​Aree Bly is an alignment coach for analytical minds, having spent much of her career as a health insurance consulting actuary in the United States. She has a great love for the outdoors – spending time in nature, and she lived for a few years in Brazil! These days, Aree is a regular podcast guest and speaker (including a TEDx talk in New York City, where she spoke about resetting in a new direction). She helps individuals and teams to identify and navigate their values, strengths and skills to create the success they really desire. In this article, ‘alignment ally’ Aree describes her ‘alignment landscape’ model, drawing on her own analytical experiences: 

"I have both said and heard 'I am too analytical to fully follow the voice within'. Sometimes it comes out as 'I am too analytical to clearly hear the voice within'. In either case, there is another way to navigate into and through a successful career. One in which the success you create is also sustainable. 

Navigating your own career and the challenges that you meet along the way implies that there is a map that you can follow. That map is called your alignment landscape. 

Alignment, Learning, Proficiency & more
You operate best and contribute most effectively when your work is aligned with both your current skills and your values. In your alignment zone, with everything falling into place, you can perform every time.

When you know that you have the skills and talents at hand to tackle an upcoming project or solve the problem that a client is facing, you can approach the job confidently. All you need to do is reach into your toolbox and - voila - a hammer in hand ready for the nail. You don’t even need to think about it. The skills are there, honed and ready to be used. Read more to continue exploring the features of the alignment landscape with me, including this map’s particular orientation and contours.

Like me, a number of our mentors have benefited from rotation programmes during their careers i.e. changing roles every few years. And, the main purpose behind these changes is broader development as a professional, including building new skills from fresh experiences. In my own career, I’ve moved roles both within companies and outside, including shifting countries and responsibilities for different experiences, especially as learning something new greatly appeals to me – I find it a fantastic way to ride the learning curve.

Read more on my career experiences (as an example of rotation) in this next article, which concludes with suggestions on how to create your own growth opportunities by rotating during your career. It follows on from the first rotation-themed article which concentrated on the corporate and managerial perspectives.

As professionals, it’s important that we don’t see obtaining our professional qualifications as the end of our development journey, especially as we are still likely to have many decades of work ahead of us after obtaining the letters after our names. Because of this, our professions strongly emphasise that we continue developing beyond qualification, with increasing encouragement for learning over our lifetimes (‘lifelong learning’). A critical component of effective learning is identifying the goals of your desired development, which offer a reference point to compare your introspection, action and progress against.

As we race towards the end of the year, the time for performance appraisals is rapidly approaching again. They offer us the opportunity to reflect on our performance and development, as well as consider what we’d like to do differently in future. In this vein, this article explores the value of professional reflection, drawing from approaches followed across a number of professions. It considers Continuing Professional Development (CPD) and possible activities, and the shift from rules to principles and the increased flexibility for and responsibility on professionals to manage their professional development. Read more to explore different models of ‘reflective practice’, possible drawbacks, and practical frameworks to use for reflecting in a CPD context.

Our follow-on article on the topic of professional reflection ("Getting Value from Reflective Practice Discussions") then delves into feedback and discussion with others about our development, including examples of possible questions in a reflective practice discussion (or diffraction discussion, as at least one professional body calls it).