OVERVIEW: When trying to see yourself in your work, it's critical to ask other people how they see you. Discovering your professional identity involves assessing four key factors about yourself and triangulating responses into bigger patterns or themes. Doing this is critical to surfacing insights and revealing your authentic professional identity--the identity that is buried beneath traditional labels and formal job titles. The four key factors are:

• Internal Validation (how you see yourself in your work)

• External Validation (how others see you in your work)

• Conscious Elements (who you think you are in your greatest areas of expertise)

• Unconscious Elements (who you are in your work when you're in flow)

The internal, conscious, and unconscious factors can be done on your own, but external validation requires you to talk with other people so that you can hear their perspectives.

HOT TIP: Letters of reference and testimonials (even on LinkedIn) that you've gathered over the years are also sources of external validation. Go back and look at what people said about WHO you are.