Donna Frost

Facilitation of the development of professional artistry 217 7 Perspective transformations on the road to developing professional artistry: three milestones Recognising the professional artistry and the potential for it in our own practice The first milestone on the journey towards developing professional artistry was being able to look at, understand and value our practice in a particularway. Whether the focus of our work was facilitation of others’ learning, staff nursing or working as a nurse practitioner, there came a moment when we connected our ability to make a difference in our work to the idea of professional artistry. Coming to see, accept and take responsibility for our own practice as somewhere where magic sometimes happens, or could happen was a transformation in perspective and it laid the groundwork for recognizing, capturing, unpicking and developing this kind of practice further. To reach this milestone, and the ones thereafter, meant learning to look at practice honestly, to take our blinkers off about what we ‘should’ be doing as professionals and to dare to perceive, describe and experience what we were actually doing as professionals. As well, to honestly perceive and experience, where possible, what our practice set in motion: to look at the impact of our practice on self and others. Developing the capacity to consider practice in this way and to help each other do so was an ongoing process which took and takes time. At the same time, engaging in the process was almost immediately enlightening, confronting, thrilling and useful. This is illustrated in the poem below, constructed from words and phrases used in the evaluations of the first two RNI CCCI meetings, and Figure 7 . 2 , showing two of the pictures used as part of the evaluations and the words uttered thereby.