From Drumsticks to Dream Jobs: How Justin Pohlmann Found His Identity Beyond the Title

For a while, Justin Pohlmann was the guy you knew was a drummer within five seconds of meeting him. He delivers the line with the kind of self-aware laugh that tells you he's made peace with who he used to be.

"I was worse than a vegan who does CrossFit," he jokes. "Within five seconds of knowing me, you knew I was a drummer."

That identity ran deep. So deep, in fact, that when the road life ended — when the reality of 150 shows in his infant son's first year of life forced a hard choice — Justin didn't just lose a career. He lost himself. What followed was a years-long journey through fog, false starts, and eventually, a clarity that could only come from the inside out.

Today, Justin Pohlmann is a Talent Acquisition Business Partner at LOPA, a Louisiana-based nonprofit focused on organ donation, and the founder of Resound Coaching, a career coaching practice helping people untangle their identity from their job title. The path between those two points is anything but straight — and that's exactly what makes it worth telling.

The Musician Who Walked Off the Stage

Justin grew up in church, came to faith around age seven or eight, and never really left either. He met his wife, Shay, through Awana camp in junior high — a friendship that grew slowly through high school, then through the glory days of AOL Instant Messenger, into something that became the anchor for everything that followed.

Music was never just a hobby. It was a calling-adjacent thing, the thing he built his whole identity around. He played drums at every church he was part of, picked up a touring gig with a Texas country artist, and for a stretch, hit things with sticks for a living. He taught drum lessons on the side and worked about six days a week — and loved every minute of it.

Then came his second child, and reality shifted. "The reality of tours and babies is a terrible combo," Justin says plainly. "Dad is a way cooler title than drummer."

He stepped off the road. And in the silence that followed, he didn't know who he was anymore.

The Fog Years

He landed at a car dealership because they said yes. He'll tell you that with a straight face. When customers said they needed to talk to their spouse before buying, Justin's honest response was, "I think you should." Suffice it to say, it wasn't the best fit.

What came next was harder to name. He drifted for a couple of years — not dramatically, just quietly. Working jobs that didn't fit, feeling the distance between who he was and who he was supposed to become. The moment that crystallized the urgency came on the service drive, when he picked up the phone and heard a voice come out of his mouth that he didn't recognize.

"I said all the right words, but the tone behind it had such disdain for people. I thought — who was that?"

So he did what any responsible soon-to-be father of three would do. He quit, with nothing lined up, about a week before their third child was born. Shay, he'll tell you without hesitation, is way out of his league. They prayed through it together, saved enough to take a breath, and Justin used the time to finally sit still and listen.

The Pivot Nobody Saw Coming — Except God

In the soul-searching season that followed, Justin took career assessment after career assessment. Every one pointed toward sales. He resisted. Then he took a copier sales job anyway — and in the training process, something unexpected clicked.

The training philosophy was simple: no problem, no sale. You can't pitch a solution until you've uncovered the real issue. Justin started applying that framework to his own career history, and the picture came into focus fast. Job searching is painful. Onboarding is usually a mess. The process of going from a stranger to a valued colleague is rarely smooth. He thought: I can help with that.

When he mentioned it to the people around him, everyone said, "Yes, obviously, you should do that." His wife reminded him she'd been saying exactly that for years.

He went back to school, earned his HR degree, worked his way through employee benefits at an insurance company, and eventually found his way into recruiting — first as an HR generalist at LOPA, then stepping into talent acquisition full time. "That's been my happy place for almost two years now," he says. "Helping candidates figure out where they fit, helping hiring managers figure out how to hire — all of those talent-related things."

Resound Coaching: The Business He Never Wanted to Start

The coaching work started as a class at his church. Justin had watched too many people stuck in the same loop he'd once been trapped in — careers carrying the full weight of their identity, people chasing purpose through job titles and missing it entirely.

He asked the church if they had anything to help people who felt stuck. They didn't. He offered to create something. They said yes. And slowly, what started as a Sunday morning class became something bigger than he'd planned.

I will be the first to admit I am the world's most reluctant entrepreneur. I never wanted to start a business. God just kept pushing it, so I said — okay, I'll lean into it.

Launching Resound Coaching meant upfront costs — a website, startup pieces — real dollars with three kids who like to eat three times a day, on a single income Shay has managed brilliantly for twelve years. Every step of it was prayerful. Not performatively prayerful, but genuinely leaning in and waiting to hear. "Being able to step out in faith and put money into it was a big decision," he says. "We prayed through it."

That kind of faith-integrated decision-making isn't reserved for the big moments. It runs through everything — which job to take, how long to stay, what the season is for. When he joined LOPA, Justin says he sensed it was a "reason and season" role. That became clear quickly when his daughter had a serious accident and the organization's benefits proved to be extraordinary provision. "I thought, okay, God — if that was the only reason I had to take this job, we're good. Thank You."

The Only Title That Doesn't Change

If there's one message threading through Justin's entire story — through the drumsticks and the dealership and the career pivots and the coaching — it's this: your job is what you do, not who you are.

Our identity as believers is children of God first, full stop. Everything else that comes on top of that has nothing to do with who we are.

He sees it constantly in coaching — people whose sense of worth rises and falls with their job title, whose purpose feels like it's waiting to be unlocked by the right role or the right opportunity. The search for a "big purpose" is often where people get the most lost, he says, because they're looking in the wrong direction.

"God definitely calls you to do things, but that calling can change in different seasons of life. Who you are and what your purpose is do not change based on your job title."

The purpose, as Justin frames it, is almost disarmingly simple: children of God, created to do good works, to love others, to make disciples. Not a formula. Not a career plan. A foundation.

For leaders exhausted by the pressure to perform, prove, and produce — that foundation is the most practical thing in the room. It's the place Justin had to find before any of the right work could actually begin. And it's the place Resound Coaching is quietly helping others find too, one conversation at a time.

The reluctant entrepreneur is still figuring it out. But he knows who he is. That turns out to be enough to start.