questioning them?
Outcome: A clearer picture of the assumptions that may be influencing your choices today.
2. Which parts of that story are actually true?
Now examine your answers like data. What evidence supports each belief? What evidence challenges it? Is the information current, or are you still making decisions based on something that happened years ago?
Then create an Evidence List. Write down at least 20 things you’ve accomplished, learned, overcome, built, improved, solved, contributed to, or had the courage to try. Include the big things, but don’t overlook the smaller ones. Maybe you figured out a difficult problem, learned a new skill, helped a struggling teammate, led something for the first time, recovered from a failure, received a compliment you brushed aside, or did something that scared you.
Don’t be modest. This isn’t the place to decide whether something is impressive enough to count. You’re collecting evidence.
Keep the list and continue adding to it. When your confidence takes a hit, go back and read it. When you’re updating your résumé, preparing for an interview, writing a bio, or considering an opportunity that feels slightly beyond your reach, use it to remind yourself of what you’ve already accomplished, what you’re capable of, and how awesome you are.
Outcome: A more accurate picture of who you are today, plus a growing record of your capabilities and accomplishments that you can use to build confidence and communicate your value.
3. Who do I want to become?
For this one, give yourself permission to imagine before you evaluate. Don’t immediately worry about whether it’s practical, how long it will take, what it will cost, or what anyone else might think. This is your list, just for you. Leave judgment and excuses at the door.
What kind of person do you want to become? What do you want to be better at? What kind of work would feel meaningful? What interests have you packed away? What makes you curious? What makes you lose track of time? What possibility makes your heart pound a little faster?
You aren’t writing a job title. You’re looking for direction.
Outcome: A picture of the person you want to develop and a clearer sense of the direction you want your life and career to take.
4. What would I start doing differently today if I believed becoming that person was possible?
Now make it real.
Look back at the person you described in the last exercise and make a list of things you could start doing differently if you genuinely believed becoming that person was possible. Don’t build the entire roadmap yet. Just think about the things that could begin moving you in that direction.
Would you take a class? Make a phone call? Introduce yourself to someone? Raise your hand? Attend an event? Practice a skill? Apply for something? Research an idea you’ve been quietly thinking about? What would you start, stop, learn, try, or do differently?
Now look at your list and choose one thing you can do tomorrow.
It doesn’t have to be the biggest thing on the list. In fact, it probably shouldn’t be. Choose something specific and achievable that moves you in the direction of the person you want to become.
Then do it.
Outcome: One tangible action that turns possibility into movement and begins closing the distance between who you are today and who you want to become.
About Izzy House
Izzy House is an author, aerospace communications strategist, and marketing leader who believes education and inspiration have the power to transform lives. Through her writing, speaking, and work with leaders across the commercial space industry, she promotes the exciting world of space and inspires people to pursue careers with purpose.
As the author of both business and children’s books, Izzy believes curiosity, continuous learning, and meaningful relationships create opportunities at every stage of life. Her writing helps readers understand complex ideas, communicate with confidence, and recognize the unique value they bring to the world.
Inspire the child who might become an engineer.
Develop the engineer who might become a leader.
Empower the leader who might change the world.
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