What is your Hybrid Professional Identity? Meet Sarabeth Berk

Hello and welcome to Unleash Monday, where we talk about the brain, especially the gifted brain and how does it affect our thinking and experience of the world differently. There are a lot of stereotypes and stigma around giftedness, and I'm here to challenge dos. I'm here to raise awareness and to have a conversation around this topic of what does it mean to be a gifted adult common experience among gifted folks is that they feel out of place.

They don't quite fit in. They are too sensitive, too intense, too emotional, too, over excitable and too deep thinkers about the world and about themselves. So if you have been called too much of about anything, then this show is for you. My name is Nadja. I'm too loud, too colorful, too badly, too bossy. And I love to talk too much.

So welcome to my world. And I'm so happy you are here. Hi and happy Monday. I hope you had an amazing weekend and again, ready for the next week. We're diving into 2022 with a lot of swing and a lot of great episodes. So I'm so excited. You are here. Thank you for being part of this journey. Thank you for listening to unleash Monday.

And today I have an incredible guest. I have Sarahbeth Berk here, and Sarahbeth. She has given me new vocabulary. She just blew my mind when I saw her TEDx talk. And I don't want to tell you much more, what's going to happen during this conversation, but just saying she's amazing. And she is working in the field of professional identity,

but also bridges this with the broski is disintegration. So does this gotta be an amazing talk and probably also something new for you? I hope so. And something food for thoughts. So without saying more, I want to introduce you to Sarahbeth. Enjoy this conversation. Hi, welcome Sarahbeth. I'm so excited to have you on the podcast today.

I am so excited to, I love listening to your podcast, so it's great to be here. Oh, thank you. It's really nice to have somebody on the show who also knows my podcast. And then you reached out to me and then I went and listened to your Ted talk, which we're going to talk about later. And I was like,

oh my God. Yes, I need her on my podcast. So, but before we start talking about what you do today and your book and everything that you do, let's go all the way back and maybe start from like your own journey. I guess there is a background why you are where you are today. Do you want to guide us a little bit like through your development and your gifted story?

I guess that, Yeah, absolutely. I mean, when I think of myself as a little girl, I had a huge imagination. I've always been very creative. In first grade, I was taking cereal boxes and turning them into little puppet theater shows. And I wrote a whole script and had characters and I brought it to class and my teacher was like,

you should show that to other students. And then I was just always in a fantasy make-believe land. I think more than what other children were around me. And I was really smart and bright and I knew I was talkative and I would connect more with adults than I would my own peers. But you don't understand any of that as a kid, you're just like,

this is me doing what I do. And I think I got tested for gifted program when I was in elementary school, but we moved to a rural part of Colorado when I was in second grade. And so they didn't really have resources or pull out programs. And the way that I got treated was because I was always completing work really fast and getting ideas quickly,

my teacher would say, oh, can you help me? Or can you help other students? So I definitely became known as a teacher's pet because I was fast and just, I loved learning. But also that started to set me in this box of like, oh Sarahbeth the nerd. And she's, you know, not like the rest of us.

And I struggled to have social relationships. I really remember having a hard time making friends, so being alone and being with books and just focusing on school was very much part of my growth. And then balancing that art side of me, the creative side and the academic side. And I never knew what to do with that. And by the time I got to high school,

I realized I needed to take an art class every semester to have an outlet because I needed to let myself connect with media and making and like visual processes. But then I'd be in all the honors classes. And something happened in high school where I loved my high school art teacher. I idolized her, but she didn't let me get into the honors program of art.

It was like a senior studio class. So I took that as, oh, I'm not that good at art. I'm not creative enough. And it's sort of stung me and made me realize there's things that I'm not good at. But in retrospect, I think I just wasn't quite ready at that time. Like I had it in me, but there was something where my skills and art just really were a little behind at that point.

