Developing Competence and Trust: Maintaining the Heart of a Profession

The task of a profession is to sustain a set of life’s essential principles alive in society’s thinking. At its core, this is not a contract – a service offered for money – it is a covenant with Life itself. It involves fundamental insights about Life that go beyond self-centredness and requires significant maturity and competence in those who dedicate their lives to embodying those principles. It also requires mature and empathic custodianship by society of those entrusted by society to carry the responsibility of that profession. Ultimately, if the principles of Life are not understood, valued and sustained for their own sake, civilisation dies. The professions as they are currently structured are craft based, having their origins in the protest-ant ethic that created the industrial revolution and gave civilisation its current form. The master/apprentice form of teaching, of passing on understanding about Life from someone who knows to someone who doesn’t, by demonstration and one-to-one guidance, remains the model for the transmission of professional understanding. The Professional Covenant At the heart of every profession is a covenant. One puts oneself at risk to embody a principle for society. This requires a certain maturity of the professional person, because one cannot embody a principle simply because one wishes to do so. Professionals put the principles first because they can. They are self-secure and can thus put themselves aside so that what is visible in their responses, decisions and actions are the principles at work. In a different way of phrasing it, they work at making themselves transparent and able to hold a focus. They work to be able to recognise and interpret needs and they work to understand (literally stand under the influence of) the principles, so that when the need calls, the principle responds and the light shines through. The analogy is the analogy of a lens and it is a precise analogy. The analogy carries some particular messages. Firstly it treats the principles not as passive ideas but as active initiators of creative change – not only as active participants in a transformation process but the controlling participants in a transformation process, and indeed the necessary controlling participants in the transformation process. This then makes it clear that the role of the lens (the professional person who is acting as the transmitter of the influence of the principles) is as a servant of those principles, and like a faithful servant their task is to be a clean lens and a responsive lens and transmit clearly the illumination that comes from the principles.