Hi Reader,

And suddenly it clicked into place. It took me almost half a year, more than thirty conversations, to finally land on an important nuance regarding unprofessionalism: It's more than courage, humanity, and authenticity. What really matters is the professional risk. An action only counts as unprofessional if it would trigger a "But you cannot do that!" from those around us.

When I quit my day job to move to Amsterdam and redesign my life, that was courageous. It wasn't unprofessional.

What happened a few weeks before, when I spoke up at the board meeting although the chairman explicitly told me that it was not my place to speak — that was unprofessional.

Every week I spend hours screening potential guests. I meet entrepreneurs, employees, all kinds of people who are courageous and authentic in their own way. But only a few of them are willing to talk about the moments that could have cost them their job.

What I've learned over the past months: It's easy to champion unprofessionalism in theory; in theory we all know how to become the person we want to be. But actually doing it — putting our conviction ahead of what's expected of us, in a room that's telling us not to — that's rare. And, that's who I want on the podcast: people who walked their talk.

🎤 Waiting for you on the Unprofessionalism podcast:

Most of what we call professionalism is the practice of filtering ourselves down to fit a role. The parts that don't strictly belong get left at the door — curiosity, personal opinion, the harder questions about how and why we work. So the conversations that might actually move things forward — about workaholism, about race, about what people are quietly carrying — rarely happen out loud at work.

Jamell Crouthers writes those conversations anyway. Sixty books in eight years, all under his own name, all about the topics most jobs avoid — and all of it findable by any colleague or boss who cares to look. That's the risk: not one confrontation, but a whole second self made public while he holds a full-time job.

His way through is fiction. A novel puts just enough distance between a person and a hard truth that they can recognise themselves in a character without having to defend the recognition — and sometimes that distance is the only thing that makes the conversation possible at all.

But the same self lands differently depending on the room. At the medical office, coworkers passing the break room started asking what he was writing; some bought his books; his supervisor became a listener. At his current bank job, almost nobody knows. The writing hasn't changed — the room has. Which is the question I keep returning to: unprofessionalism isn't only whether you're brave enough to bring your full self in, it's whether the room lets that self survive. So what else are we filtering out that fiction, or art, or someone's personal project might quietly bring back?

🎧 Click here to listen to the interview

📥 Download my 1-page summary

​UP_024_Summary.pdf​

That's it from my side. I hope to see you next week!

Myriam