mylifeinrambles.blog

I have been thinking about the word professionalism, and how much work it has been asked to do, and how much of that work I am no longer sure it should be doing (I’m a words person).

Let me be clear and careful about what I am talking about from the start. There is a version of professionalism that is genuinely valuable, and I do not want the argument that follows to be mistaken for an attack on it. Being professional, in the substantive sense, means showing up when you said you would. It means keeping the confidences that were entrusted to you. It means practicing within the scope of what you actually know how to do. It means not bringing your bad day into the room with the person who needs your attention. It means holding yourself to standards of competence, care, and honesty that other people can rely on.

None of that is what I want to talk about today. That part is fine. That part is, in fact, essential.

What I want to talk about is the other version of professionalism. The costume version. The performed one. The layer of studied distance and careful language and pleasant blankness that has come to sit on top of the real practice like a second, ill-fitting skin. That version has become confused with the substantive one, and the confusion is doing damage across nearly every field where humans are supposed to be helping other humans.

The costume version looks like this.

It sounds like the polished voice that comes out of somebody’s mouth when they are delivering hard information. Not the honest voice — the professional voice. Slightly softened. Slightly rehearsed. Slightly at a distance from the person hearing it. As though the information is being read from a card that was written in a different room by somebody who does not know either of you.

It looks like the wall of qualifying language that surrounds every real answer with three hedging phrases, so that no actual claim gets made and no actual position gets taken. Nothing gets said, exactly, but the appearance of authoritative speech is preserved.

It looks like the careful avoidance of the plain truth. The person in front of you asks a hard question. You give a technically-correct but functionally-useless answer, one that dances around what everyone in the room actually needs to know. Because saying the thing plainly would feel unprofessional, which has come to mean human.

It looks like eye contact traded for screen contact. The professional is present in the room but is not, in any meaningful sense, present with the person in the room. There is a screen between them, and even when there isn’t, there is the memory of a screen. A learned distance. A trained not-quite-looking.

It sounds like the tone that quietly implies the person delivering the service is somehow above the person receiving it. Not consciously. Not deliberately. But structurally — through language, through posture, through the careful maintenance of a small emotional distance that says I am the one who knows things and you are the one who does not.

It looks like a mask. However well-tailored, however well-intentioned. A mask. And once you notice it, you start seeing it everywhere.

And then, of course, there are the actual clothes.

Because we should be honest about this too. Professional attire has become, in most fields, part of the costume. Not because it has to be — some clothing genuinely serves a function. Scrubs in a hospital, a hard hat on a construction site, a chef’s coat in a kitchen. These signal this is the person to ask, and they protect the wearer from real physical hazards, and they are worn for reasons that make sense.

But most professional attire is not that. Most professional attire is a suit. Or a specific style of blazer. Or a particular pair of shoes. Or a color palette that never dips below a certain register of formality. And what it signals is not this is the person to ask. What it signals is this is the person who has earned the right to be taken seriously.

Which is a completely different claim. And, quietly, a false one.

The person in the suit is not automatically better at their job than the person in jeans. The person in the well-cut blazer is not automatically more compassionate than the person in a soft cardigan. The person who dresses “professionally” is not automatically doing more professional work than the person who dresses however they dress. The clothes have taken on a weight they were never supposed to carry, and we treat them as though they are evidence of competence when they are, at best, evidence of adherence to a dress code.

What the clothes actually are, if we are being honest, is armor.

They are the outermost layer of the costume, and they do the same job every other layer of the costume does. They put a barrier between the professional and the person the professional is supposed to be helping. They signal hold yourself at this distance from me. They give the wearer somewhere to hide, the same way the tone gives them somewhere to hide, the same way the polished language gives them somewhere to hide.

And notably, the armor does not protect the person receiving the service. It protects the person providing it. It shields the professional from being seen as a fellow human being. It gives them a uniform to become, so that the person underneath does not have to be present in the room.

None of this is a critique of anyone who chooses to dress a certain way for work. People wear what makes them feel prepared, or focused, or capable of doing hard things. That’s fair. What I am critiquing is the cultural assumption that the clothing is the professionalism — that showing up in the right suit is somehow evidence that you are trustworthy, and showing up in jeans is somehow evidence that you are not. That assumption is false. It has always been false. And it lets a lot of costume wearers pass as competent while a lot of substantively competent people get dismissed for not signaling correctly.

Here is the trouble with the whole costume, clothes included.

The costume was originally designed to serve a real purpose. It was meant to help professionals hold appropriate boundaries. It was meant to give the people they served confidence in their competence. It was meant to protect both parties from the messiness that arises when human beings bring their full selves into charged encounters.

But somewhere along the way, the costume stopped being a tool and started being an identity. Professionals stopped putting the costume on for specific purposes and started wearing it all the time. And then the costume, worn constantly, started shaping what could and couldn’t happen in the room.

