Solutions Occur at the Intersection of (un)Related Skills
This week, I have been working with a client who freelances, but hasn’t had a resume in over a decade.
This week, I have been working with a client who freelances, but hasn’t had a resume in over a decade.
She had the fortune to get work through word-of-mouth for many years. In this past year, however, she has found herself moving into a new level that requires her to share her resume with prospective employers. Problem is, they don’t have one.
Time and again, she has been unable to present a document to them because she has been working a brutal schedule that keeps her from sitting down long enough to form a solid document from scratch. When she thinks of starting, she becomes overwhelmed by all the actions steps.
She has to keep working to pay bills, but needs a document to increase the scope of opportunities enough that she would have time and space to create the very resume that would allow her access to this next level. For a year, my client has felt trapped.
She has also felt embarrassed and ashamed. Resumes are supposed to be easy to write. Everyone but me has one. If I have to ask for help doing this, something is wrong with me. These are all thoughts she articulated in our first meeting. Never in her life has she received guidance or information on how to write a resume.
We acknowledged societal pressure to always appear buttoned up, and how, in this instance, she fell through the cracks. Then we got to work.
She wanted both a resume and the skillset to edit and craft her resume in the future. So I developed a process tailored to her needs — one that both condenses her decade of eclectic professional expertise into a strong resume and provides a space for her to develop lifelong resume preparation skills.
This process has occurred at the exact intersection of two seemingly isolated skillsets — copywriting and life coaching. I have coached clients on goal-setting, emotional blocks, developing action plans, and holding them accountable since 2018. I have also written hundreds of versions of resumes for myself and have edited many client resumes over the years to use action language, present results, and hit keywords. Never have I used both skillsets at the same time in such a fundamental way.
In doing so, I have developed a powerful solution to a client’s problem that neither a life coach nor a copywriter would be able to do. A life coach wouldn’t have the technical know-how to create a strong document that the client would feel proud of. A copywriter might not have the expertise in teaching a client how to go through brainstorm to narrative to bulleted action item to editing. Both someone who occupies both?
Using both sets of skills, I’ve created a process that becomes intuitive and well-informed in a way that my client can trust.
It’s quite possible that you have a number of skillsets that seem irrelevant to each other, but could provide the exact solution needed to create a niche or advance your skillset. If peanut butter and chocolate can fuse together to become a Reese’s Cup, then your skills have the power to become the next big thing!