We Don’t Need You Right Now
What Happens When Your Skills Don’t Match Your Mission?
TLDR: This article marks the first in a series where I try to unpack a very personal 2024 Q1. A lot of people are in the same boat — laid off, and trying to figure out next steps. Here, I explore the relationship between current skills, up-skilling, self-awareness, and self-worth. How do you hold your own self-worth while knowing the skills you possess aren’t enough to fully contribute to the missions and communities you care about?
It’s a bit of a spaghetti story, but for a few musings on that front, read on.
Two weeks ago, at a bar in the Inner Richmond, I caught up with a friend and former coworker about my current circumstances. Times were tough, I said. I’d been trying to learn new hard skills that might be valuable in this current job market, but I felt like a failure. Acquiring these new skills meant a lot to me, more than they should have. My success in learning and perfectly executing these skills became synonymous with the vision of a miraculous new self. Someone no would reject, or ghost. And no one executes new concepts perfectly. After six months of effort, my results had fallen short of my aspirations. I was not this miraculous new self, nor did I feel any closer to her image. I judged my naive visions and felt at a loss.
There was a pause before she said “You are in the 99th percentile of community people. You build communities when it’s not even your job. Why don’t you do something with that?”
I forget my response. It felt great to be recognized for work I did from someone I respect. I still went home to a reality that reminds me in the end, the work I did with the skills I have didn’t matter.
Sitting with her question days later, I realized I didn’t want to cater to my strengths, in part, because I’m existentially tired of being self-aware enough to know I’m valuable, just not valuable enough.
It’s human to want respect. It’s rational to change to get it. It’s crippling to have that change come slowly, so slowly that you start to believe you’re stuck with what you’ve got. Forever adjacently integral, a nice-to-have for the missions you wanted to make your career.
If you can’t change, you can’t “make an impact” on any of the things you care about. Without change, it feels like no team would have me. How do I know which direction to go from here?
Just got a new LinkedIn message. A sponsored memo is “impressed” with my resume and wants ✨Amy to apply to USC’s MS in Hospitality and Tourism.
I don’t mean to be a downer. I have skills, of course I do, everyone does. I’m clinically creative, an excellent communicator, a natural community builder. I memorized Henry V in four days, and my documentation is immaculate. I’ve written the best Jira tickets you’ve ever seen! I recently starred in a short film! I know Python and C++ now!
I simply feel stupid saying “I have skills.”
How do people come to disregard their own strengths so readily?
It’s often too difficult to escape societal norms to disregard them. I’m solidly in their clutches, so part of the calculus here is naming implicit values. Money is an obvious one, made only more so if it’s a rags to riches story with 10x annual return. Certain institutional affiliations (Ivys, Big 4 Consulting, Big Tech, Awards, etc.) tend to give people a leg up. So here, we’re already contending with skill as an achievement tool, used to perform and attain within these systems.
How do folks being to contextualize their skills, then, and evaluate what is and isn’t valuable to the people around them? We want to work together, after all, communal animals that we are.
In part, people disregard themselves through observation. Anyone can see that most “catering” roles have a ceiling. Parents constantly advise against certain careers. Lots of people sense that a company’s biggest decisions get made in biz ops. Nonprofit burnout is real once you see where the money comes from. We all know technical roles are well compensated. Anyone can see that AI can write copy faster than a marketer. We all know the social media manager is paid pennies to the strategist’s dollar. Anyone can deduce which skills seem to be the “haves” and which ones are silently sloughed off. These are macro trends, and a regular part of public discourse.
People also learn to disregard themselves through their own micro-economies, their lived experience. Obvious, isn’t it, that small, non-explicit dismissals are everything in the end. Maybe you executed something, but someone else had that type of thing in mind first. Maybe you can’t quite deliver an analysis fast enough so you’re passed over for a project, but you’ve got the next one, for sure. Maybe you don’t know how to close that deal, so the team has got it from here, thanks! Or maybe you’re in a senior position, waiting for the call-up that never comes.
You’re left feeling … dull. That your internal understanding is not externally real. Anxious, even, that people think less of you, and you’re left wondering why.
For people who want to care about their job, it’s tough to work towards something if it feels that job doesn’t care about you.
There are two pieces to try and make whole in these types of situations— you see a shifting tide, and people abandoning your ship. Naturally, you’re going to learn how to swim.
So sure, I have skills. But I’ve learned there must be something I don’t have and I can’t afford not to find it.
“What do you do most beautifully?” said George Saunders in Mike Errico’s book “Music, Lyrics, and Life.”
What a kind question. How fair a world must be to earnestly explore it.
