I was in a meeting recently where we were talking about how to improve something.

It was the kind of conversation I have been part of hundreds of times. Smart people around a table, trying to make something better. We talked about what was working, what was difficult, and what might need to change.

At some point, I realized I was listening differently than I might have a few years ago.

I wondered what we had learned to see as the problem in the first place.

Whose experience were we organizing the conversation around? Which assumptions had become so familiar that we were no longer naming them? What might become visible if we looked at the same situation differently?

I've been thinking about that moment because I suspect one of the quieter ways we change over a professional life is that we learn to see our work differently.

Early in my career as a pharmacist, I was trained to notice symptoms, laboratory values, and diagnoses to identify drug-related problems and optimize medication therapy. Education taught me to notice learners and learning. Leadership made organizations, incentives and the conditions surrounding people's work more visible to me. Research gave me language for patterns I had sensed but couldn't always name. Coaching has changed how I listen.

I carry all of those ways of seeing now.

Our professions and organizations teach us where to direct our attention. Over time, we learn which problems deserve attention, which questions are reasonable, whose expertise carries weight, and which explanations make sense within the worlds we inhabit.

Experience can also change that gaze.

We begin to see patterns where we once saw isolated events. A recurring problem starts to raise questions about the conditions producing it. We notice assumptions hiding inside ordinary language. We become curious about why some possibilities are easy to imagine while others rarely enter the conversation.

The environment may be familiar. What we can see within it has changed.

I think this is one reason professional growth can be difficult to recognize. We tend to look for visible evidence: a new title, a promotion, another credential, a different role.

Some of our most meaningful development appears in our attention.

We ask different questions. We become curious about things we once accepted. We see connections that weren't visible to us before.

Last week, I wrote about what we carry with us into a (school) new year.

Perhaps we also carry new ways of seeing.

And sometimes we recognize how much we have changed by noticing what we can see now that we couldn't see before.

Reflection

What do you notice in your work now that you might not have noticed five years ago?