Discover your Top 10 Skills: Realistic

If you have spent much time on LinkedIn or looking at candidate resumes, you have seen plenty of “skills” sections. An emerging leader looking for their first opportunity can feel like they have to fill out the skills section, but it is hard to know what skills they have.

When you do not have clarity on your skills, you advertise skills that employers believe are not skills at all. Skills like:

• Hard-working

• Team player

• Communication

• Time management

• Organization

• Microsoft Word

Are these terrible things to communicate with potential employers? Not at all!

But these “skills” are overused and cliche. You will see them on most skills sections on LinkedIn and in resumes. Since these skills are overused, imagine how much more you could stand out if you had a clear list of top 10 skills that are a more significant value-add for companies.

But here is the rub, just because you can do a skill doesn’t mean you should list it on your resume. You can do a lot of things. But if you want to make an impact and create your next opportunity, you must find your top 10 skills that you are competent in AND enjoy using.

The secret to unlocking your top 10 skills that will bring you a sense of purpose?

Your story.

Think of one experience where you felt the most like yourself. This story does not have to be from your adult work life. Maybe you have felt the most yourself as an eight-year-old building a lego Millenium Falcon. Perhaps you loved collecting rocks in middle school, finding, cleaning, categorizing, and displaying your treasures. You could feel the best about your volunteer experiences, part-time taco truck job, or babysitting a niece/nephew. Whatever it is, write down the story in as much detail as possible.

Do you have your story in mind? Give the story a title, and let’s run it through a list of skills to see if you :

A) Use that skill in your story

B) Enjoyed using that skill

This blog post will focus on one of six areas of skill. If you go through this list and do not find you used these skills in your story, that is ok. We will have five other skills areas that you will surely use in your story and that you find most enjoyable.

Today's skill area: Realistic Skills

Realistic skills are focused on something other than working with people or data.

Realistic skills are focused on working with things. These are skills that are associated with manual and physical work. They may happen outdoors or while playing a sport. The results you will see from working with a Realistic skill are often tangible.

Let’s look at the realistic skill list through the lens of one of my success stories.

This success story is titled: Coffee Dan.

I worked as a tasting room host and delivery driver for a coffee roaster in Newberg, Oregon.

I loved this experience! But it can be easy to enjoy an experience and not take time to reflect on the skills you learned when you are in the thick of the work you were doing. I had yet to learn I used this many Relasitic skills in the coffee industry.

Here are the Realistic skills. Let’s take a look at how many I used as Coffee Dan.

• Measuring - Yes

• Sewing or styling - Yes

• Servicing things - No

• Troubleshooting - No

• Assembling- Yes

• Using machines - Yes

• Cooking- Yes

• Repairing- No

• Building - No

• Operating equipment - Yes

• Using one’s hands- No

• Fixing things - No

• lifting/pushing - Yes

• Installing - No

• Development - No

These are all great skills that can be useful in future opportunities. However, just because I used these skills as Coffee Dan, does not mean that I enjoyed using these skills. As you do this exercise for yourself, keep in mind which skills sound more fun to you. Which skills would you love to use in the future?

To be honest, there are no Realsitic skills that I have that I want to use in future opportunities. You may ONLY want to use Realsitic skills. To each their own. Whether you want to use these skills in the future or not, clarifying that you possess these skills will help you get unstuck and create opportunities. The clearer you can communicate your top 10 skills that you are competent in and enjoy, the more opportunities you will have.

Realistic skills are one of six areas of skills. Make sure you are subscribed to my newsletter to receive all six skill areas and discover your top 10 skills.

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Want to go more in-depth with your Realistic skills and discover where you can use them? Check out my LifeMappingU course to start living your purpose today.

Get started with LifeMappingU here