By Lula Abera

What coaching, accomplished Black adults, is teaching me about achievement, identity, and what we pass down to our children.

I was listening to Trevor Noah’s podcast recently, and something he said just stuck with me. We don’t really ask children what they want to do when they grow up. We ask what they want to be. It’s a phrase we say so often that we’ve stopped hearing it.

What do you want to be when you grow up? A doctor, lawyer, teacher, engineer, entrepreneur. The answer is almost always a job. The more I sat with that, the stranger the question felt. We’re asking about being, but we expect an answer about work. Somewhere along the way those two ideas fused, and most of us never notice the seam.

A few years ago I probably wouldn’t have thought twice about it. I’ve always been ambitious. I believe deeply in meaningful work. I’ve built much of my own life around curiosity, purpose, and the idea that what we do can make a difference. But I’m also an executive coach. I spend hours every week sitting across from highly accomplished adults, many of whom have done exactly what they were told success should look like. And now I’m a mother. Those two parts of my life have started talking to each other.

The adults I coach are changing how I think about the children I’m raising. Increasingly, I find myself wondering: what are we teaching kids when we hand them a picture of success before we’ve helped them understand who they are?

Achievement Was Never Just About a Job

I think this question carries a particular weight in Black families, because for us achievement has never been simply about achievement. There’s history underneath it. I grew up in an Ethiopian/Eritrean family. There were expectations about education, work, responsibility, what it meant to build a life. You did well in school. You took the opportunity in front of you. You worked hard. You became independent. You made something of yourself.

Nobody delivered those messages because the adults around me were obsessed with résumés. They came from love. From knowing what instability looks like. From migration, sacrifice, and the understanding that opportunity is never something you take for granted. Across Black communities, the histories differ, but the lesson tends to rhyme.

• Get your education, because no one can take it from you.
• Have your own money.
• Don’t give anyone a reason to question your competence.
• Know more than everybody else in the room.
• And maybe the most familiar one of all: you’re going to have to work twice as hard.

There’s real truth inside that warning. Black parents have had to prepare their kids for institutions that haven’t always seen them clearly: schools, workplaces, banks, and every other system that’s distributed opportunity unevenly. Preparing a Black child for that reality is an act of protection. So I’m not interested in romanticizing some version of the world where Black parents just stop talking about race, or work, or excellence. That would ignore exactly what produced these lessons in the first place.

What I’m interested in is what happens once a survival lesson has been repeated so many times we stop recognizing it as one. “Work twice as hard” starts out as preparation for inequity. But eventually a child can hear something else in it: my ordinary effort will never be enough. “Make something of yourself” starts as encouragement. But there’s an uncomfortable question hiding inside it: what was I before I made something of myself?

“Be independent” is meant to protect a child from vulnerability. But at what point does independence turn into an inability to need anyone? That’s the part I keep coming back to. Not whether our parents were wrong, but whether every lesson that protected one generation should automatically become the identity of the next.

I Meet the Children Years Later

Most of my work is coaching executives, managers, and organizational leaders. People sometimes assume that means helping people become more productive, communicate better, manage a team more effectively. Sometimes it does.

But some of the most important conversations I have with successful people start somewhere else entirely. They start when achievement stops working as an answer. Someone spends years becoming exceptionally good at what they do, and then something shifts. A promotion doesn’t feel the way they thought it would. A job they once fought to get started making them miserable. They know they need to leave, but leaving feels like losing a piece of themselves. They can’t delegate, because being the person who handles everything has quietly become how they measure their worth. They can’t rest without guilt. Asking for help feels like admitting incompetence. Saying “no” feels more dangerous than exhausting themselves.

And sometimes, underneath a conversation that sounds like it’s about leadership, I hear a much older question: if I’m no longer performing at this level, am I still valuable?. I’ve asked executives, “Who are you without your title?” It sounds like a simple coaching question. It rarely gets a simple answer. Sometimes there’s a long pause. Sometimes people start listing other roles: mother, wife, friend, daughter. So I ask again. Those are still roles. Who are you? That’s usually where the real coaching begins, because a lot of us have spent enormous energy building a life without spending nearly as much time building a relationship with the person living it.

I don’t think this is simply a parenting issue. It would be irresponsible to draw a straight line from something a parent said to an eight-year-old and how that person leads a team at forty-two. Too many other forces are involved. Race matters. Gender matters. Class, immigration, workplace culture, capitalism all of it matters. So does personality, trauma, opportunity, and the thousands of small experiences that pile up over a lifetime.

But after enough of these conversations, I’ve become fixated on an earlier question: when did achievement become such important evidence that we are okay? Because what I’m starting to see is that most of us learned the language of achievement long before we ever set foot in a workplace.

“Make something of yourself” starts as encouragement. But there’s an uncomfortable question hiding inside it: what was I before I made something of myself?

There Is a Difference Between Ambition and Worth

I want to be careful here, because I’m not trying to raise children who think effort doesn’t matter. I value ambition. I want my kids to be disciplined, to find out what they’re capable of, to chase hard things, to recover from disappointment, to honor their commitments, to feel the satisfaction of working toward something that matters. I don’t want to eliminate struggle from their lives. I couldn’t even if I tried.

