There’s a prevalent understanding in the world that the very definition of ‘professional’ is a kind of machine-like activity - efficient, rule based, predictable, rational but unfeeling. Even when it’s not talked about we see it shaping our participation in organisations of all kinds - businesses, schools, health-care. And beyond work it shapes our entire orientation to life.

But what if we started to notice the deadening qualities of this way and started to attend to a life-giving alternative: professionalism as a kind of deep care and sensitivity, to one another, to wisdom, to life itself?

This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about all of this, hosted as always by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

This is Turning Towards Life, a weekly live 30 minute conversation hosted by Thirdspace in which Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn dive deep into big questions of human living. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google and Spotify.

You can find out more about our Professional Coaching Course, which we talk a little about in this episode, on the Thirdspace website here.

Here's our source for this week:

The Professionalism That Will Kill Us All

by Charles Davies (www.howtobeclear.com)

“The professionalism that requires us to be unmoved by what we meet through the day is a professionalism that will kill us all.”

About fifteen years ago I started regularly going to Denmark to teach at the Kaospilots, a school of creative and social entrepreneurship. What I loved about the school was that, rather than teaching people to be ‘businesspeople’, they asked: What do you need to learn to live and work well in an unpredictable world? And so the students learned how to listen to each other. And how to listen to themselves. How to see what is happening and see what is needed — and feel able to respond. How to stand for something. They were learning how to be sensitive. How to be sensitive at work...

The insensitivity required to be part of the system is unsustainable. Without sensitivity to life as a whole, everything starts to die...

[So] how can we do the work we need to do in a way that increases rather than blocks our sensitivity? What does professionalism look like when it is something you feel your way through, moment by moment? When it requires vulnerability and uncertainty? When being more professional means being more human? Kinder, wiser, more generous, more forgiving, more loving. And — not doing these things for their own sake, not doing these things because they’re nice, but doing them because that’s what works. Because, if we go to work and we‘re on autopilot, then everything starts to die.

Photo by Davide Cantelli on Unsplash

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