And so what happened when I graduated high school, I had no idea what to do. I ended up going into an interior design program. And from that I had like our first semester, we were looking at commercial properties and redesigning like the new courthouse. So I was like, this is awful. I never want to do this kind of design. I need to change majors.

And I'd realized I'd never sat down with a book of all the majors out there and suddenly everything under the sign appealed to me. I wanted anthropology and political science and graphic design, and I wanted to be a computer animation person, but I didn't want to do all the coding. And I was like, oh my God, what? There's so many choices.

And I resonate with this. Why didn't I know this sooner? And then what happened is I did go into an art program because that creative side was just still calling me. And lo and behold now I'm end of my freshman year realizing I need to transfer schools. I really want to focus on an art program. And I worked my butt off that summer.

I did this whole portfolio and had to do a self portraits and charcoal drawings, but my skills were so much better at that point. And I got accepted into a program at the art Institute of Chicago. And what was unique about that moment is one, it sort of validated my creativity of like, I can get into this prestigious program. And second,

they started a new major that was called visual and critical studies. So you can hear it in the name. It's a perfect balance of all the art and studio art making classes you want to take. And then it was all this theory and culture and like deep critical thought. And I was like, that's the program I need. It's a balance. It's a blend of both.

So that sort of launched me. And then I'll be honest. After I graduated from art school, I was lost. I had a complete meltdown. And I think that was one of my first identity crises because I wasn't a student anymore. I didn't have a job lined up and I thought, well, what's wrong with me? Why don't I have a future?

Everyone has told me all along serve at, you're such a great student. You have all this potential, but I didn't know what to do with it. So that part of the journey was pretty pivotal for me to kind of rebuild and find my way out because I was lost. And I went through a lot of depression and then slowly but surely, I made my way back,

ended up in a master's program where I thought I'll be an art teacher that feels like a natural outlet. And from that program, it's sort of catapulted. A lot of things happened off of that, where I taught in the classroom for a little bit, but also felt held back. I realized I wasn't just a teacher in the way that I process and think,

and I am in the world. I really wanted to have more leadership. I love innovation. I wanted to transform school systems. Like why are we sitting in the classroom all day? And why, you know, is, is this dictating what, what that does in the curriculum? And so I was this forced to be reckoned with. And actually that's one other point of my developmental story.

I was the girl that always spoke my mind and I would get in trouble with teachers and with adults or people in leadership saying, you should watch what you say, and you don't know who you're dealing with. And like, go, go back to your seat or stop questioning this. So this disruptor side of me has been in me all along, but I thought it was bad.

So eventually I went and got my PhD because I thought I need a credential to break out of this box that I'd been put in as just the art teacher. When in fact I was also doing design and other projects and I had many sides to me and I thought nobody sees the full breadth of what I do. And then once I was in grad school,

which is the nice segue to kind of more of our conversation today, I had a real identity crisis of what is my professional identity. I'm an artist and a teacher and a researcher and a designer, but how can you have four hats? How, why does everyone use the expression? I'm a Jack of all trades like that doesn't help us see you.

And so this became my dissertation work. And eventually I realized I'm the sum of these parts and I don't have to separate them. And that hybridity and having a hybrid professional identity is the true me. And that revelation literally changed my life. And it's been my calling and my work for about 10 years now. So there's a lot there to unpack, but that's a bit of my journey so far In a nutshell,

thank you so much for sharing. And I love what you say about, you know, being the disruptor and always have this feedback that this is a bad thing and something's wrong with you or you're, you need to adapt. You need to change, but obviously we can, as gifted people, it's hard. That's just who we are. And finally understanding and accepting that it's okay who we are and just embracing it and just having,

I guess, the vocabulary for it and phrasing it in a more positive way. It doesn't change who we are. It just changes our perspective of things I would say, and how we advocate for ourselves. And I love that. You said like, yeah, this term, jack-of-all-trades, it's such a negative word. So when I listened to your Ted talk and you mentioned the word multi potentiality,

but that means more like a fragmented version. Like you do this and then you do something else and then you do something else. But what you're actually saying with the hybridity is you incorporate all of your talents and all of who you are and bring it to your job, to your career, to ever whatever you're doing. That's your whole self, it's not a fragmented piece basically.

