25. Are you more than your title?

Do you fit into a neat little job title box? Sarabeth Berk explains how it's totally fine if you can't! She outlines the definition of a hybrid professional and agrees that no matter your role, you should add the skill of SPEAKING to the mix.

Transcript

Sally: What's your job title? Is it straightforward like lawyer, fireman, school teacher? Or is it a long convoluted bunch of jargon no one outside your industry would understand?=T And does it sum up what you really do? Welcome to episode 25 of That Voice Podcast. Are you more than your title?

I'm Sally Prosser. You're listening to That Voice Podcast. No matter who you are or what you do, your voice matters. So unless you've sworn that lifetime vow of silence, this is the podcast for you.

Can you sum up what you do in a conventional title? I certainly can't. I mean, I call myself a voice coach, but I'm really a speech and drama teacher mashed with a PR professional mashed with a journalist. My fascinating guest today is Sarabeth Berk and she would describe me as a hybrid. Sounds exotic, doesn't it? I love it. Sarabeth's website is www.morethanmytitle.com and she believes being a hybrid is your secret weapon in the workforce. Sarabeth, welcome to That Voice Podcast.

Sarabeth: Why, thank you so much for having me.

Sally: Sarabeth is joining us from beautiful Denver tonight - bringing That Voice Podcast a bit international. How's the weather over there?

Sarabeth: It's so nice. We're having a beautiful winter crisp with enough snow for the ski slopes. I love it.

Sally: Oh, beautiful. Very different to sunny Brisbane where I am. So Sarabeth, my first question is always the same. It's could you do your job if you lost your voice?

Sarabeth: That is such a hard question. I don't think I could to be honest. So I consider myself a hybrid professional, obviously, and that means that I have different professional identities that comprise what I do. I'm an artist and a researcher and an educator and designer, but my day job is being this director of futurebound, which is leading an innovation ecosystem. And I have to do a lot of collaboration and connecting and networking. So my voice is critical to my work. Yeah. I couldn't do it without it.

Sally: Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you do?

Sarabeth: Yeah. It's interesting because I have a day job, right. But partially what I speak about is my research. So my day job is leading an effort that's trying to bring more innovation to early childhood. We know that the earliest years of life are the most critical. That's when your brain develops and your nervous system and immune system, just everything really has a high growth curve at that early year. But what we don't do is invest enough money or really have enough new ideas helping children at that early time of life. So that's what I do for my day job.

Sally: So interesting. So the research around hybrids is on-the-side, so to speak, although you wouldn't say that, would you?

Sarabeth: I know this is why it's tricky. My job is the epitome of being a hybrid professional in the workforce. So I'm living my research. I just happened to have had an epiphany and literally a professional identity crisis about five years ago where I knew I had all these different talents. I was working in the workforce, but using really only just one of my professional identities at a time. And that's not fulfilling. I would always feel like I had one of my arms tied behind my back because I could only show up and use one or two identities in my job. So the job I do right now is the first job where all of my professional identities, my hybridity is finally being recognized. So I sort of am walking the talk that I'm researching, that it's possible to find work where you can bring all of these identities together in one full professional identity. So I've decided I need to research and write and speak about being a hybrid because other people are experiencing this problem. This is a struggle. I've met so many people in different fields that are saying, nobody knows what I do. I'm more than my job title. I'm stuck in a box. How did you figure out to be a hybrid professional? Help me do that too. And so that's what I'm researching.

Sally: Yeah, and what I find interesting is one of the things that you help people with is dealing with that dreaded question - what do you do? I mean, that's hard to answer anyway, but how do you answer it if you're a hybrid?

Sarabeth: Yeah, that is the question. I used to have such fear around it because it really makes you question how other people see you and how you see yourself and the truth. It's not just what do you do, it's what do you really do when you take back the curtain and look beyond your title. So my first question to people is what are your professional identities? Forget the job title and that's when you start to reveal that you are the artist and the researcher and the designer. That's a different way of expressing yourself. So that's sort of step one. And then step two is to consider what is the connection between your different professional identities? How do they relate to each other? Because the relationships, I talk about the intersections, if you were to add the artists and the designer together at the same time, who are you in that moment or the researcher, artist, designer, that's three identities together, forming a new identity.

What is that relationship and what are you doing in those moments? So I do a lot of self-reflection with people when I'm talking with them about their hybridity, but ultimately I've created a tool called the hybrid professional identity elevator pitch and it sort of starts with introducing yourself as a hybrid professional because that's a disarming and very clear way of telling people - I do more than one thing. And then I have people come up with a new hybrid title for themselves that's not what the world assigned to them. Like don't tell them you're the director of futurebound them. You're the creative disruptor. That's your hybridity. That's how I introduce my hybrid professional self and then the reveal is the interconnection. So there's a couple steps I've found that help people answer the what do you do if you do more than one thing?

