When I was a full-time academic, my emotional states were very much linked to academic life. The stress and anxiety during term time. The freedom and relief that came with the end of term. I was frustrated because a paper was rejected. I was happy because of a one-week gap between lectures so I could travel to see my family. As if my job was the only cause for any emotional state.
Leaving academia felt like starting psychotherapy again, without the therapist. I learned the much wider range of triggers of my mood, and even more than that, I discovered parts of my personality that I did not know existed. I am not as introverted as I thought. In academia, I was shy to express my ideas because I feared the judgement of colleagues. Scientific rigour had slowly suppressed the creative and expressive sides of my personality, leaving no room for those traits to surface. Now, I surprise myself feeling almost a need to communicate with others. It is as if my job, gradually and almost invisibly, built a cage around my personality and did not allow it to fully express itself. I think of this as a locked-in personality.
Personality is not fixed
Psychological research shows that personality is not a fixed blueprint determined at birth. While genetic factors play a role, decades of research in behavioural genetics and developmental psychology show that personality traits can and do shift in response to sustained environmental conditions, including the workplace. Over time, environmental conditions can actively reshape how your traits develop, constraining which parts of you are visible, to others and to yourself.
Research on person-environment fit shows that a mismatch between your personality and your job demands leads to boredom, dissatisfaction, anxiety, and in serious cases, burnout. The person-environment misfit is one of the most underexplored reasons people feel stuck in their careers. Importantly, this mismatch does not always exist from the beginning. You may start a job that suits who you are at the time, only to find, years later, that you have changed and the job has not changed with you.
The coaching industry often refers to this as a misalignment between values and career. I would go further. In many cases, it has deeper roots in personality itself, in the way a sustained environmental mismatch can suppress, distort, or simply obscure who you actually are.
I frequently see this in my work with clients. I have recently been working with a talented young professional in software development. She came to coaching because she got easily distracted at work, felt bored and uninspired, and wanted to improve her concentration. It turned out that the problem was not her concentration. The daily demands of her job were hiding important parts of her personality, including a very strong inclination towards management and leadership. These were traits that had never had the conditions to fully develop and express themselves in her current role.
How to recognise a locked-in personality
What strikes me most, reflecting on my own experience, is that I could not see it despite considering myself a reasonably self-aware person. What I could see were the consequences. Just like my client, I felt a lack of motivation, persistent anxiety, and for a period, burnout. I had lost curiosity, and a scientist without curiosity is, professionally, already half gone.
There are a few signals worth paying attention to. A growing sense that your reactions and emotions belong entirely to your job, the way mine did during my academic years, is one of them. Another is the feeling that parts of yourself only come alive outside work, in conversations, projects, or relationships that have nothing to do with your professional life. A third is the quiet but persistent sense that the version of yourself at work is a narrower, flatter version of who you actually are.
None of these signals are conclusive on their own. But together, they are worth taking seriously.
What the locked-in personality actually costs
One reason people stay in environments that have locked them in is the sunk cost fallacy: the belief that leaving means losing the investment already made. For career transitions, years of training, qualifications, professional identity, relationships built within a field.
But my experience taught me that what you leave behind may be an old version of yourself. And this is an investment that may no longer hold value for your future. So, the real question is not what you would be leaving behind. It is what you have already been quietly losing, year by year, inside the cage.
And yet, leaving is rarely tidy. There is genuine loss involved, and it deserves to be acknowledged rather than reframed away. But what I have seen consistently, in my own experience and in the people I work with, is that the personality traits suppressed by a mismatched environment do not disappear. They wait.
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About the author
Dr Giulia Galli. An accredited coach, chartered psychologist, and academic neuroscientist with twenty years of experience in understanding people’s thinking, decisions and behaviour. You can read more about my story and my approach to coaching here.
