A story about a professional, a question she couldn’t answer and what changes when we learn to direct more of our own development
Could Self-Coaching Change Professional Development? wasn’t the question Imani was trying to answer when her manager asked what she wanted to work on over the coming year.
Imani was twenty-eight and had recently moved from project co-ordinator to project manager in a large organisation.
She liked her work.
She was ambitious without being in a hurry. She wanted to become better at what she did, take on greater responsibility and continue progressing.
The organisation wanted that too.
There was an extensive internal learning platform. Employees could attend workshops, webinars and development programmes. Managers were expected to discuss development during one-to-ones. Imani had already benefited from several of the opportunities available to her.
Now it was time to update her development plan.
Her manager asked:
What would you like to work on this year?
Imani thought for a moment.
“Leadership skills.”
Her manager nodded.
“What specifically?”
That was harder.
“Confidence. Strategic thinking. Probably influencing too.”
There was a leadership programme beginning in a few months that her manager thought might be useful.
Imani looked it up afterwards.
It looked good.
She added it to her development plan.
And went back to work.
The Meeting
Three days later, Imani was sitting in a project meeting with six other people.
Most were considerably more senior than she was.
The project had encountered a problem and the discussion had been going around in circles for several minutes.
Imani knew what she thought.
She worked more closely with the project than almost anyone else in the room and could see something the discussion was missing.
There was a pause.
She could have spoken.
She didn’t.
Someone else began talking.
A few minutes later, he made almost exactly the point Imani had been thinking.
“Yes,” one of the senior managers said. “That’s it.”
The conversation changed direction.
Imani contributed later in the meeting when somebody asked her a direct question.
She answered confidently.
Nobody would have left the room thinking anything had gone wrong.
Nothing had.
But Imani left thinking about the moment she hadn’t spoken.
Why didn’t I say that?
When a Development Goal Is Too Big
That evening, Imani thought about her development plan.
Confidence.
Perhaps her instinct had been right.
Maybe she needed to become more confident.
But the more she thought about it, the less convincing that explanation became.
She wasn’t generally lacking in confidence.
With her immediate team, she spoke freely.
With clients she knew well, she was comfortable expressing an opinion.
When someone asked directly what she thought, she usually answered.
She had given presentations she had been nervous about and handled them well.
So she tried a different question.
When do I hold back?
That was easier to answer.
When there were several senior people in the room.
When she wasn’t completely certain her contribution would be useful.
When she had to enter a conversation rather than being invited into it.
When she worried that everybody else knew something she didn’t.
That was different.
“Become more confident” had sounded like a development goal.
But it hadn’t told Imani very much about what she actually needed to develop.
Her working life had.
What Is My Working Life Trying to Teach Me?
A few days later, Imani wrote a question at the top of a page in her notebook:
What is my working life trying to teach me?
She began paying attention.
Not only to what went wrong.
To everything.
There was the meeting where she hadn’t spoken.
A presentation where she noticed she rushed through the first two minutes and then settled.
A difficult conversation with a colleague that she had handled better than she expected.
A piece of work she kept postponing because she wasn’t sure where to begin.
Feedback from her manager that initially irritated her.
A project she had enjoyed so much that she lost track of time.
A senior colleague who seemed able to disagree with people without making the disagreement feel confrontational.
Imani became curious.
Instead of asking only:
What courses should I take?
She began asking:
What am I noticing about how I work?
Where am I getting stuck?
What am I getting better at?
What situations stretch me?
What would I like to be able to do differently next time?
The answers didn’t replace her development plan.
They made it more useful.
Becoming an Active Participant in Your Own Development
This is where self-coaching can change our relationship with professional development.
Professional development can come from many places.
A training programme can introduce knowledge, frameworks and skills we don’t yet have.
A good manager can see potential we haven’t recognised.
A coach can help us explore our thinking.
A mentor can offer perspective drawn from experience.
Colleagues can challenge us.
Books, courses, workshops and conversations can open up entirely new ways of thinking.
All of these can be valuable.
Self-coaching doesn’t diminish any of them.
It adds something else.
It helps us become more active participants in recognising and directing our own development.
Because there are things about Imani’s working life that nobody else can observe all of the time.
Her manager wasn’t inside her head during the meeting when she decided not to speak.
The designer of the leadership programme couldn’t know which particular situations caused her to hold back.
An online learning platform couldn’t notice that she was becoming increasingly interested in one kind of project and less interested in another.
Imani was there for all of it.
The question was whether she was paying attention.
Turning Experience Into Learning
Imani began a simple practice at the end of each week.
She opened her notebook and asked herself three questions:
What happened?
What did it show me about myself?
What do I want to practise or learn next?
Some weeks there was very little to write.
Other weeks one incident gave her several pages.
Gradually, ordinary working experiences became part of her professional development.
Monday’s breakthrough.
Tuesday’s meeting.
Wednesday’s mistake.
Thursday’s difficult conversation.
Friday’s success.
Instead of waiting for development to happen somewhere separate from her work, Imani began learning from the work itself.
And because she was clearer about what she wanted to develop, she also became better at recognising the external support that could help her.
She asked her manager for opportunities to present to more senior groups.
She watched how colleagues entered conversations when they hadn’t been invited to speak.
She practised making her point earlier in smaller meetings.
And she still enrolled on the leadership programme.
But something had changed.
The programme was no longer her professional development.
It was one valuable part of it.
From Consuming Learning to Directing It
There is an understandable tendency to think about professional development in terms of provision.
What training can we offer?
What programmes should people attend?
What resources should we make available?
What skills will the organisation need?
Those are important questions.
Organisations have a valuable role in creating learning opportunities, developing people and ensuring that employees have access to expertise and experiences they may never discover by themselves.
But perhaps there is another question worth asking alongside them:
How do we help people become better at directing their own learning?
Because professional development doesn’t only happen when something is delivered.
It happens when someone notices that a conversation didn’t go as they wanted.
When they become curious about why one piece of work energises them and another drains them.
When feedback makes them uncomfortable enough to examine it.
When they recognise a gap in what they know.
When they try something differently and notice what happens.
When they ask themselves what their experience is teaching them.
Self-coaching can help turn those moments into learning.
Professional Development as an Ongoing Practice
Several months later, Imani was having another one-to-one with her manager.
The leadership programme had been useful.
She had learned new approaches and had begun experimenting with some of them in her work.
Her manager asked:
“What development would be useful for you next?”
This time Imani didn’t say:
“Leadership.”
She didn’t say:
“Confidence.”
She knew what she wanted to work on.
She wanted to become better at contributing earlier when she was working with senior groups.
She wanted more opportunities to practise influencing without relying on authority.
And she had become increasingly interested in the strategic side of the projects she managed and wanted greater exposure to how those decisions were made.
Her manager listened.
Together, they began discussing what might help.
Some of it involved formal learning.
Some involved experience.
Some involved people Imani could learn from.
And some of it she could begin practising herself.
The organisation hadn’t become less important to Imani’s development.
Imani had become more involved in directing it.
Perhaps that’s one of the possibilities self-coaching offers professional development.
Not replacing training.
Not replacing managers, coaches, mentors or learning professionals.
Not expecting people to figure everything out alone.
But helping people develop the ability to notice, question, reflect, experiment and recognise what they need to learn next.
Professional development can give us extraordinary opportunities to learn.
Self-coaching can help us know what to do with them.
And perhaps the future of professional development isn’t simply giving people more opportunities to learn.
Perhaps it’s also helping them become better at recognising what they need to learn next.
Continue Exploring Self-Coaching
Read more Professional Self-Coaching stories and explore practical self-coaching resources in the Professional Self-Coaching collection
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