What Is Professional?

We tend to think we know what it means to be professional.

Competence. Reliability. Experience. Knowing what to say, when to say it, how to behave. Delivering the work. Meeting the deadline. Keeping your composure.

But I have begun to think professionalism is something much deeper.

Because sooner or later, if you build something of your own, the work stops asking only what you can do.

It starts asking who you are.

The Things We Carry

Problems have a strange ability to survive.

So does trauma.

It changes size, shape and intensity. It becomes opaque. It goes quiet. It gets louder. It disappears for years and then emerges in a completely different part of our lives.

Sometimes it can behave almost like a parasite. Something with its own instinct for survival.

And there is something strangely liberating in that metaphor.

Because if something is not the totality of who we are, if it is something we are carrying, then perhaps it is also something we can eventually put down.

We do not leave these things at the door when we start a business.

We bring ourselves with us.

All of ourselves.

And entrepreneurship has an extraordinary ability to find the parts we thought we had hidden.

Business Pushes Buttons You Didn't Know You Had

Start a business and eventually you will meet yourself.

Not the carefully constructed version.

The other one.

The person who has to make decisions without knowing the outcome. The person who has to put a price on their own value. The person who hears no. Who gets ignored. Who succeeds unexpectedly. Who makes mistakes. Who has to ask for money. Who has to trust another person. Who has to be trusted.

You meet your relationship with failure.

Your relationship with success.

Your relationship with money, authority, responsibility, rejection, uncertainty, control and self-worth.

Entrepreneurship pushes buttons you didn't know you had.

Things that remained dormant suddenly have somewhere to appear.

An unanswered email can become rejection.

A difficult client can awaken an old relationship with authority.

Financial uncertainty can uncover fears about security.

Success itself can reveal an unexpected fear of being seen.

These reactions belong to the business.

But they also belong to us.

And if we are paying attention, they are telling us something.

The Business Becomes a Mirror

Running Visual Oasis has asked many things of me.

It has demanded greater clarity of thought. Better communication. More discipline. More patience. More confidence. More humility.

It has required professionalism, certainly.

But it has also required awareness.

Awareness of my strengths and weaknesses.

Awareness of when I am responding to what is actually happening and when I am responding to something much older.

Awareness of ego.

Fear.

Expectation.

Frustration.

Attachment.

Awareness of the human condition. 

And the curious thing is, the more I come to understand these things within myself, the better I have become at recognising them in other people.

That matters enormously when your work is about understanding people.

Because behind every company are human beings.

Behind every brief, decision, disagreement, ambition and vision is a person carrying a lifetime of experiences into the room.

Just like me.

Entrepreneurship as Practice

Perhaps this is one of the most overlooked possibilities of entrepreneurship.

It can be therapeutic.

Not therapy. There is an important distinction.

But therapeutic in the sense that it repeatedly presents us with opportunities to encounter ourselves and choose differently.

Instead of avoiding uncertainty, we learn to operate within it.

Instead of allowing rejection to define us, we learn from it.

Instead of hiding weaknesses, we develop them.

Instead of automatically reacting to old patterns, we begin to recognise them.

Thought becomes action.

Understanding becomes practice.

The abstract work of personal development suddenly has consequences.

You cannot simply believe you are patient when someone is testing your patience.

You cannot simply believe you are courageous when your livelihood requires a difficult decision.

You cannot simply believe you know your worth when someone is asking you to defend it.

Life asks for evidence.

Business does too.

And evidence compounds. The more you are the person you need to be. The person you claim to be. The more reality changes to acknowledge that. And it all starts with you. 

In doing so, you get to authentically meet that person.  

Growth Changes the Person Doing the Growing

The more you grow, the more capable you become.

The more capable you become, the more you can hold.

Greater responsibility.

Greater complexity.

Greater uncertainty.

Greater opportunity.

But something else happens too.

You become more aware.

And perhaps this is where entrepreneurship moves beyond intellectual or financial development and becomes something closer to spiritual development.

Not necessarily spiritual in an esoteric sense. 

But simply:

Who am I becoming through the things I choose to do?

That question changes the meaning of success.

Clients matter.

Growth matters.

Revenue matters.

Profit matters.

A business has to survive and prosper.

But there is another balance sheet quietly accumulating alongside the financial one.

Who did you have to become to build this?

What did you learn?

What did you overcome?

What did you finally recognise in yourself?

What did you put down?

And what are you now capable of carrying?

A Microcosm of Life

Running a business is a microcosm of life itself.

There are periods of expansion and contraction. Confidence and doubt. Loss and opportunity. Fear and excitement. Control and surrender.

There are people who walk beside you for years and others who appear briefly but change the direction of everything.

There are plans that work.

Plans that collapse.

Doors that close.

Doors that open. 

Doors you never knew existed.

And through all of it, there is you.

The business becomes a reflection of who you are and how willing you are to change.

To grow.

To face what is uncomfortable.

To recognise what is good.

To acknowledge what is not.

To embrace the challenge rather than continually trying to escape it.

Visual Oasis has made me better.

Clearer.

More capable.

More aware of myself and, consequently, more able to understand and serve others.

It has allowed me to experience more of life because it has required more of me in return.

Perhaps that brings me back to the original question.

What is professional?

Maybe professionalism isn't the ability to separate the human being from the work.

Maybe it is the opposite.

It is knowing yourself well enough that you can bring the whole human being to the work, without allowing the unconscious parts of you to take control of it.

To recognise fear without being governed by it.

To recognise ego without having to obey it.

To recognise weakness without hiding from it.

To recognise strength without needing to prove it.

To keep learning.

To keep becoming.

And to use what you build in the world as an opportunity to build something within yourself.

Maybe the greatest thing we build through entrepreneurship isn't the business at all.

Maybe it is the person capable of building it.

VO