But now I wonder who has the luxury to ask this question? Who decides what is beautiful? Or what is beautifully done?
Who gets to be beautiful, and why?
There’s a separate, more delicate idea in this exploration. A different reason for wishing I wasn’t warm, friendly, nurturing, communal, or kind.
Welcome to the gender-bias spaghetti course.
If there was a generation of “women can do anything they want, so they better be doctors, lawyers, CEOs, or titans of industry” people, I’m sure I’d be part of it. Of course, women are not the only people who identify with this generational ethos. Plus, there is nothing wrong with anything traditionally “feminine,” or at least there shouldn’t be — my lord, I wish all of these traits were more commonplace. However, with this generational identity comes an idea I found in some cranial fold that says to break through barriers I need to outperform in every way, specifically by embracing things I am not naturally inclined to do or to which I do not naturally excel, to break down barriers for “the rest of us.” Even if I don’t like those things, even if it’s lonely and detrimental to me personally. I don’t know where this idea came from. I fear it’s driven all of my choices.
This contentious inspection puts me on shaky ground — are my skills and traits natured or nurtured? Of course, though, to be in the “Lead It” Generation means to feel as though everything I am was nurtured, and that I can continue to nurture myself into positions of power.
If a person has learned to discount those things that come naturally to them through experience — like, say, community building — because a broader society has not deemed it valuable — by, say, paying less for these roles than others— and if that person can see peripherally what other skills get attention, no worries! That person can learn. Right?
Whispers of growing headwinds stoke this fire. How are current systems, like social media or internet participation or governance or AI, encouraging continued bias? Sometimes the conversation is quiet — the most successful platformed creators who identify as women tend to make content about cooking, mothering, decorating, or makeup. Why is that? Sometimes the conversation is loud — Arizona just upheld a 160 year-old abortion ban. The summary is the same: enemies of choice are growing. Who is responsible for defeating them? This time, as with all times, is a prescient time for action.
I can only assume the panic setting in for me — of tacitly accepting traditional roles quietly foisted upon me — has set in for many, but I don’t want that panic to be so affecting for other’s career decisions.
So if I really cared about taking up the “making space” mantle, wouldn’t I do everything to make space in the most unwelcome places? To change myself, take up that space, make a way so others could follow? Or so they wouldn’t have to?
Shouldn’t I be changing to be that cruisader?
If I really cared about making more space for people from every walk of life, for them to feel free to take any role they want without first thinking of some greater cause, shouldn’t I be putting all my energy into taking that space? For us?
Aren’t I failing mightily for not being there already?
Or am I just crippling myself for no reason?
In a dark night of the soul, I download the Human Design app to see what I’m all about, based only on 3 pieces of data.
Apparently someone with my birth date, time, and place is a projector. Their role model? The hermit. And it would ruin their energy if they worked more than 4–6 hours a day.
The kicker: this person shouldn’t start anything, but must wait for an invitation to act.
I think I’m coming to terms with how many external inputs I’ve let make me feel valuable or unmoored. Everything I’ve explored here is a lot to put on one job search, and for god sakes it hasn’t been very helpful.
In this exploratory season, there are a few things I know for sure: I don’t like feeling adjacent. I don’t like feeling I’m not solving something big. I don’t like feeling I’m undervalued, and I want to make changes because I choose to, not because someone else thinks I should. I’m sure many people feel the same.
Regardless of who or what made me feel this way (that can of worms!) I’m left asking: How do you hold self-worth while knowing the skills you possess aren’t enough to fully contribute to the communities you care about? How do you keep going, when no one seems to expect or want you to continue?
Exploring the matrix behind that question, the biases in it and the systems that would benefit/ crumble if you acted on it, should have felt like putting on my shoes before walking outside. Unpack all that. Where did the pebble in your soul come from? I can see now why it felt like I forgot something halfway down the street.
Change remains the answer, in any case. But it’s a change that must be driven from internal choices and not external insights. If you’re uncomfortable with the idea that there are skills you don’t have that prevent you from being chosen, or that there are skills you do have that aren’t enough, then change is the only answer. I’m trying to take my experience as informer, though, and not as gospel. Some ways of changing are more helpful than others.
So, what happens when your skills don’t match your mission? You change. As I hope I’ve highlighted here, the reasons behind changing (and maintaining change) is a matrixed hydra, despite what the self-help industry may have you believe. How do you change in a way that’s helpful? That’s for another time.
Hey, I’m Amy! From working in the arts, to startup manufacturing and fellowships, to edtech ops and growth, I’ve lived multiple lives. Follow for more content from an avid multi-passionate. ✨
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