Skills to pay the bills*
(*Oh, yes I did!)
Just a quick thought, but if you’re trying to change your situation, it really does help to identify your skills. You want to enumerate your skills, so that you can appreciate them, and in doing so, consider how your skills can help you change your situation.
I say this as someone who started a business, thinking, “Oh, well everyone knows how to write a resume and network.” Despite having grown up in NYC, and lived overseas and toiled in the salt mines of network news, yes, at heart, I was very innocent. Because nowadays, when I meet people who know how to network, and can write a well-organized, understandable resume, I pretty much want to burst into song and/or tears and clasp that person to my bosom. If you understood how many people I meet, in my the course of my day, who regard networking as a kind of black magic ritual, people who treat networking and useful, resumes with the same kind of suspicion and fear that FOX News shows science: they don’t like it, they don’t understand it, and they don’t want it near them. Or their producers.
The deeper I got into this business, the more I understood that what I had always taken for granted was, to many people, a very special skill. (And the nagging I gave them was a bonus. For them. Ha. What a world!)
Thus, if you’re trying to [fill in the blank] and you’re not exactly how to make sense of getting started, why not write out a list of your skills and experiences, as relevant to your goals? Start thinking about what makes you special, and how those unique traits could be used to help you achieve your aims. I do this all the time with clients and invariably, something they take for granted–being promoted, for example, from menial labor to the executive level; speaking Farsi; starting their first business when they were 20–makes me say,”…wait, what. You did that? Do you understand what you achieved?” And they’ll start realizing that something they took for granted actually makes them extremely valuable. And then we start to create a specialized narrative and strategy based on their goals, a strategy deriving from their unique experiences. Oh, I do it all the time. I especially love people who speak “unusual” languages and say, “Oh, whatever, who cares about Tagalog?” Hmm, no one, I guess, oh wait! Maybe the millions of people in the Philippines, and all the companies devoted to penetrating and profiting off that market? Maybe they kinda care? #yathink
Maybe the bigger issue here is that people should stop comparing themselves–fruitlessly–to impossible and irrelevant standards, and start celebrating their own worthwhile achievements. #notetoself