There are some transitions in life that arrive with a clear beginning and end. Starting school. Leaving home. Retirement. Others are less obvious.
Part of our special series of articles on transitions
For me, one of the most significant transitions in my career as an educational psychologist to date hasn’t been gaining my doctorate or changing organisations. It has been the gradual move from practitioner into management and leadership roles.
At first glance, the change seemed straightforward. I had a new job title and new responsibilities. There were more meetings and what seemed like a larger sphere of influence. But, beneath the surface, something more complex was happening.
Over the years, I had developed a strong sense of who I was professionally. My training and early career experiences had shaped values that sat at the heart of my practice: a commitment to listening deeply, working collaboratively, sharing power, and creating spaces where people felt heard and understood. These weren’t simply things I did; they had become part of how I understood myself to be as a psychologist.
Then I stepped into leadership.
What I wasn’t prepared for was how often leadership would ask questions of that identity. I remember being involved in a consultation process around organisational change early in my management career. I gathered colleagues’ views carefully, using approaches that I believed genuinely encouraged participation and voice. The EPs in my team engaged thoughtfully and honestly. Yet, when the final decisions by senior leaders in the council were presented, little evidence of those contributions remained. The outcome felt largely predetermined.
I left that experience feeling unsettled. It is not that I disagreed with every aspect of the decision, but something about the process felt challenging. I found myself asking: if I value participation, authenticity and shared decision-making, what happens when the systems I work within don’t always operate in those ways? Can I remain true to those values whilst remaining in this leadership role?
Looking back, I now realise this was less a leadership challenge and more an identity challenge. Developmental psychologist Robert Kegan describes growth as a process of making visible the assumptions and beliefs that shape us. An image that comes to mind is that of a jar of water that appears clear until it is shaken. As I shake, all the sediment at the bottom of the jar rises to the surface. Things that once felt certain become clouded and harder to make sense of.
For me, moving into a leadership role shook that jar. It surfaced all the beliefs I held about authority, influence, belonging, and change and revealed tensions I hadn’t fully appreciated before. It revealed a desire in me to challenge systems to bring about meaningful change alongside wanting to belong within those organisations. I value innovation but also crave security. I want to be courageous but am aware of the personal cost that courage can bring. Over time, I have become less interested in resolving these tensions and more interested in understanding them.
One thing that has helped me do this is the presence of what Action Researcher Hilary Bradbury calls developmental friendships: trusted colleagues and friends who create space for reflection, challenge, and support. Some of my most important professional learning has happened less in formal training and more in the conversations that happen after difficult meetings, over coffee, or during walks with those developmental friends. These relationships have helped me make sense of transitions in a way that most traditional leadership courses haven’t prepared me for.
And this is what I believe professional transitions require – not simply the acquisition of new skills, but opportunities to reflect on who we are becoming.
As educational psychologists, we spend much of our time supporting children, young people, and families through periods of transition. We understand that change often involves uncertainty, loss, possibility, and growth existing side by side. Yet we can sometimes forget that these same processes apply to us.
The transition from practitioner to leader is not just about learning to manage people or budgets. It is also about renegotiating identity, values, and purpose. For me, that process remains in process. The jar still gets shaken from time to time. But I have become more comfortable with the cloudiness that follows, trusting that if I pay attention, sit with the uncertainty, and remain connected to the values that matter the most to me, something useful usually settles into view.
These reflections are explored in greater depth in a recent book chapter I’ve written on professional identity, self-enquiry and career transitions (see Radical Retirement). I suspect, however, that the questions at its heart are ones many of us continue to revisit throughout our professional lives:
- Who am I becoming?
- What values am I carrying forward?
- What parts of myself do I want to take with me into whatever comes next?
