Golden Oldies: You Are the Total of All Your Experiences
by Miki Saxon
Poking through 14+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
Who you are includes all the previous yous in your life. And each you developed unique skills appropriate to what you did and what was going on in that you’s life.
That cumulative effect made the current you deeper, richer, more valuable, smarter, and more adaptive. It doesn’t matter if the skills were developed in response to a need at work or a situation in your personal life. They are there to use if you choose, but first you need to acknowledge them — which can be difficult in a world that worships youth, AKA, no experiences / no depth.
Read other Golden Oldies here.
For decades, I’ve said that people have two sides to their head, personal and professional, and rarely do they use the skills from one side in dealing with the challenges on the other. For example, when you have two employees arguing by email with each other and copying the entire group use the skills you use with your kids. They work on the adults because, in situations such as this, the adults are acting like kids.
Sad as it is in a world where career change is more drastic than ever before, it seems that these self-inflicted barriers are increasing; not so much in general skill usage, but rather in “specialized” skills.
I know several investment bankers, unhappy with what they were doing, who moved to companies in senior operational roles, but don’t use/adapt many of their banking skills to the new environment. The same is true for many of what I call radical career changers—engineers who move to financial services; salespeople who become technical and vice versa.
Because I run into it more and more, I’ve spent time figuring out why it happens and the easiest way to eliminate the barriers. Partly, it’s because people often go back to school for their new career, and so assume that their old skills don’t apply, but it’s also a language thing.
Every type of work has its own language, i.e., applying industry/job specific definitions to various words; because the meaning changes, the associated skill is often relegated to the “previous life.”
Humans are cumulative animals, without an effective delete key, so, when you’re adding new skills be sure to keep using the old ones by remembering to recognize when it’s the language that’s changed, rather than the action, and learning to tweak previous skills to apply to your new situation.
Image credit: Luigi Mengato
