How Work Reveals Who We Are
Professional Development: What Do We Learn About Ourselves at Work? Christopher’s experience began to make him question something he had previously taken for granted: how well he really understood himself.
Christopher had always thought he knew himself reasonably well.
He knew what he was good at.
He knew what frustrated him.
He knew the kind of work he enjoyed and the kind he preferred to avoid.
He knew he was reliable.
He knew he cared about doing things properly.
What he hadn’t expected was that work would show him parts of himself he hadn’t really noticed.
The Decision
Christopher had been asked to take responsibility for a piece of work that mattered.
It wasn’t the biggest project he had ever worked on, but there were more people involved and more consequences if things went wrong.
He wanted to do it well.
Perhaps too much.
He started checking everything.
Then checking it again.
He found himself rewriting things other people had already completed.
He delayed decisions because he wanted more certainty.
He told himself he was being thorough.
But eventually someone said something that stopped him.
“You don’t have to make every decision yourself.”
Christopher knew they were right.
But he didn’t like hearing it.
What Was Actually Going On?
He had thought the problem was workload.
It wasn’t.
He had thought the problem was standards.
It wasn’t that either.
He began to realise that something deeper was happening.
He didn’t trust himself to let something go until it felt completely safe.
He didn’t like uncertainty.
He had built a professional identity around being dependable, and somewhere along the way, dependable had become almost indistinguishable from in control.
That was uncomfortable to recognise.
But it was useful.
Because once he could see it, he could begin to do something about it.
Work Shows Us Things
This is one of the less obvious forms of Professional Development.
Our work can reveal things about us that no competency framework necessarily captures.
How do we respond when someone disagrees with us?
What happens when we don’t know the answer?
Do we ask for help?
Do we become defensive when our work is criticised?
Do we speak up too quickly?
Do we stay silent too long?
Do we take responsibility?
Do we avoid it?
What happens when someone else receives recognition for something we contributed to?
What happens when we are given authority?
What happens when we aren’t?
These moments can tell us something.
Not necessarily something flattering.
But something useful.
Christopher’s Standards Were Real
Christopher didn’t need to become less conscientious.
His attention to detail was one of his strengths.
The development was learning when that strength became unhelpful.
He began to notice the difference between checking something because it mattered and checking it because he was uncomfortable letting go.
He started asking himself a question:
What am I trying to protect here?
Sometimes the answer was quality.
Sometimes it was other people.
And sometimes, if he was honest, it was himself.
He didn’t want to be wrong.
He didn’t want to disappoint people.
He didn’t want to discover that he wasn’t as capable as they thought.
That realisation changed something.
Not overnight.
But gradually.
We Discover Ourselves in the Ordinary Moments
Professional Development doesn’t only happen during major challenges.
Sometimes it appears in very ordinary moments.
The meeting where we decide whether to challenge something.
The email we rewrite three times.
The conversation we keep postponing.
The piece of work we can’t bring ourselves to hand over.
The mistake we can’t stop thinking about.
The colleague whose way of working irritates us.
The responsibility we secretly want.
The responsibility we secretly hope someone else will take.
These moments can be revealing.
They can tell us what matters to us.
What we fear.
What we value.
What we need to learn.
And sometimes, what we have already developed.
What Christopher Was Learning
Christopher began to see that professional development wasn’t only about becoming more capable.
It was also about becoming more aware.
More aware of his reactions.
More aware of his assumptions.
More aware of the difference between a strength and an overused strength.
More aware of the kind of professional he wanted to be when circumstances were uncertain.
That awareness didn’t solve everything.
But it gave him something he hadn’t had before.
Choice.
He could notice what was happening inside him before automatically acting on it.
And that was changing his work.
So What Do We Learn About Ourselves at Work?
Perhaps more than we realise.
Work gives us repeated opportunities to see ourselves in action.
We see how we respond to pressure.
How we treat people when we are busy.
How we behave when we have authority.
How we react when we don’t.
How we respond to being wrong.
How we respond when someone else is right.
These are not separate from Professional Development.
They are part of it.
Because developing professionally isn’t simply about adding more to what we know.
Sometimes it is about understanding more clearly what we bring to the work already.
And then deciding what we want to keep, what we want to change and what we want to become more conscious of.
Christopher had thought he was learning how to manage a bigger piece of work.
He was.
But he was also learning something more difficult.
He was learning how to recognise himself while he was working.
And that turned out to be development too.
Connect and Continue
Work With Me: Individual WorkLife Coaching, Commissioned Learning Resources, Speaking Engagements and Organisational Partnerships.
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