What if I loathe what I’m “qualified” to do?

I want to start off by saying that I find talking about “marketable skills” and qualifications to be pretty snooze-worthy.  (Yeah, that’s one way to start a blog post: What you are about to read will be very dull erm, practical.)  Zeroing in and getting excited about your qualifications while stuck in a career you hate can be a bit of an obstacle, particularly if you take a limited and literal approach.  

In my last post, I talked about Jim Collins’ advice to find the sweet spot in our life work where our salable skills meet our passion meet our natural talents.  Like I said, I think brainstorming the salable skills is by far the driest element of this detective work, so we’ll knock it out of the way and move onto the fun stuff (passion and talent, oh my!) in future posts.

I discovered Jim Collins and the idea of exploring the sweet spot long after I decided to make a change in my career.  Now I’m trying to sort through my professional history and personal resources to retroactively apply the theory and see where the pieces fall.  

I may have reached my own path without this paradigm, but in hindsight I’m finding that the metaphor is spot on. Now I can use the insight to refine my own One Big Thing even further, and also better understand the process in order to help my clients.

I left my corporate career because I wanted to do something completely different.  I actually loved the firm and the people I worked with, and if I had only loved accounting half as much, it would have been a match made in heaven. Also, there was my slight distaste for fluorescent lighting and the whole working-for-someone-else thing.  Oh, and tracking my billable time in six minute increments.

Anyway, I had no intention of leaving that job to go do accounting (or finance, or consulting) for some other firm.  You would gag repeatedly at the number of people who suggested I go work for H&R Block to make some money preparing tax returns.  (Unless you happen to work at H&R Block, in which case, if you enjoy it, more power to you.)

When you tell people you don’t want to do what you’re doing anymore, most of the time, most of the people just aren’t ready to let you out of the box they’ve built around you.  

And when they suggest you find another way or place to keep doing what you loath doing, you might just have to say “Wow, great idea, I hadn’t thought of that!” and then skip along on your way to doing your own thing.  And go ahead and roll your eyes when necessary.

These people are probably stuck assessing your marketable skills and qualifications within a very narrow reach.  I say be patient with them and get creative with yourself.

The abilities I developed in my career, the ones that I was paid to do, certainly include the thrill of excel spreadsheets and financial statement reconciliation.  Thank goodness I also worked with real, living, breathing people because that’s how I developed the skills that I value today.  Not to mention those people are what made work enjoyable.

The point I am trying to make (yeah, geez, get to the point already) is that it helps be free-handed and creative in brainstorming our marketable skills.  In my opinion, one of the main reasons to go through this step is to build your own confidence about what exactly you’re capable of doing to make money. 

Sometimes scanning the abilities you’ve developed in your professional career brings some pretty obvious ideas to mind, and you can make a few tweaks to what you’re doing now with joyful success.  One of my best friends was an elementary school teacher and hated every minute.  Now she leads project teams in developing educational software, and it totally floats her boat: pretty smooth transition from loath to love.

It’s so easy to get bogged down and discouraged by your title or training, thinking you’ll need to make a huge investment in time or money in order to really make a significant change in what you’re doing.  Maybe you were specifically educated to be an accountant or an engineer or a teacher.  But what does that even mean?  

Titles and training don’t get much more specific than tax accounting.  I actually have a masters degree in business taxation.  I know, ohmygod, I know.  So what the hell else can you do with that degree?  Well two of the U.S. Representatives in my area graduated from the same program.  So if only I wanted to be a politician focused on tax policy, I’d be all set.

But what non-accounting (i.e. people-loving) marketable skills did I build? Client service (which I define as liking people and serving the people who like you back).  Mentoring younger professionals.  Project management.  

Then there are all sorts of fuzzy, not-quite-measurable skills like how to read people, teach difficult concepts, see someone’s strengths and then develop those strengths, mediate conflict, work with a range of personalities and agendas, prioritize, evaluate other people’s work, evaluate my own work, communicate effectively, give and take constructive feedback.  

I could obviously go on and on.  The key is to focus on the aspects of a job that you enjoyed, and then see if you can identify what skills you were building.  

It also helps to recall the high points of your work experience, and crystallize what exactly you liked about those moments, however few and far between they may have been.  I enjoyed relating to my clients and colleagues.  

I loved advising the staff on my teams, but I wasn’t particularly keen on watching their tax technical skills grow.  I was far more interested in talking to them about their lives, what made them tick, what got their juice flowing, what they enjoyed about their job, how they were doing with work/life balance.  And yeah, that’s pretty much what I love doing now.  

See how creatively I backed my way into that one?  Any thoughts on how the work experience you already have can help steer you into something you’d really love doing?