Did I understand that correctly? Did I want to expand a little bit on that? Cause that's sort of the basis of my thesis and framework here, I've come to realize we actually have three different types of workers in the workforce. There are three different buckets of professional identity people fall into. And typically society has said there's only one or two buckets, not three.

So the three buckets are these singularity where someone has one professional identity. They only see themselves or associate with one thing like I'm just an engineer. The next step is multiplicity and multiplicity means having many professional identities. And that can mean someone has a day job and a side job. It can be over time. People accumulate identities or people who say I wear a lot of hats.

They all fall into multiplicity. And there are over 30 terms I've found to label this category being multi-passionate multihyphenate Jack of all trees, a polymath multi-dimensional. You can notice that prefix of multi keeps hitting that bucket. And multipotentialite is definitely in there too. Just many. But what about the next step? This third bucket where you're not just one and you're not just many.

What if these, I think of a Venn diagram, one of the circles, the identities start to collide and overlap and therefore there's intersections. And you actually have a hybrid identity emerging between or as a result of the other identities. That is something many people are experiencing and don't know how to talk about because we haven't had this language. We didn't know the term of being a hybrid was possible and integration.

And this also maps to Nebraska's theory, right? Of theory of positive disintegration, that when you're breaking yourself part you're disintegrating, and you're putting yourself back together, that reintegration that's what's happening. When you learn, how do the different parts of yourself fit? And it becomes a fuller version of you. I use analogies all the time to also make this more concrete.

I think of food, any kind of recipe or pizza, where you have many ingredients, but you don't eat a pizza as one ingredient at a time as the mushrooms and then the pepperoni and then the olives and on the cheese like that is multiplicity. But the pizza is so good because we eat it as a melty, gooey sum of all of its parts that is hybrid professional identity.

One other layer I want to add on this too, is that it is not all of your professional identities happening simultaneously. It's a set of your foundational ones. So going back to a pizza, if you put every ingredient in your kitchen on that pizza, it would taste disgusting because they don't all go together. I believe that's how we work in our professions.

You have a primary set of professional identities that are the ones you love, the most, your greatest areas of expertise. They light you up. You want to be known for them. You find those two, three or four, because that's really all we can hold at at a time in our primary professional identity. And at the intersection of those, that is where your greatest truest hybrid self comes through.

And it takes a lot of work Nadia for people to realize, oh my God, what are my primary identities? And what are the secondary or the tertiary ones I call them non-primary because people confuse them all. And the number one question I start my research with when I talk to people is what is your professional identity? And no one knows how to answer this right out of the gate.

They say, oh, you mean like my job title I'm director of sales, or, oh, I work in, you know, design and media and I'm like, those are not identities. Who are you? So there's a lot, a lot of work to be done in everything I'm bringing up today because it's an awareness of what professional identity is.

It's not our job titles. And then it's another level of awareness of, do you really work in multiplicity or are you in hybridity? And if you're in a space of intersecting identities, then we have a lot to unpack because investigating what new identity is coming through in the intersection is just a revelation of seeing yourself in a new way. For most people,

they have never thought about this before. And I must admit, I've never thought about this either. And I really identified with the multiplicity. And I guess maybe up to this point, it was also more multiplicity for me because as you know, I'm a podcast host, but I also have a day job. So I'm, I'm a epidemiologist and infection biologist by training.

I'm also a project manager I'm trained in commercial degree. So I worked in accounting for a bit. I worked in pension services at a bank. So you see, I did a lot of different things and I did them really separately, but I just, in the process of starting a new job and my day job, I'm actually moving into HR. I became an HR business partner and I will incorporate all of who I am.

