Find the hidden doorways between your professional identities
The image below is one of four paintings by Rene Magritte that inspired the interpretation of my research data back when I first began studying hybrid professional identity.
Rene Magritte, La Victoire
This painting is called La Victoire. It's a classic example of how Surrealists use juxtaposition to question reality.
When I saw this painting, it perfectly expressed the idea of crossovers, a theme I heard participants refer to during interviews, but I wasn't sure what it meant until I saw this artwork.
Crossovers are where hybrid professionals know how to move between their professional identities. At first, this action is ad hoc and later it happens at will as hybrid professionals become more fluent and comfortable in their hybridity. However, before crossing over can happen, hybrid professionals must find the doorways to access and interlink their disparate identities.
As you can see in the painting, the "crossover" doorways are invisible. A worker must perceive their existence before they can access them.
Seeing this painting added a necessary detail to my research that hybrid professionals must learn to crossover. It doesn't happen automatically because the connections aren't readily visible.
The doorway is camouflaged in the landscape. Yet, when it's open, it provides a gateway between two separate worlds (the ocean and the shore). And, a lone cloud is able to drift between the two worlds.
The question becomes, how do we find the access points that allow us to move between our different professional identities, and therefore hybridize ourselves?
Well, that's another layer of my research. (Hint: there's a developmental progression which requires more self-awareness).
My key takeaway...Hybrid professionals must discover their own invisible doorways before they can connect their identities in meaningful ways.
Finding the hidden doorways
My interest in invisible doorways resonates extremely well with Carrie Majewski's focus on seeing DoorD.
Carrie's concept goes like this: We need to learn to choose the invisible options, only the ones that we can see, that represent our most divine vision of our careers. When we hit a fork in a road, we're trained to try doors A, B, or C, but she argues there's a fourth door that's hidden, and that's door D.
Why I find Carrie's work fascinating is that we're both futurists retraining people how to navigate the future of work and showing them emergent possibilities they're missing.
I focus on professional identity shifts and rebranding, and Carrie focuses on leadership philosophies, career pathways, and business opportunities.