How to investigate the intersection of your work identities
Knowing yourself starts with seeing yourself.
So how do you learn how to see yourself in your work?
We don't know how to do this because we haven't been taught how. There aren't tools for this in the career space, which is why I'm creating them.
Professional identity self-analysis is not a common practice in career path toolkits. Instead, we rely on assessments to quantitatively analyze us on a scale (like Myers Briggs, DISC or StrengthsFinders). The results provide insights into how we work, but not on who we are in our work.
For nearly a decade, I've had a burning desire to understand this research question:
Who are you at the intersection of your different work identities? (This has become the decoding part of my process).
And, once you decode who you are the question becomes:
What do you call that hybrid version of your professional identity? (This has become the branding part of my process).
Early in my research, I realized NO ONE can answer the "Who are you at your intersection" question. At least, not directly. That's why we need an indirect process to get there.
It largely involves making the unconscious parts of ourselves in our work conscious.
Start by seeing yourself in your work
Finding your hybrid professional identity is fundamentally about learning how to see yourself in your work. There are two kinds of seeing.
Type 1= Literal: How do you see yourself in your work?
Literal answers include listing the identity or identities you see yourself performing or labeling yourself as in your work. You might say, "I see myself as a navigator, creator, and mentor."
For people who have multiple professional identities, it's important to narrow these to your primary ones and then place those in a Venn diagram to later reflect on the intersections.
Type 2= Metacognitive Reflection: How do you see yourself in your work?
Metacognition and meta-awareness are terms for when we think about our own thinking and have awareness of our own self-awareness.
Metacognitive answers of your professional identity include describing how you do what you do in a way that's highly specific, unique, granular and full of self-understanding.
Instead of saying, "In my work, I see that I'm a good problem solver and ask a lot of questions," a metacognitive response would be, "When I ask people questions, I usually start with an open-ended prompt such as 'What if we...' and then I step back to listen closely. I pay attention to their train of thinking by writing each response on a whiteboard, carefully structuring my notes to capture exact phrases before pausing colleagues to notice patterns I'm seeing in their answers."
Notice how much clarity is in a metacognitive answer. I can picture exactly what that person is doing and how.
Metacognitive reflection is critical for finding your hybrid professional identity
Becoming skilled at developing your meta-awareness in your work leads to surfacing a plethora of elements you've never seen about yourself before in your career. It heightens your observational capacity to see yourself and communicate exactly who you are.
It also increases your ability to dive deeper into what you do, how you do it, and why you do it so you finally gain full clarity and can reveal your true value in your work.
For instance, when a client was reflecting out loud about how he worked, he said:
The highlighted words represent keywords about who he really is in his work. They are a departure from the ordinary ways he described himself as a project manager.
From these keywords, we later found that his hybrid professional identity (who he is at the intersection) is a Tension Methodologist. You can see how we derived that from the language he used about himself that he wasn't conscious of.
Meta-awareness is about being a witness to yourself so that you can study, understand, and effectively communicate yourself in your hybrid state of being.
Getting to the metacognitive layer of seeing yourself requires two tings:
1) finding the best pathway(s) to access your unconscious, and
2) being willing to recognize things you take for granted about how you work. These subtle nuances about you are actually the unlocks that provide the best clues about your amazing hybrid identity.
Developing your meta-awareness is how you understand who you are in your intersection of your work identities.
How to investigate the intersections of your work identities
This is a required step before branding your hybrid professional identity. No skipping over it! When people try to blow past and start working on their hybrid identity, I find they grab onto language they think is cool or "sounds good," but that language is never right, and it isn't fully aligned with who they really are.
The way to get to your hybrid truth is by diving into the depths of who you are at your intersection.
Investigating your intersections is the only way to reveal the language you need to create your hybrid title. (See the highlighted example above).
Hands down, this step (step three of my five-part process) is where people struggle the most. Know that in advance and be ready to slow down and take your time here.
In my cohort-based course and in my workbook, I provide a number of ways to help you investigate your intersections because each person finds success with different tools. Being a witness of yourself and how you work is hard, especially if you haven't practiced this type of self-reflection before.
Remember, the goal is to make your unconscious ways of working at your intersection conscious.
TOOLS TO ACCESS YOUR META-AWARENESS
Here's a list of activities I use with people. Try to access at least three unconscious moments where your hybrid identity is in action (my way of saying you're working at your intersection):
Guided visualizations
Work product analysis
Flow state storytelling
Details, description, dialogue
First, Best, Only's
Zone of genius moments
Think alouds
Journaling
Once you've found a moment or work product to share, use these questions to aid your meta-awareness:
What specifically am I doing in that moment?
How exactly am I doing it?
Why am I doing it that way?
How am I doing it differently than my peers of similar credentials who do similar things?
If I see myself doing something and I give it a general label like facilitating, problem solving, building relationships ... Ask myself: exactly how am I doing it? Get more specific.
What words am I using as I describe this moment that are unusual or eye-catching? Did I happen to describe the moment by saying: "I was moving the chess pieces to make a point"? Wait, am I a chess player during my work meetings? (Jot down strange and interesting phrases you use. Notice them. Those are your clues and hybrid keywords!)
Which of my primary professional identities are showing up in that exact moment? Are they blending together or am I using them discreetly?
How are my primary professional identities being used together to do something in a new way to achieve a result better than the old way?
By using these activities and questions, you access higher levels of self-understanding of who you are in your career.
Investigating your intersections is different than niching down and focusing on one thing you do well. Rather, you're getting more attuned to your hybrid expertise, which is who you are as a combination of the best parts of your primary professional identities.
From here, I promise you'll be more inspired and ready to design the best hybrid job title for yourself.