Or as you say, parts of these separate identities, they will be at hybrid because I've done some diversity and inclusion work before I know how the organization works. I've already worked there with the researchers. And now I can add that and we'll get training on HR on top. So we'll do a further education. Otherwise it will be boring, wouldn't it?

Yeah. So you see, I'm now in the midst of this identity crisis, like who am I? And I really loved hearing your tech talk. And it was basically at the best point in my life, I guess, to hear that right now and to think about my identity and creating my own title, as you said, and you, you call yourself a creative disruptor.

I really love that. Do you want to share then after you is like how you, when you came to D really stations, like what was the next step and how did people react? And I guess it grew from there. Cause then you wrote a book and as we say, you went on and had a TEDx talk. And so you all have a course program.

Tell us a little bit more how that evolved from your thesis and in your personal career. So first, yeah, I want to just make a comment about the title, creative disruptor. So I teach a whole course on how to understand and unpack and discover your real professional identity and then how to brand and talk about being a hybrid professional and who we are at the intersection of our multiple professional identities is the driving question of all this work.

And so when you see that, who you are at the intersection, you need to come up with a new label, a new title that is unique to you, authentic for who you are and really helps you articulate, oh my God, this is my professional identity. I didn't know for me, I call myself a creative disruptor. And that's because I work at the intersection of being an artist,

educator, researcher, and designer, and creative disruptor, completely articulate the Sarahbeth. That I've been really since my early twenties through today, I just didn't have that language. I was a teacher, I was a program manager. I was a coordinator. I was a director of programs, but none of that was truly me. So there's a lot of power in unlocking this hybridity,

but yeah, what happened from grad school? So I work on this PhD. I use a methodology, actually, I'll add this in called R tography. And it's a very sort of niche specialty where it's spelled a slash R slash T and it's art and graphic combined. So Rita Erwin and Stephanie springy came up with this and they said, we need a methodology that allows art and writing to be more fluid because it's about inquiry between spaces,

the visual and the written play off of each other and a slash R slash T is artists researcher, teacher that these three identities come into play in the methodology. And I was blown away when I even learned there was a methodology that was hybrid because it perfectly suited me. And I used my art background in the research, which was really rare. So not only did I do the formal dissertation for my PhD,

but I put out a call for entries and I asked people to create artwork in response to their own hybrid professional identity. And I did a whole exhibition of people who are art educators, rethinking their identity through visual mediums, to correspond with exploring who we are through more than just how we talk and write about ourselves. So that was kind of a thing most grad students don't do.

But after I finished and I graduated, I knew, I think there's more to this work someday. I want to help publicize this, but I also didn't fully believe that idea. I had mattered to other people. So I was a little bit shy and nervous and didn't really share it. I didn't have a website or anything yet, but I was in an innovation program role.

I'm working in a school district and then eventually in higher education. And I kept meeting really interesting people. And when I was networking, I'd hear people tell their stories of, I do a little bit of this, and I'm also over there doing that and that would stop them and say, have you ever heard or thought about the fact you could be a hybrid professional that you're connecting and integrating these identities together.

And they went, whoa, that's a really cool concept. So little by little, I was testing and sort of playing with this idea with people from all different backgrounds. And I liked that they lit up, I liked that they sort of leaned in and went. That is really interesting. And eventually what happened is one day I was at CU Boulder and they said,

can you tell your leadership story to a group of women? We have this women's leadership symposium. And they asked me to be a keynote. I said, sure. And I thought, what is my leadership story? And so I went on stage and that was the first time I talked publicly about being this hybrid professional, my ability to innovate and leave the work I did on campus was a result of being an artist and educator and researcher and designer.

