As I finished identifying skills from my last 5 stories, I thought of 3 more to analyze – my memories of the girl I helped release from state custody at the legal clinic and 2 stories about my nonprofit work, one where I successfully convinced my boss to follow through on answering the questions I needed to finish a government report and successfully quitting the nonprofit job by convincing the board that I was justified in quitting.

I can already tell that thinking up all these stories and identifying the skills used in each is the key to converting my vague subjective feelings about work into something objective and actionable. Just seeing everything laid out in a comprehensive way just gives me confidence in the conclusions of this analysis. This might be the most important part of the book – it’s critical to think up as many stories as possible! And that takes time.

Sadly, school doesn’t teach you how to identify your own employable skills but at least I’m finally doing the work to dig deep and spell everything out for myself so that I can communicate it to employers. It’s like mining your unconscious self-knowledge into conscious self-knowledge. It’s like therapy for employment.

So the list of my top 10 skills are:

1. using my brain
2. solving problems
3. assess, evaluate, treat
4. perceive patterns
5. communicate well in person
6. speak
7. listen
8. analyze, break down into parts
9. negotiating, resolve conflicts
10. advise