Sally: Yeah. Great. There's a couple of things there. The first one is, I totally agree. They say so much innovation happens during those intersections. I think it was the invention of the printing press. The person who invented the printing press knew all about newspapers because was working in that area, but was also a metal worker. And so it was bringing together those two things that invented the printing press. It's really interesting. And the other part to that is I think if people don't have a traditional role, like they can't say, I'm a doctor, I'm a lawyer. Do you think they feel like they're maybe not good enough or they have a bit of shyness or embarrassment about saying they're a hybrid? And what you're doing is giving people a new confidence around talking about it?

Sarabeth: Yeah. I, the more I research and interview people, professional identity is such a topic about self esteem and self confidence. We define ourselves by our job titles. And if we're in a job transition and we don't have a job title or we don't know what to call ourselves, people feel really insecure. So there's a lot of self worth wrapped up in this and I definitely talk about that in my research. But hybridity I've found is actually permission. Most people feel relief when they learn this idea because they're like, 'wait finally, you're telling me I can be this and that. I don't have to choose and I don't have to hide part of myself. I can be all the things I want to be.' And I just want to add this caveat that's different than being someone - there's some terms out there like being multitalented or multi-passionate or a polymath or Jack-and-Jill of all trades - there's a lot of terms like that and that those terms, to me show that you are, you have multiple professional identities and the difference here with hybridity is the integration. So up until this point in time in the workforce, we've just been listing a lot of things on our resumes and that's confusing. I think it makes it unclear what you really do. Whereas being a hybrid is the sum of all those parts and that's a really new way for us to think about ourselves.

Sally: Yeah, I love that. It's about permission. So a lot of people come to me to learn how to speak better because they're seeing that if they can add the skill of speaking to their professional identity, that they can have more success. And I know you do a lot of speaking as well yourself. How valuable would you say the ability to speak is for somebody's professional identity?

Sarabeth: I love that question. I believe describing your professional identity is an exercise in communication. I talk about this being professional branding. You have to be able to convey who you are. So that's speaking your truth. It's sharing with the world a very clear message of how you want to be seen and how you define yourself. And I love that. I mean speaking is really important to this work.

Sally: Yeah. In a way - how on earth do you convey your hybridity if you don't have the speaking skills to go along with it?

Sarabeth: Exactly. And this is a game of language because words are sort of arbitrary points of meaning. We are all using the words 'I'm a coach, I'm a marketer, I do coding, I do sales' and we have thousands of people with those labels and so words are almost not enough. So the idea of hybridity is getting more creative with using existing language, but then adding a new dimension, whether it's like a descriptor word or a series of words mashed together, like the term teacherpreneur or a hairapist or starchitect are these hybrid words that are new titles and new language.

Sally: What is a starchitect?

Sarabeth: It can be like a famous architect or an architect who works for celebrities and really important people.

Sally: Yeah, I get it. That's so cool. I've got to, I've got to think of my own cool title now. It says on your website there's a quote that says 'the average adult worker holds more than 10 jobs in a lifetime and reinvents their career three to four times.' And that got me thinking, our traditional thinking is, you do this and then you change and you do that and then you do something else. Even though you might be changing job title, you are still a sum of all of those things. And I feel like I'm a good example of that. Even though right now I'm not a practicing journalist or a practicing PR professional. All those skills from those professional identities I'm using every day in what I do now. So what would you say to people out there who think that they might be a hybrid?

Sarabeth: Well, first of all, I just love how you painted that picture of your past experiences informing your hybridity cause that is definitely a part of this puzzle is reflecting back to make sense of the professionally you've become. So my advice to people that think they're a hybrid or want to become a hybrid professional is first take that self assessment. Really get clear on what are your professional identities. Because in identity research, you actually can't be more than a few things at the same time. So if you're telling the world you're five or six or seven different kinds of professional identities, you actually have to narrow that down. And I think it's something I call finding your primary professional identities. Those are the ones that you use pretty much every day. They have to light you up, give you energy, bring you joy and you would feel like you were missing part of yourself if one of those wasn't represented.