And it just landed with that audience. There were like 300 people in the room. And afterwards, so many people came up and said, I loved what you had to say. I've never thought about intersectionality and professional identity together. You just helped me understand myself. And I had no idea this was going to happen. That people are going to love it this much after that people requested,

can you show me how you did this? I want to learn how to understand my own hybridity and the teacher. And he was like, sure. So I created a couple of worksheets. I was like, we're going to draw a Venn diagram and we're going to do this and I'd sit down and people went. Yeah, but what, what's the step before the Venn diagram?

And I'm confused here. And so by watching people's questions, I went, oh, I need to make more worksheets. And then a friend of mine who was a mentor, she saw what I was doing. And she looked at me and said, sir, Beth, you need to make a workbook. This is not just a series of worksheets. And he was like,

darn, I don't need any more projects on my plate, but I knew she was bright. And she lived that fire me and Nadia in one month, you know, when you get those creative downloads and everything's synchronized the whole design layout, text, everything came out of me for the workbook. And it was right around that time that I had applied to be a TEDx speaker and I got accepted.

And that was like, perfect, because the workbook was just about ready. I only had one month before the TEDx date was actually happening. So I ordered copies of the workbook. I had to figure out my TEDx talk and then boom, I gave it and people wanted copies of the workbook. And I was like, okay, something's going on here?

And then people started asking, so when's the book coming out? And I was like, I've had enough time since grad school to marinate and validate and get more data points and stories that it was just ready to burst out of me. The book I did, the TEDx, I came out in June, 2019 and I sat down in November, 2019. I went on like a one week writing retreat and I wrote at least half of the book and that retreat,

it was like 10 hours of just straight pouring out words. It was, it was coming so easily out of me. And I was like, oh my gosh, I got the book done by like February when it was published by April of 2020. And so that's really the process. And ever since then, it's been wild. How much response I've gotten.

People are just like, we didn't know. We had permission to be multiple things simultaneously. I've never heard this language of being a hybrid. You've changed my whole sense of myself. My confidence has shifted. I'm able to talk about myself more accurately. My manager understands what I, now my colleagues can explain that I'm, you know, this cultural lens shifter.

And I never used that term before. I mean, it is really magical what this is doing to help people find themselves, especially when we're in the midst of the great resignation and people are leaving work because it doesn't fit them anymore. And their values are shifting. I really think we're going through a great reinvention because so much of this professional identity work,

and this goes back to identity literature. We go through multiple cycles in our lives of looking at who we are of changing our identities. We go through explorations and then achievements, where we sort of commit to a new identity, but this is not taught in career development. These structures are like the identity development space and the career development space I'm merging. And then I also bring in personal branding.

So I'm literally forming a whole new field of career support and professional identity development that we desperately need right now in society. Wow. So you're a creative career disruptor, I would say. So for people that are like now really curious, so what, what do you cover in the book and what then is the next step, I guess your course that teaches then really the nitty gritty would,

do you want to say a little bit more about like what's in the book and what can people learn? And maybe you have a little bit of a sneak peek of if people are really I'm curious. I love that. Yeah. So the book is called more than my title, the power of hybrid professionals in a workforce of experts in generalists. And that book sets the stage of if you're someone that wears a lot of hats,

you're a Jack of all trades. You don't feel seen, you don't feel valued in your work and you're struggling to express your identity, then learn about how to rethink your professional identity. So it gives sort of a stages of development. People are either in the, I call it emerging hybrid professional identity or established because if you're emerging, it's kind of like,

oh, I might be, but I might not be. Or sometimes I am. I'm not sure how to do this hybrid thing. And then people that are more established can talk about it. They can activate it. They can move into hybridity or decide not to. So hybridity is a choice. It's also something that's developmental. And so the book helps explain that.

And it also shows examples and stories of people who have done it. And then there's chapters on how to bring this into your work or what to say during interviews and what's happening in the workforce. But then there is a workbook that compliments the book and the workbook is all about how do you start to decode your professional identity, investigate your intersections, hybridize,

figure out a name for who you are. And it gives you all kinds of tools and prompts. And I've got a professional identity word list and a hybrid identity, elevator pitch, all of these things I've seen people need. And it sort of activates a lot of self-reflection and meta awareness. That's probably the biggest thing that happens in this process is people have to stop and be the witness of themselves in their work.

