Professionalism is very subjective thing to describe; however in simple term - Autograph our work with excellence. Whatever we do, we should do with passion, eagerness, completeness and accountability because every job is a self-portrait of the person who does it.

Many of us have normal tendency “we are doing our job and we are professional” – it’s purely our perception because we never retrospect - what are we doing, how we are doing or what are the expectation. There is a thin line difference between professional and unprofessional. For example: A professional learns every aspect of the job; whereas an unprofessional skips the learning process whenever possible. Similarly a professional discovers what is needed and wanted but an unprofessional assumes what others need and want.

As per my knowledge maturity plays a big role in many different aspects of life – whether personal or professional. When it comes to our working life, we need to be emotionally mature and able to act professionally in every situation so that we can be viewed in this light by our leaders. If we act like an immature way, management will see us that way, and treat us accordingly. Many of us are happy with the way we behave, work and responsibilities; however we expect to grow vertically –we never bother to look on us : Are we emotionally mature? Are we self-sufficient? Are we proactive? Are we self driven and motivated person? Are we professional? The day we try to find those answers and do a retrospective – we will have because it’s we who knows better than anyone else. Unless we want to sit at the same desk for the rest of our life without any chance of promotion, we need to buck up, grow up, and prove that we are emotionally mature enough to handle moving up in the company to a better position.

We should keep in mind that emotional maturity isn’t all about behaving and acting professional. It’s also about controlling our anger and our personal feelings when something is work related, because we don’t want to get the two confused. We might have a disagreement, but that doesn’t mean that we can get angry, stop talking - need to let it go, relax and focus on the task at hand, which is our work.

Most often we blame company, person and culture – when our aspiration does not meet with reality; However if we need a professional job, we need to have professional attitude to work in. Most difficult thing is to deal with people who are unprofessional - it’s really stressful. It can’t be avoided - but we shouldn’t waste our time trying to deal with them or even paying attention to them. Instead, we should just let them go and try to do our job the best that we can.

The first step to making ourselves a professional is to decide we professional.