One of the things I have been noticing lately is that change is rarely experienced by one person at a time.

We can feel ourselves changing long before the people around us experience us differently. That gap has become increasingly interesting to me because I think it explains why so many transitions feel more difficult than we expect.

As a pharmacist, I have watched our profession change dramatically over the past two decades. Pharmacists have taken on expanded clinical roles, developed new expertise, and become increasingly involved in direct patient care. None of that happened overnight. More importantly, the knowledge and capability did not suddenly appear when legislation changed. Much of it had been developing for years.

What took longer was recognition.

Patients had to experience pharmacists differently. Physicians had to work alongside pharmacists in new ways. Organizations had to redesign roles that reflected a broader understanding of what pharmacists could contribute.

Professional identity changed.

The relationships surrounding that identity changed more slowly.

I have noticed something similar in my own life. Over the past few years, coaching has become an increasingly important part of my work alongside my academic career. Yet when people introduce me, they will often describe me as an educator, a pharmacist, or an Associate Dean.

They're right.

They just are not telling the whole story.

That has never felt frustrating to me. If anything, it has made me more curious about how identity actually works.

We often think of identity as something we carry within us, but identity also lives in relationships. The people around us come to know us through repeated experiences. They build an understanding of who we are over months and years, and those understandings do not shift simply because we have.

Relationships have memories.

Perhaps more importantly, relationships change at the speed of experience.

We don't become recognizable to other people because we announce that we have changed. We become recognizable because they begin to experience us differently. One conversation rarely changes that. Dozens of conversations might.

I think this is one of the reasons becoming can feel lonely.

We may know that something has shifted within us while the people around us are still responding to an earlier version of who we were. It is tempting to interpret that delay as evidence that our growth is not real or that we have somehow failed to communicate it well enough.

I have come to think something else is happening.

Recognition often lags behind change.

We cannot rush that process because relationships are built through experience. Every conversation, every interaction, every shared piece of work becomes another opportunity for people to know us differently than they did before.

Eventually, the conversations begin to change. The introductions become different. People start asking different questions because they have come to know a different version of you. None of it happens all at once, but one day you realize that the relationship has quietly caught up with the person you had already become.

Perhaps that is one more quiet lesson about becoming. Changing ourselves is only part of the journey. Living that change long enough for other people to experience it is part of the work too.

Reflection Prompt

Where in your life are you hoping people will see a new version of you? What might change if you gave those relationships a little more time to catch up?