Because when you ask people to reflect on what you do, they kind of get bogged down. And they say of a lot of the similar things like, oh, I do problem solving. And I love connecting people and I'm a relationship builder and that's not specific enough. You have to start seeing yourself as like, how are you connecting? What kind of relationship builder are you?

Why are you using post-it notes when you're doing a brainstorm session? Like we all have really different ways of doing things, but we're not, self-aware enough to describe it. And when we can get into the stories and explanation of how we do what we do, new language emerges, that's where I saw, oh, I'm using art and putting it with data and disrupting that kind of research.

And I'm challenging things. And this and that. So the language of disruption was coming through when I saw what I was really doing in the world, in my work. And then the creator was really coming through. And so eventually those words were part of the themes I saw. And it was like, maybe that's my hybrid title. So it's putting all of these pictures together and that's what the book and the workbook do,

but I've really learned, people love to do this as a group. And so I run courses with live coaching and that way people get to mirror and brainstorm and share their own language and reflect back, and it becomes this awesome collaborative process. So that's how I'm doing the work in the world. And I do a lot of speaking on this as well.

Oh, thank you. And I'm so excited to also dig into this topic now, myself, I love how you talk about, you know, this hybridity forming out of multiplicity, obviously, but let's talk about it for me, a very obvious that this addresses a lot of gifted people. Do you want to share a little bit how giftedness comes into the whole play of what you do and how you see that in your work?

Yeah, I mean, I do think this notion of figuring out your intersectionality and being able to put yourself together as the sum of many identities is about integration. So I learned about Dubroski when I was in my grad studies, I was taking a creativity and giftedness class and I was studying from Norma Hafenstein at the DU University of Denver. And we read about Debrowski's theory and I was just flabbergasted.

I had never come across it. And it just made so much sense of overexcitabilities and developmental potential on these five stages of, you know, these, these orders of how you come into yourself and that not everybody even gets through those or has these moments of disintegration. And I was like, but I know I have, and I know I feel these,

these overexcitabilities in myself, the imaginational and central and psychomotor and so forth. And so it hit me later that me going through this turmoil of processing, I'm not just a Jack of all trades, but who am I really, that's the moment of disintegration where I'm really questioning and studying. And so for people that are gifted and you always feel like you're in a binary of like,

you're either this or that, you have to choose just one thing. People don't understand how you make sense because you have such disparate and divergent interests. The beauty of hybridity is they do belong together. Like the intersection is about juxtaposition, metamorphosis, condensation, and learning how to cross over in a very like deliberate, intentional way where the identities connect. And I just feel there is so much synergy and alignment between the positive disintegration work,

where you are re integrating to become the bigger fuller part of yourself. And it's almost like self-actualization or reaching that full potential or your developmental potential for that matter. So I, I do think people that are gifted have a higher probability of being in the space of a hybrid professional identity, but most of them have been forced fitting themselves or using language like,

well, I'm a multipotentialite or a multihyphenate because they didn't know there was this other thing they could express instead. So will that be your second book? It sounds like something more than just about career. If you talk about it's really more it's it's about identity and we have also different identity outside of our careers. And as you just mentioned about gifted giftedness and gifted people in general,

I think this book might be very curious. No, I'd love to, I'm definitely holding that idea on the burner of, I got two or three more book ideas. I see this as a series because I've had some really big questions that like, how do hybrid professionals fit into companies? How do we get employers to understand their value? Because I do have as part of my thesis that the workforce needs all three types.

We need the experts, we need the generalist or the people in the multiplicity space. Then, then we need the hybrids. And then a high functioning team uses all three. But if we're not hiring for all three, if we just say, oh, Nadja, you're more of this role. Or we need you to just kind of dabble across. We're not actually embracing how these different types of work identity help an organization thrive.

