Is Your Arsenal Missing Sub-Skills?
Have you ever met most of the requirements on a job description but still felt unprepared for the job? Maybe you feel that way at your current job. It might be a confidence issue as the dominant narrative suggests, but it could also be an insightful intuition about the limits of your knowledge and experience. Rather than denying the gap, examining it (without going too far down the rabbit hole) can help you decide whether to fill it or focus your time and energy elsewhere.
If you choose to fill a gap, developing a plan can take time. Finding resources and conversations targeting these nuanced spaces can be like looking for a needle in a haystack, and putting pressure on yourself to find an answer right away can lead to burnout. Even after finding support and inspiration, integrating others’ perspectives with your lay of the land takes experimentation.
Creating time and space in your life for the process might mean stepping stone jobs or side projects. As we experiment with structures to support our growth goals, it’s important to leave room for unstructured free time to make sense of our learnings in ways we can’t predict. While time to think (and feel) can be hard to advocate for externally and internally, the teachings we expose ourselves to are only as valuable as what we can glean from them on a personally actionable level.
Call to action: What’s a sub-skill you want to develop? What’s a step you can take this week to explore it?