So when you look at your list of all your professional identities and then trim it down to the ones that meet that criteria, I just said that's the first step of figuring out your hybridity. After that, I have a little technique I like to call professional identity math and it's adding those together and starting to look at what you do in the intersections, what happens when you combine them and then find a really cool way to name it, give it a special label and title that you feel encompasses what that unique recipe is. I use the analogy too, of pizza. Like we don't all just want to be cheese pizza, like you have certain ingredients on yours with pineapple, maybe and spinach and like some weird spice.

Sally: Kiwifruit - I saw a news story the other day about kiwifruit on a pizza.

Sarabeth: Exactly. And so that's your hybridity and what do you call that special pizza? That's how we need to think about our hybridity in the workforce is the type of pizza name that we're giving ourselves because we have different identities.

Sally: Love that. And how are you feeling now? Do you feel, you know, you started this research because you had frustration around marrying all your professional identities.

Sarabeth: I'm in such a different place than where I was just less than 10 years ago. I was struggling. I felt lost. I felt confused. I really didn't know who I was as a professional. And this has been a journey both because I just fell in love with researching it and study other people's identities. But I've gotten so much clarity and so much more self-belief of I know who I am and these are the identities that I feel most proud of and I get to show in my work and now people also value me for those. So I feel like a transformed person. This has become the tool that probably has changed my professional life in a lot of ways.

Sally: Yeah. And I'm all about confidence, spoken communication. And I guess with that security in yourself, you'd feel much more confident communicating what you do now?

Sarabeth: Absolutely. I think I would have been so much more afraid of standing on stage and introducing myself or even just being in a networking session, talking about who I was if I didn't have this security and this confidence of my hybridity. And the last step that I notice when people find their new quote unquote like hybrid professional title is the owning it. The what you were just kind of referring to is. So before I knew to call myself Creative Disruptor, I maybe didn't feel comfortable. I didn't feel like that was really me. It felt too weird or funny. But the more I practiced and tested it in the world and noticed that it sort of made people light up and get more curious about me and they said, tell me more - what does that mean? I've never met a creative disruptor. And I realized I had to own it. Like that was exactly who I was and it was the best way for me to describe myself. And I was like, yes, this is my title. This is me. Let me tell you about it.

Sally: Yeah, because there's not some special rule book of the only titles that you're allowed to go by.

Sarabeth: One hundred percent right. Yes.

Sally: Well of course, unless you know, you can't go around calling yourself a doctor, I suppose if you haven't got the qualifications. Fantastic. So how can people find your, how can people find out more about hybridity and the research you do?

Sarabeth: Well, first of all, I've got a book coming out in April called 'More than my title, the power of hybrid professionals in a workforce of experts and generalists. So I am really excited to share that because that has a lot more information, but morethanmytitle.com is my website and I've got a workbook and some other downloadable resources. And you can see I did a TEDx talk that's also online about are you a hybrid professional? So there's a few resources online if you look for me.

Sally: Yeah, the Ted talk is great to watch and you talk about the pizza, which I like.

Sarabeth: I do talk about the pizza?

Sally: Fantastic. Was there anything else you'd like to add?

Sarabeth: I just really like how you are focusing on voice because I think that's a certain kind of hybrid professional too, and it wasn't something I was thinking about until I met you, so thank you for the work you're doing.

Sally: Oh, well I certainly love what I do.

Sarabeth: Well, your voice is phenomenal. Like I could just listen to you all day. You really do have it mastered. Yeah.

Sally: Oh, thank you. Because I've been doing some voice exercises this morning because I'm just coming off the back of a cold. But thank you. Sarabeth, thank you so much for joining That Voice Podcast.

Sarabeth: Thank you. It's such a pleasure. Take care.

Sally: Oh my gosh. I love what Sarabeth stands for. Isn't that a great reminder that we can do many things, be many things and have a way to express it. If you think you're a hybrid, why don't you check out morethanmytitle.com. There's lots of great resources there.

It got me thinking about that dreaded question. So what do you do? I'm sure we've all been on the receiving end of that question and look, I'm guilty of asking it too. So next week I'm going to share with you a few ways you can answer the, 'what do you do' question without the stock standard name and job title and with lots of style and pizzazz.

And remember that's not the only thing to set your alarms for. Next Monday, I'll also be hosting my free online masterclass - How to speak with confidence, clarity, and charisma. It's at 10:30 AM Australian Eastern Standard time. That's Brisbane time, not Sydney time. Just Google it if you're confused. It's great. We've got more than a hundred people signed up. I'd love to have you on board as well. It's not too late to register. Click HERE to reserve your spot.

Thanks for listening to That Voice Podcast. If you enjoyed it and have an iPhone, please subscribe, rate and review. I really appreciate it.