So that's one book I need to write. Another one I think is about pre-professional identity. Calling people, students for 18 or 24 years of their life, I think is detrimental because they get baked into the student identity and they don't know who they are. So I want to shift away from that and say, let's talk about your pre professional identity. Who are you becoming?

What are you sensing into? And it's not just conversations between what are you passionate about and what are you good at? And what do you like to do that is traditional career coaching. One of my frameworks is that work is a three legged stool. The three legs are one is knowing your passion, what you love to do. And that's typically what we talk about when we do work investigation,

the second leg of the stool is your purpose. Why do you do what you do? Right? People want to have impact, and they want to have a reason, but the third leg of the stool that matters is identity. Who are you when you follow your passion and purpose, what do you call yourself? And we don't ask those questions. We just assume if you've got a passion,

you've got a purpose, you'll figure yourself out, but we actually don't do the work to ask what is your identity? So I want to bring that language into career advising and just all kinds of, you know, workforce development programs. And then I think you're right. I think there is a space for people that are somewhere in this giftedness world, trying to make sense of themselves when nobody else understands them.

One of my big goals is you have to make sense of yourself. First, if you don't know who you are, nobody else is going to make sense of you for you. And you can sit with a therapist and you can sit with a coach or you can talk to a career advisor, and they're going to ask you questions, but you have to do this internal validation instead of just external validation.

So if you just let the world tell you how they see you and you take personality assessments and you take another strengths finder thing, that's great. You've got data, but now how do you see that in your own sense of self? What is that identity construct? So there's a lot. I just feel so passionate about this space because identity work is such a core part of being a human.

And we talk about all of our social identities and personal identities, race, class, and gender studies. That's where I saw intersectionality literature. It was not from career or business or anything else. And I borrowed it. I mean, that is my giftedness was seeing frameworks that live in other types of academic study and saying, but that idea belongs over here too.

Why are we not talking about it that way? Yeah. Thank you so much for your book, your course, for just you being you and sharing with the world. And I'm going to go on that journey myself. Now, I'm going to take another half an hour after our conversation and kind of do some, some brainstorming on my identity. You,

Well, you asked me, I think for a little taste test of a tool. So I'd love to share one if that's okay. Please do. Yes. I have a framework about how do you validate your primary professional identities and for everyone listening, all of the work I do is really about Venn diagrams. It's such a simple tool, and yet we haven't thought to use it in the world of our professional identities.

So at a basic level, just draw a Venn diagram, two circles, three circles, or four circles, and put one of your professional identities, your primary ones into each circle, and then start to wonder, well, who am I at the intersection? How do these identities play together and fit together? And I've got a whole process behind that.

So I'm just giving that as a high level idea. But my little activity for everyone today is in your primary professional identities, there are four things to consider. One is internal validation versus extra validation. And the other is unconscious versus conscious spaces. So here are the questions for external validation. Ask how do others see me and brainstorm that list of identities for internal validation?

How do I see myself in my work? What are those identities? I would call myself or hold to be most true for the unconscious identities you have in your work, who are you in your flow when you feel your best and things are effortless and easy and fabulous find those identities in your flow state. And then the conscious state is who am I in my greatest areas of expertise?

What do I want to be known for in my work? Because I'm competent at it and accomplished when you answer those four questions, then you start to look for which words are common, across three or four of them, there should be some patterns. And then those help you see, these are my primary professional identities because they are rooted across these areas.

