What Made You Good is No Longer Enough

One of the most interesting conversations happening around Artificial Intelligence is about skills.

Which skills will become more valuable? Which will become less important? What will people need to learn next? How will roles change as AI becomes capable of doing more of the work that previously relied on human expertise?

These are sensible questions, but they also raise a more personal one.

How accurate is our view of what we are actually good at?

Most of us build a picture of ourselves over many years. We learn what comes naturally, where people turn to us for help and what we are recognised for. Those experiences gradually become part of how we see ourselves professionally.

The problem is that the picture can become outdated without us realising it.

It reminds me of using an old map in a city that has changed.

The landmarks might still be there and many of the roads will look familiar, so the map feels reliable. Then you reach an intersection that no longer exists or discover that the road you have always used now takes you somewhere completely different.

There is nothing wrong with the map. It was accurate when it was created.

The environment moved on.

I think many people are facing something similar in their careers right now.

Technical expertise that took years to develop remains valuable, but some of the tasks associated with that expertise are changing quickly. AI can already research, analyse, summarise, draft and solve problems at a level that would have seemed extraordinary only a few years ago.

At the same time, capabilities such as judgement, communication, creativity, adaptability and the ability to work effectively with other people are becoming harder to ignore.

That creates a challenge because accurately evaluating ourselves has never been easy.

Some people underestimate their strengths and spend years believing they are less capable than the evidence suggests. Others become so comfortable with what has worked in the past that they stop noticing where they need to develop.

Both can hold us back.

Self Evaluation, one of the competencies within CLARITY on the Emotional Navigation Roadmap™, is about accurately identifying our strengths and development areas.

The word accurately matters.

This is not an exercise in finding faults, nor is it about creating a list of everything we are good at so we can feel confident.

It is about developing an honest picture of ourselves as we are today.

That requires more than looking in the mirror because our view of ourselves will always contain blind spots. We need other sources of information.

Feedback is one of them.

So are results.

The situations we repeatedly find difficult can tell us something. So can the work that gives us energy, the responsibilities we tend to avoid, the things other people consistently ask us to do and the capabilities that seem to come more naturally to us than they do to others.

The key is being willing to look at all of that without immediately defending or diminishing what we find.

It is also worth revisiting the picture regularly.

A strength can become less relevant as our role changes. Something that was once a development area can become a strength through experience. A capability we hardly used five years ago might suddenly become incredibly valuable.

That is particularly important in an environment changing as quickly as the one we are in now.

The temptation with AI is to spend all our time trying to understand what the technology can do.

We need to keep updating the map of what we can do as well.

Perhaps a useful place to start is to think about the person you were professionally three years ago.

What would you have listed as your greatest strengths? What did you find difficult? What did people rely on you for?

Then ask yourself whether you would give the same answers today.

If you would, it might be worth checking whether the map still matches the territory.