Recognising The Person We Become Through Working Life
Professional Development: How Do We Know When We’ve Changed? Sometimes the evidence of development is not something new we have achieved, but something we now respond to differently.
Nancy didn’t think she had changed.
At least, not in the way people usually meant when they talked about Professional Development.
She hadn’t recently completed a qualification.
She hadn’t moved into a completely different role.
There was no obvious milestone she could point to.
Her working life looked, from the outside, much as it always had.
Then something happened that made her reconsider.
The Conversation
Nancy was in a meeting when a colleague challenged something she had said.
The challenge wasn’t particularly aggressive.
But it was direct.
A few years earlier, Nancy knew exactly what she would have done.
She would have gone quiet.
She would have thought about the conversation afterwards.
She would have replayed what she had said and what she should have said instead.
She might even have avoided raising the subject again.
This time, she listened.
Then she said:
“That’s fair. I hadn’t looked at it that way.”
And the conversation continued.
Only later did Nancy realise what had happened.
She hadn’t become more knowledgeable.
She hadn’t prepared differently.
She had simply responded differently.
The Changes We Don’t Put on a CV
We tend to recognise development when there is something visible to show for it.
A new qualification.
A promotion.
A new responsibility.
A completed course.
A new skill.
These things make development easy to describe.
But some of the most meaningful changes in a professional life leave no obvious record.
You become more comfortable saying, “I don’t know.”
You stop taking disagreement as criticism.
You ask for help earlier.
You become better at listening before deciding.
You stop needing every decision to be yours.
You recover more quickly after getting something wrong.
You speak when you once would have stayed silent.
Or you learn when not to speak.
These changes can be difficult to measure.
But they can change a working life.
Nancy Had Not Noticed the Change
That was what interested Nancy.
She couldn’t identify a moment when she had decided to become more comfortable with disagreement.
There hadn’t been a course.
No one had sat her down and taught her how to respond.
It had happened gradually.
Through difficult conversations.
Through mistakes.
Through watching other people.
Through experiences she had initially found uncomfortable.
Through discovering that sometimes the thing she thought was happening was not what was happening at all.
And perhaps through getting tired of responding to things in the same old way.
How Do We Know?
Maybe we know because something that once felt difficult has become possible.
Maybe we notice because our first reaction is no longer our only reaction.
Maybe someone else notices before we do.
“You handled that differently.”
“You wouldn’t have said that a few years ago.”
“You seem much more comfortable with that now.”
Those observations can be surprisingly powerful.
They invite us to look back.
Not simply at what we have achieved, but at how we have changed.
Nancy Looked Back
She began thinking about some of the situations she had found difficult earlier in her career.
There had been a time when she felt she needed to prove herself.
A time when criticism felt personal.
A time when she believed that being capable meant knowing the answer.
A time when asking for help seemed like admitting weakness.
None of those things had disappeared completely.
That wasn’t the point.
She had changed because they no longer controlled her in quite the same way.
She could notice them.
She could choose how to respond.
And sometimes she could even recognise the old reaction without following it.
That was development.
Change Doesn’t Always Feel Like Development
Perhaps this is one reason Professional Development can be difficult to recognise.
While we are changing, it may simply feel like living through things.
We don’t always know that a difficult experience is developing us.
We may only see it later.
Sometimes years later.
We tell a story about something that happened and suddenly realise:
I wouldn’t handle that the same way now.
That sentence contains something important.
It means there is a before and an after.
The event may be unchanged.
The person remembering it is not.
The Story Can Show Us
This is where the stories of our working lives can become useful.
When we tell the story of something that happened years ago, we may notice things we couldn’t see at the time.
We may hear our younger self making a decision and understand why.
We may recognise a quality we had before we had a name for it.
We may see a pattern in the situations that have changed us.
We may notice that the thing we thought was a failure became an important turning point.
And we may realise that some of the most significant development in our working lives happened quietly.
So How Do We Know When We’ve Changed?
Perhaps we don’t always need a measure.
Sometimes the evidence is in the response.
The conversation we can now have.
The uncertainty we can now tolerate.
The mistake we can now recover from.
The responsibility we can now accept.
The boundary we can now set.
The question we can now ask.
The thing we can now let go.
Nancy hadn’t thought of herself as having undergone a significant period of Professional Development.
Then she realised that she had.
She simply hadn’t been measuring it in the usual way.
She had been measuring it through her working life.
And perhaps that is another way of recognising development:
Not only by asking what we have learned, but by noticing what we can now do, face, understand or become that we couldn’t before.
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