Your Skills, Talents and Abilities

Where are you in your journey to your Career Happiness?

By chance does this sound familiar- “I don’t know what I want to do, but I know it’s not this?” I am pretty confident that you have either said that or heard it from those in your personal or professional life.

I find that statement to be a symptom of the underlying issue- you are not using your skills and abilities in a way that works for you. Sure, maybe you are fulfilling the needs of your employer- they may even think of you as a rockstar! But the bigger question is do you feel like the rockstar of your career? Are you the rockstar you want to be?

Unfortunately, for too many people that answer is a no. And even more unfortunately, we have way too many ways to rationalize it. It’s just work. Everyone else is miserable too. It must just be me. Maybe I’m not as good as I thought I was. It’s funny isn’t it, how we can choose misery, or less than we want or deserve at work and convince ourselves that it is okay.

Yeah well, I’m here to tell you to knock it off. How much better would your world be, and arguably the rest of the world if your (and everyone else’s for that matter) skills, talents and experience were at their highest and best use?

Great fantasy, right? Not so fast. The rub is that very very few of us can really even identify what our key skills, talents and experiences are, let alone figure out what to do with them in the market. I’ll give you a big fat mulligan on this. One of the reasons you may be in the dark, is that we have never been taught, challenged or even considered how or why to think this way.

Those days are over. Get yourself a career notebook, or just pull out an unused one from your closet somewhere. Write down what you believe your best skills, experiences and talents are. What does your gut tell you? What have others told you that value most about you? What have you been praised for in your life? What do people come to you for? What do they not come to you for? (for example, no one will ever come to me to learn from my keen attention to detail- and I am glad about that!)

Now, think hard about how- and if- you are currently utilizing or leveraging those in your current job. Not at all? Not enough? Write it down. Please don’t try to do it all in one sitting. This is hard work and you will be utilizing muscles than you may never have used. But get started! If you want to tell me about how that experience is for you, please drop me a note at julie.bauke@thebaukegroup.com. I’d love to hear from you!