Donna Frost

Facilitation of the development of professional artistry 219 7 “Looking back I felt very nervous asking patients about how they had experienced my care. And at the same time I thought, ‘what are they going to say?’ I mean, they are unlikely to give bad feedback to me or my colleague. So is it even useful? And then when patients said that they liked that I listened to them, and paid attention, I thought, of course, obviously that is fine. Everybody likes to be heard and to have attention paid. What is even useful about this kind of feedback? But then I had a kind of lightbulb moment. I took it for granted because that is how I see my work, but the patient didn’t take it for granted because he saw a lot of health care professionals and didn’t always feel seen and heard by them. Or, in any case, he did feel seen and heard by me and even though that sounds very basic it was also very powerful.” (Rosemarie-Post-Mtg 20151028 -p 21 )] Examining and exploring our practice honestly and listening to the feedback of others helped us identify moments of professional artistry, or the potential for professional artistry, in both ordinary everyday practice and alsowithin extraordinary practice moments. Considering and coming to understand our practice in this way was quite confronting, even though we were often focused on aspects of practice that were going well. Firstly, examining the beautiful moments of our practice also made the less successful moments and the chances we had missed more obvious. And secondly, as we became more aware of the ways in which we actively contributed to the creation of and demonstration of professional artistry within our practice, our sense of responsibility to be consistently practising in these ways increased (see for example Figure 7 . 3 ).