Accord Advisory Group

Here is a simple exercise: take a room of mature, urban professionals– highly educated & highly skilled. Ask each to reflect on a personal vignette, mirroring their sense of accomplishment and pride. Then contrast what capabilities they think are reflected in their own stories with the capabilities that others actually hear in their stories: the difference is remarkable and significant.

The Working Knowledge that individuals think they recognize as successful are practical “hard” skills: concrete activities such as writing, editing, networking, selling, marketing, and researching. However, as others listen to the accomplishments of a lifetime, what emerges is a softer side.

What others hear in the same stories are such ideas as: creativity, ability, knowledge, capability, flexibility, risk, and perseverance. What others enable us to hear in what we are proudest of, needs to be internalized and held dear. We need to write it in bold colors across our bathroom mirrors, as we look at ourselves each morning.

Others have the capability of teaching us that our human dimensions, above and beyond the job-specific tasks we’re accustomed to portraying on our resumes, are the starting point for recognizing what we genuinely know in what we do: and our starting point for stretching beyond our comfort zones through exercise of those “soft skills”, to new beginnings.

Getting back to the main point: what does it say about us, that the skills we see in ourselves lead us to limitation? And that, generally uninvolved with telling our stories to others, we never get to value the genuinely transferable abilities gained during our working lives?

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