I was updating my profile on CreativeMornings.com because I was thinking of attending an upcoming Phoenix meeting. I have a creative office listing, and I thought members of a creative community might be interesting people to meet and learn from.
Then something completely unrelated caught my attention: The Skills section.
Business networking. Parenting. Partnerships. Puns. Public speaking. Breaking things. Putting things into boxes. Handshaking. Learning. Sleeping. Staring longingly into the distance.
I particularly loved seeing public speaking and staring longingly into the distance on the same list.
This definitely wasn't a conventional résumé.
I also noticed that, in addition to selecting from the existing skills, there was an option to enter a skill that wasn't already listed. It made me wonder whether many of these wonderfully unconventional skills had been added by members themselves.
And that got me thinking: Why do we define our skills so narrowly?
When we're asked about skills professionally, we tend to reach automatically for credentials and conventional competencies:
Negotiation. Marketing. Technology. Management. Sales. Analysis.
But what about:
Learning?
Connecting people?
Seeing possibilities?
Asking good questions?
Making people comfortable?
Finding humor in ordinary situations?
Seeing something familiar from a different perspective?
Those can be enormously valuable professional skills - even though they rarely appear on a résumé.
If you weren't writing a résumé, what would you put on your skills list?
Learning from everything around me would probably be one of mine.
And, appropriately enough, I learned several interesting things from CreativeMornings that day.
Its manifesto begins with a wonderfully inclusive premise: “Everyone is creative.” The organization's emphasis on face-to-face connection, learning from others and community feels very familiar to those of us here on ActiveRain.
CreativeMornings is a global organization, but its local chapters meet face-to-face around a shared monthly theme. The themes are contributed by chapters around the world, creating a common thread among conversations happening in very different places.
This month's theme is “نخلة | Nakhlah (Palm),” chosen by the Khobar chapter in Saudi Arabia.
The inspiration behind it particularly caught my attention: When storms come, palm trees can bend with the wind rather than break.
And there was another set of skills I hadn't seen on a traditional résumé:
Adaptability. Resilience. Knowing when to bend.
Suddenly, the funny skills menu and the monthly theme seemed connected.
A person isn't only a collection of things they've been formally trained to do.
We're also shaped by what we've learned to notice, how we relate to other people, how we respond when circumstances change - and perhaps even our ability to make a good pun at the appropriate moment.
So, ActiveRainers, my question to you this morning:
What skill would you add to your profile that would probably never appear on your résumé?
Apparently, sleeping, breaking things and puns are skills.
What are yours?
Bonus points if your answer makes the rest of us laugh.
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