Then I realised I needed to stop and look at what I was already doing
Professional Development: I Thought It Meant Moving Forward, Briony had always thought of professional development as something that happened next.
The next challenge that would stretch her.
The next project.
The next responsibility.
The next role.
She had never been particularly interested in standing still. Even when things were going well, she was usually thinking about what came afterwards.
The Course
So when she saw an opportunity to attend a Strategic Leadership for Project Managers course, she asked her manager if she could go.
“I think it would be useful,” she said.
Her manager looked at the course outline.
“What are you hoping to get from it?”
Briony looked again at the list of topics.
“I suppose I want to develop my leadership skills.”
“What makes you think that’s what you need?”
Briony hesitated.
She wasn’t sure.
She had become very good at managing projects. She could bring people together, deal with competing priorities, spot problems before they became crises and keep things moving when circumstances changed.
But she had learned most of that by doing the work.
Perhaps that was why the course appealed to her. It offered something she hadn’t really had before: the chance to step outside the work and learn in a more structured way.
Her manager nodded.
“That makes sense. But before I sign off on this, perhaps spend some time thinking about what you have already learned from all those projects.”
Briony wasn’t quite sure what that meant.
What The Work Had Taught Her
Briony decided to find out.
She went back through some of the projects she had managed over the previous few years.
Not to assess whether they had been successful.
Not to update her CV.
She wanted to remember what had actually happened.
She started with a project that had gone particularly well.
At the time, she had been pleased with the outcome. But looking back, she noticed something she hadn’t recognised then.
She had spent less time trying to have all the answers herself.
Instead, she had become better at bringing the right people into the conversation.
Then she looked at a project that had been much harder.
There had been conflicting priorities, frustrated stakeholders and a point when she had been tempted to push ahead simply to get things moving again.
She hadn’t.
She had stopped and listened.
That had taken longer.
But it had prevented a bigger problem later.
Then there was a project where she had got something wrong.
She had assumed she understood what a particular stakeholder needed. She hadn’t.
She had learned to ask before assuming.
None of these lessons had come from a course.
They had come from doing the work.
And, more importantly, from paying attention to what the work had taught her.
Experience Is Not The Same As Learning
This distinction began to interest Briony.
She had always thought of experience as something she accumulated.
Years in a role.
Projects completed.
Problems solved.
Responsibilities taken on.
But experience, she realised, was only the starting point.
What mattered was what happened to her because of that experience.
Had she changed?
Had her judgement changed?
Did she approach the same situation differently now?
Was there something she understood now that she hadn’t understood before?
The answer was often yes.
She had simply never thought of those changes as professional development.
They felt too ordinary.
They were part of the job.
Yet they were changing how she did the job.
What Had Changed?
Briony went back to her notes and asked herself a few simple questions.
What did I notice?
I noticed that I could recognise patterns much earlier than I once could. I was often aware that something was going wrong before anyone had said so.
What did I do?
I no longer automatically stepped in to solve the problem herself. Increasingly, I created the conditions for other people to solve it.
Why did I do it that way?
Because experience had taught me that being the person with the answer wasn’t always the same as being the person who moved the work forward.
What happened because of it?
People took more ownership. Conversations became more honest. Problems were sometimes raised earlier, when they were still possible to address.
What Do I Do Differently Now?
I no longer spend so much time proving that I can handle something. Instead, I ask what the situation actually needs — and what I can contribute without automatically taking responsibility for everything.
And then she came to the question that mattered most.
What does this tell me about what I have learned?
That I had developed more than project-management skills.
I had developed judgement.
Patience.
Awareness.
The ability to listen before acting.
And a better understanding of when my own intervention was useful — and when it wasn’t.
We Notice What We Know When We Look Back
Briony had assumed that professional development happened while she was learning something new.
Now she was beginning to see that it could also happen when she became different at something she already knew how to do.
She hadn’t learned how to manage complexity from a single course.
She had learned through difficult conversations, changing circumstances, mistakes, successes and repeated experience.
She had learned by noticing what worked.
And by noticing what didn’t.
This mattered because some of the things she had become good at no longer felt like skills.
They felt like instinct.
But perhaps instinct was sometimes experience that had become embedded.
The ability to sense when a project was drifting.
The ability to tell when someone wasn’t saying what they really meant.
The ability to know when to push and when to wait.
These weren’t things she had consciously set out to learn.
But they had become part of how she worked.
We Tend To Count What Is Easy To Count
Briony could have easily demonstrated her development through the things that appeared on paper.
Projects completed.
Responsibilities added.
Targets achieved.
New systems introduced.
Those things mattered.
But they didn’t tell the whole story.
They couldn’t show how she had changed the way she listened.
Or how she had become more comfortable with uncertainty.
Or how she had learned that asking a better question could sometimes be more useful than providing a faster answer.
These changes were harder to measure.
But they were affecting the quality of her work.
And perhaps that was why they were so easy to overlook.
The Conversation Changed
A few weeks later, Briony went back to her manager.
She had done what she had been asked.
She had looked back at the projects she had managed, the decisions she had made, the problems she had encountered and the ways she had responded.
What she brought back wasn’t a list of skills she needed to acquire.
It was a much clearer understanding of what she had already learned.
She talked about how her judgement had changed.
How she had become better at listening before acting.
How she had learned that taking responsibility didn’t always mean taking control.
And how some of the things she had once found difficult had gradually become strengths.
Her manager listened.
“So, do you still want to do the course?”
“Yes,” Briony said.
“But for a different reason.”
She no longer saw it as something that would give her the leadership skills she was missing.
She saw it as an opportunity to build on what she had already learned through experience — and to explore the areas she now knew she wanted to understand more deeply.
Her manager smiled.
“Then I think we can sign it off.”
Briony left the conversation thinking about how easily she could have gone into the course believing she needed to become someone different.
Instead, she was going into it with a much better understanding of who she had already become.
Building On What We Already Know
Briony still wanted to do the course.
She still wanted to learn.
But she no longer saw learning as something that had to begin with identifying what was missing.
She had begun to understand that she could learn from what she already knew.
The projects she had worked on had given her more than experience. They had changed how she listened, how she judged, how she responded to uncertainty and how she worked with other people.
The course could build on that.
It could give her new ideas, challenge some of her assumptions and help her put language around things she had learned through experience.
But she would no longer be going into it thinking that the learning started there.
Professional development is often presented as a route from one place to another.
Learn something.
Apply it.
Progress.
Move on.
But working life is rarely that straightforward.
We learn while doing.
We change through experience.
We develop judgement without necessarily naming it.
And sometimes the most useful thing we can do is stop long enough to notice.
Briony had started by thinking:
What do I need to learn?
She was now asking a different question:
What have I already learned — and where could that take me next?
Perhaps professional development isn’t always about finding what is missing.
Sometimes it begins with recognising what is already there.
What have you already learned through your working life that you might not yet recognise as professional development?
Connect and Continue
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