• What I want to separate is achievement from worth. Those aren’t the same thing. 
• Achievement says: I worked hard and accomplished something.
• Worth says: I had value before I accomplished it.

That difference looks obvious on the page. I’m not convinced it feels obvious in the way most of us actually live. I see adults who intellectually know their job doesn’t define them, but whose bodies still respond to failure like their entire identity is under threat. People who believe in work-life balance right up until balance requires disappointing someone. Leaders who tell their employees to rest but can’t give themselves the same permission.

That contradiction is telling, because it means knowing something and believing something aren’t always the same. We can know our worth isn’t tied to our output while still living as though it is.

And children aren’t just listening to what we tell them; they’re watching how we live. They notice whether we only celebrate ourselves when something goes well. They hear how we talk about our jobs. They watch whether rest makes us anxious. They see whether we know how to receive help. They observe what happens when we fail. They learn what adulthood looks like long before they could ever explain it back to us.

I find that uncomfortable, in the best possible way, because I can ask my kids every affirming question in the world, and eventually they’ll still measure it against the life they actually see me living.

Motherhood Has Made Inheritance Mean Something Different

I wrote recently about what I inherited from the women before me: the strength, the endurance, the sacrifice that made my own life possible.

Becoming a mother has made me think about inheritance differently. There are the obvious things we hope to pass down: culture, language, tradition, stories, financial security, faith, values. But there’s another inheritance happening quietly underneath all of that. Children inherit our definitions.

What does strength mean? What does success mean? What does being a good mother look like? What does being a man look like? What does failure mean? When is it okay to need another person? How much do you have to accomplish before you’re allowed to feel proud?

We rarely sit our kids down and hand them these definitions outright. They learn them by watching us. That’s made me rethink some of the survival strategies I inherited. My mother lived a life that demanded forms of strength I may never fully understand. She endured things because there weren’t many other options available to her. I don’t honor her by pretending those conditions were beautiful. I honor her by asking what her endurance was actually meant to make possible.

Maybe the point of one generation surviving something isn’t for the next generation to get better at surviving the same thing. Maybe progress also gets measured by what our children no longer have to carry. That’s the realization I landed on when I wrote about motherhood before: what one generation learned to carry in silence, another might finally have enough safety — and enough language to set down. Parenting has added another layer to that thought for me. What if I could keep my children from picking some of it up in the first place?

I Still Want Them to Know the World They Live In

There’s a tension here I don’t want to resolve too neatly. My children are Black. I can’t raise them as though race will never shape how the world responds to them. I can’t promise effort will always be rewarded fairly. I can’t guarantee every teacher, employer, institution, or stranger will see them clearly. There will probably be moments when they genuinely do need to be better prepared. There may be rooms where excellence protects them. There may be times when resilience matters enormously.

But I don’t want racism to become the architect of their identities. I don’t want to spend so much energy preparing them for how the world might diminish them that I accidentally teach them to build their whole lives around proving the world wrong. That gives the very systems I want them to navigate far too much power.

So maybe the question isn’t whether we teach Black children resilience. Of course we do. The real question is whether resilience becomes the foundation of their identity, or just one resource they can reach for when they need it. I want my children to know how to survive adversity. I just don’t want survival to become the most impressive thing about them.

Maybe We Need to Ask Different Questions

I’m still going to ask my kids what they want to do. I want to hear about the astronaut phase and the veterinarian phase and whatever careers exist twenty years from now that I can’t even imagine yet. But I want to resist making occupation the answer to a question about identity. I want to ask other things, too.

• What are you curious about?
• What makes you feel most like yourself?
• What kind of friend do you want to be?
• What do you care enough about to protect?
• What kind of life would feel meaningful to you?
• What do you want your life to have room for besides work?
• What do you want to learn even if you’re never paid for it?
• Who are you becoming?

And maybe the harder version of this work is turning those same questions back on myself. What did my family teach me success meant? Which of those lessons actually helped me? Which ones were built for circumstances that don’t exist anymore? What am I modeling about rest? What do my kids hear when I talk about work? Do they see me ask for help? Do they know what I enjoy outside of being useful to other people? Do they see a woman whose life is meaningful because she’s fully alive or mostly because she gets things done?

None of this is an indictment of the generations before us. For many Black families, being able to even ask these questions is proof that something worked. People sacrificed so their children would have choices they never had. People endured so their children could experience more. Maybe our job isn’t just to be grateful for what they carry. Maybe it’s to get discerning about what actually deserves to keep traveling.

I want my children to inherit my ambition. I want them to inherit my discipline, my curiosity, my culture, my belief that a meaningful life gets built on purpose. But I hope some things end with me.

• The need to prove I belong.
• The assumption that exhaustion means I worked hard enough.
• The idea that being needed is the same thing as being loved.
• The belief that strength means carrying everything yourself.
• The pressure to accomplish something impressive before deciding your life has value.

My children will become a lot of things over the course of their lives. Their careers will change. Their ambitions will change. Their understanding of themselves will change. I hope I raise them with enough room for that.

So when someone asks them one day, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”  I hope they dream boldly about the answer. But I also hope they already know something before they answer it. 

They don’t have to become somebody.  They already are.