Evaluating the Differences Between Professional and Personal Identities

Professional and Personal Identities
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Professional and Personal Identities
Based on the National League for Nursing (NLN), the professional identity reflects an individual’s core values reflected in one’s profession, career development, and experience. In other words, it is highly influenced by the values, norms, and characteristics of the profession, which make an individual act accordingly. In contrast, personal identity entails how a person perceives herself or himself, which evolves in the course of one’s life. Professionalism refers to an individual’s set of behaviors, relationships, and values that help one to be trusted by others. Integrity involves being honest, meeting one’s promise, and adhering to the principles of professionalism consistently even when it’s challenging. Integrity, professional, and personal identities significantly influence a person’s professionalism and integrity, which determines the path of one’s career development.
Differences Between Personal and Professional Identities and How The Christian Worldview Influences Them
Identities refer to individuals’ meanings about who they are and what it means to be themselves. In particular, professional identity comprises the values, beliefs, attitudes, skills, and knowledge that are shared by people in a specific profession (Matthews, Bialocerkowski, & Molineux, 2019). For example, through the principle of beneficence, doctors have a moral obligation to handle their patients in the best way possible to produce impressive health outcomes. Developing professional identity is a continuous process. In most cases, individuals, such as nurses and doctors, start developing their professional identities at the university, and the process continues until they start working as healthcare professionals. In the healthcare setting, professional identity is crucial since it guides a person about what they are entitled to do and prevents one from engaging in activities or actions that undermine their profession. For example, a doctor cannot administer the wrong drug to a patient since the individual is obliged to treat sick individuals using the best treatment methods. On the contrary, personal identity refers to how a person thinks about himself or herself, which might change in different stages of life (Pesut & Thorne, 2007). For instance, some individuals are carried away by education, religion, and family ties. A person might identify as a Christian or scholar. Personal identity enables one to have boundaries on what the individual can do or not. Consequently, professional and personal identities influence how people behave, interact with others, and the manner they develop and sustain relationships.
The Christian worldview significantly affects individuals’ personal and professional identities. Specifically, Christians have faith in Jesus Christ and God. They believe that Jesus Christ died for their sins and that whoever follows His teachings will have eternal life. In that light, some of the common Christian beliefs are forgiveness, kindness, generosity, courageousness, peacefulness, self-control, gentleness, patience, goodness, faithfulness, love, self-control, and joy. Spirituality or Christianity has become important in healthcare since professionals with Christian values are more obliged to fulfill their responsibilities (Pesut & Thorne, 2007). As such, a doctor or nurse who is a Christian is likely to apply all the values related to religion when undertaking his or her daily tasks. For example, the professional is likely to love patients and treat them well. Furthermore, since the person has self-control and believes in God, one cannot engage in unscrupulous activities to get more money from his or her patients. Consequently, the Christian worldview affects personal and professional identities, which determine how such individuals interact with others.
Components of a Successful Professional Identity
The primary components of a successful professional identity are accountability, knowledge, autonomy, commitment, advocacy, competence, collaborative practice, self-efficacy, goal-oriented, critical thinking, and professional socialization (Chin, Phillips, Woo, Clemans, & Yeong, 2020). In particular, for a person to become a professional in a specific field, one must be knowledgeable and accountable. Accountability means that an individual is responsible and that he or she performs all activities in the best way possible. Additionally, it goes together with commitment, which means that a professional fulfills all entitled obligations. Autonomy shows that a person is self-governed, and advocacy depicts that the individual supports policies that improve human well-being, particularly in the healthcare sector. In addition, self-efficacy portrays that a person has the capacity to behave in a way that maximizes his or her performance. That is why an individual becomes competent in his or her field of practice. Professional socialization and collaborative practice depict that a person interacts with other specialists to learn and possibly produce the best outcomes. Finally, critical thinking makes a person research and find relevant sources of information to improve his or her career. As such, the professional becomes goal-oriented and gives excellent outcomes.
My professional identity is excellent and comprises many essential components. However, since it is a continuous process, the remaining aspects will be incorporated with time for one to be the best professional in the healthcare sector. Specifically, some of the components present in my professio...