A costume worn full-time is a mask. And a mask, however well-intentioned, blocks two things that no professional relationship can function without: honest communication and genuine human contact.

Honest communication first.

If the costume requires that difficult things be delivered in soft, hedged, layered language, then the person on the other end often walks away without actually knowing what they were told. The information was technically transmitted. They technically heard it. But the language was so professionally cushioned that the reality of it did not land. And people make decisions based on what lands, not on what was technically said.

A professional who is being professional about a serious situation may deliver, over the course of an entire meeting or appointment, exactly zero sentences that the other person will remember clearly the next morning. That is not competence. That is the opposite. Competence includes being understood. Being understood sometimes requires plain language, direct sentences, and the emotional openness to look somebody in the eye and tell them the truth about the thing that is currently affecting their life.

The costume prevents that. It defaults to careful. Careful is not always what the other person needs.

And then there is the human contact piece.

Every professional relationship is, at its core, one person letting another person help them with something they cannot handle alone. Sometimes the something is medical. Sometimes it is legal. Sometimes it is financial. Sometimes it is emotional. Sometimes it is educational. Sometimes it is technical. The specifics vary. The underlying structure does not. Somebody is asking. Somebody is helping. There is a vulnerability inherent in asking, and a delicate responsibility inherent in helping.

When the person helping hides behind the costume — behind the polished voice, the practiced calm, the maintained distance, the carefully chosen outfit — the person asking can feel it. They may not name it. But they feel it.

What they feel is that the person across from them is not fully there. That there is a wall. That the person they are speaking to has decided, for professional reasons, to hold themselves at a certain distance from the person in front of them. And no matter how skilled the technical work is, that distance changes what is possible in the interaction.

It makes it harder to admit you did not understand what was just said.

It makes it harder to ask the question you were embarrassed to ask.

It makes it harder to admit that you did not follow through on what you said you would do.

It makes it harder to say that you are scared, or overwhelmed, or unsure.

The costume creates a room in which only the sanitized version of the person is invited to appear. And then, when the sanitized version does not match the actual situation the person is in, the help misses its target. And nobody quite knows why.

Here is the distinction I keep coming back to.

Ethical practice is what it sounds like. Doing the thing you were hired or trained to do, competently, honestly, within your scope, in the interest of the person you’re serving. Keeping the trust they placed in you. Being straight with them about what you know and what you don’t. Holding the weight of the situation without dumping it back onto the person you’re supposed to be helping.

The costume is a set of behaviors — and, yes, a set of clothes — that developed around ethical practice, as a way to signal it. But signaling is not the same as substance. And when the signaling drifts far enough from the substance, it starts to actively work against the very thing it was originally there to support.

You can have a competent, deeply ethical professional who does not wear the full costume. Who looks the person in the eye. Who uses plain language. Who admits when they are not sure. Who shares a small human moment when the situation calls for it. Who tells the truth even when the truth is uncomfortable. Who wears what they need to wear for the actual work rather than the outfit that most convincingly performs the concept of professional. This person is more trustworthy in the substantive sense, not less — because they are actually doing the job of communicating, connecting, and helping, rather than performing a version of it.

And you can have a professional who wears the costume perfectly — the voice, the distance, the perfect suit — and yet delivers work that is functionally worse, because the costume prevents them from ever fully arriving in the room with the person they are supposed to be helping.

What would it look like to take the costume off?

It would look like using words the other person can actually understand, without apology and without dumbing down. It would look like eye contact instead of screen contact. It would look like the truth, delivered in a tone that is warm without being softened into mush. It would look like the ability to say I don’t know out loud, in front of somebody, without shame. It would look like sitting with hard emotions in the room — the other person’s, and occasionally your own — rather than professionalism-ing them into a corner. It would look like wearing what actually helps you do the work, rather than what most convincingly signals that you are the kind of person who does the work.

It would look like the same person who currently exists in the field, minus the layers of distance that they were told, somewhere along the way, were required in order to be taken seriously.

It turns out you can be taken seriously and be a human being at the same time. The costume was not actually required. It was a habit, dressed as a rule.

One final thought.

None of this is a call for professionals to become less rigorous, or less careful, or less thoughtful about how they show up. It is a call to recognize that rigor and warmth are not opposites, and that the costume many of us were taught to wear — from the voice to the language to the clothes — was doing something specific. And the specific thing it was doing was not always what the people we serve needed.

The person in front of you deserves to understand what is going on. They deserve to be spoken to like a whole human being. They deserve to leave the room knowing what they were told, understanding what it means, and feeling that another human being was actually present with them during a moment that mattered.

The costume can come off. Underneath it, the ethical practice is still there. It has been there the whole time. It is what people came to see in the first place.