But if you're seeing a lot of disconnect or sort of scattered like the identities aren't matching together, then you have more work to do. It just means you need to do more observation and more reflection and more interviews of how other people are seeing you. So that's just a really easy takeaway for today. Thank you so much for sharing. So if anybody's interested in learning more about you,

where can people find you More than my title.com is where my book and workbook courses and a lot of free handles are there because I believe in sharing a lot of this one question, people ask me a lot too. Nadja, I just want to add is if I have all these different identities and they form hybridity than what is my expertise, because everyone's supposedly supposed to have like one area of expertise or something they're really good at,

and why this framework of being a hybrid professional is so beautiful is your hybrid expertise is your thing. What you develop in that intersection becomes a new form of expertise. So definitely check out more than my title to learn more about all of That. And you're also on social media, I believe, Yes, I am on LinkedIn a lot and Instagram the most with more than my title.

Okay. And I will link everything in the show notes. So people can just go and click and find you and all the amazing things that you do. And is there anything else you want to share? Something you wish you knew earlier, something you wish that people listening know about this topic or know about you. I want to share one more little nerdy thing,

just cause I think this audience will get it. It's all about prefixes. When we talk about disciplines, think about the words like cross-disciplinary multidisciplinary. So there that falls a spectrum. So let me lay it out like this there's interdisciplinary, which is one discipline. And I've seen this analogy again with food where interdisciplinary is like just having tomatoes on a plate.

One thing cross disciplinary is where you might have tomatoes and carrots on a plate. They see each other, but they're not really interacting. Multidisciplinary is where you have a salad. You've got some lettuce and carrots and tomato, but they're, they're laying together the salad, but they're all discreet and very easy to identify their separateness. So that space of cross and multidisciplinary is where I see multiplicity of workers,

people that have many identities, but then something really interesting happens when you get to interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary. Everything changes because the prefix inter means between and trans means beyond. So now, instead of it being a solid, suddenly you've got a stew when it's interdisciplinary, you've got things that are mixing and a whole new flavor is coming out. And if you're in the transdisciplinary coronary space,

it could be like a cake. Like the ingredients become something completely different than what they started. As you can't even tell what the initial ingredients were anymore hybrid professionals. And I, I do believe people that are gifted are in this space. That is how they think they are interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary thinkers. And that means they're also bringing these hybrid identities. They're bringing identities together in a,

between and beyond place mixing in a way that they're like, they don't know how to articulate it. That's why this spectrum aligns to so much other research. And I'm just trying to make it more transparent to people. Thank you for making it accessible. Thank you for giving me and everybody listening. New language, new thought food for thoughts. Literally. Now I'm craving some pizza and salad.

So yeah. Thank you for sharing. And I'm sure we got to stay in contact and probably I will ping you for more, more insights into my own identity. So thank you so much therapist for being here and for sharing. It's a huge pleasure to be here. Thank you so much. I told you, Sarahbeth was going to be awesome.

Didn't you enjoy this conversation. If this conversation gave you some inspiration, obviously you find all the links to in the show notes, to reach out to Sarabeth, to find her on her website and the book and her course and all that she does and follow her on social media. So I really, really enjoy sharing all of this conversation with you.

This really lights me up and energizes me and it was so wonderful. And Sarahbeth said she actually listened to my podcast. I was inspired and reached out and she wanted to be on the show. So if you're listening and you're working in the gifted space and you want to share your story, please reach out. I'm happy to feature you on unleash Monday.

Or if you're somebody who has a gifted story and believe that you have something to share that can inspire and help somebody else on their journey, please reach out. I'm happy to give a space to all of you who can offer some insights, empowering messages. And if you want to support this podcast, then obviously share this episode with somebody who you think might be interested,

might be a hybrid professional. And you can also like, and subscribe to this podcast on apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. And you can write a written review. This again, helps the algorithm. So I'm really appreciating all of your messages and all of your likes subscriptions. And if you want to learn more about Unleash Monday, then there's the website unleashmonday.com.

There's also a newsletter that I very sporadically send out, but please go and subscribe. And if you are a gifted or twice exceptional woman, then I invite you to join the unleash Monday community. You will also find more on this, on the website. So with that said, I hope you have a wonderful day and I see you in two weeks.