This is one of my favorite topics because professional development is so connected and intertwined with personal growth and development. As far as your professional life, you want to learn new skills, increase your capacity in various ways, weather it be your capacity for focus, your capacity to think in more complex ways, and hold paradoxes of our fast changing world and how many things we need to hold in our consciousness.

But besides the skills and capacities in which you want to grow, professional development is also about becoming a better human being. How do I show up as a better person, as a boss, as an employee, as a team member, as a supervisor? How do I show up and be my best?

I have a client who is on the other side of the world, and they pay me a lot of money, but what they want to get really clear on is a deeper level of what it is that’s motivating them when they choose to perform certain actions, and also what are the deeper motivations of the people around them, the other partners in their firm, or the various directors that operate under them. Once they have a clear sense of what are these core, deeper human motivators, then it’s easier for them to decipher behaviors that might have been confusing in a different context. They can engage in real heart-felt dialogues about how to adjust behaviors or how to adopt certain strategies, so that we’re harnessing these human motivators, but are able to act in a way that really leads to mutually-agreeable and mutually-enjoyable outcomes.

Calling Yourself To Task

I’ll tell you one of my favorite parts of professional development, and I’ll call it this: Kick Your Own Ass. One of the reasons that I want to emphasize that is because most of us are really not all that great at “policing ourselves.” When I say, “kick your own ass,” of course I mean it compassionately. I’m not talking about you being violent towards yourself. I’m talking about you holding yourself to task, calling yourself to your highest.

It’s wonderful when we see a motivational speaker, we read an amazing book, we watch a really cool video online, and we encounter someone who inspires us, but when you act in a way in which you can inspire yourself, that’s a whole other level. I really want to challenge you and invite you to this other level of your own being in terms of how you show up in your day-to-day life. It’s a huge part of professional development.

I have someone who’s quite close to me, who has incredible skills and capacities, an incredible ability to deliver on her work, and yet, because of how she handles interpersonal communications, she’s hit certain ceilings in terms of her professional development and she’s not able to go higher. She  could, but she’s not because she hasn’t learned how to handle those interpersonal interactions.

I want you to commit yourself to learning those skills, and that’s part of calling yourself to task. Really knowing, OK, what areas am I really strong in and where are the areas where I really need some growth? It’s almost a truism to say that we’re not aware of our own blind spots.

That’s where a team, whether it’s some kind of mastermind group where we give each other peer coaching or peer mentoring, or some other kind of group where we help each other become more aware of the areas in which we can grow. That can be extremely helpful and extremely useful.

Self-Compassion and Professional Development

But we can’t only depend on other people. We want to kick our own ass. This does mean self-responsibility, but I also want you to call yourself to task with a huge dose of self-compassion. Giving yourself understanding for the places in which you fall short, and going through a period of mourning, being able to mourn the things that we did where we feel like we screwed up or we weren’t up to our par on our own standards. We need to be able to go through that without beating ourselves up, and go through self-forgiveness. And that’s a topic of much longer training than can fit in this video. Once we are able to mourn it and go through self-forgiveness, then just keep moving on.

I invite you to consider being the person that other people in your organization are going to miss when you’re not there;

to be the person who goes the extra mile;

to be the person who shows up in the best way possible.

You will be regarded as someone who is remarkable, and by that I mean, someone who is worth remarking about.

When you show up as the best person you can be in professional settings you find that more and more doors open for you.