Dance with the Skills that Brought Ya

Posted on March 05, 2021 by Bob Favre, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

Typically, folks change careers one or more times during their lifetime. An engineer may move to sales. A real estate professional may start brokering mortgages. Even if we stay in one industry or one company for many years, chances are we’ll get ourselves promoted to management or as individual contributors and one way or another our workday will look very different than it did our first year on the job. This evolution is natural and healthy, growing and learning new things. Life could be pretty boring otherwise. Strangely it’s said, “We should only be comfortable when we’re outside our comfort zones.”

I started out my work years with one of my great loves in life, computer programming. Like others, after a while I moved into software development management and project/program delivery. During this time, we started her therapy practice (Behavioral Kinetics, LLC) and I volunteered to figure out how to submit her insurance claims on weekends as well as helping with the other associated back office processes. After a time, it occurred to me that my weekend tasks were pretty repetitive work, just moving data around to various files, typing into a web browser, etc. Crystal’s practice was thriving but I was spending every Saturday morning tethered to a desk doing data entry.

Then I remembered I used to be pretty capable at moving airline passenger data around using C++, Visual Basic and COBOL in the olden days. I thought I should be able to get my Saturday mornings back by writing a few scripts. I started out small using whatever I had on my computer at the time, Python/VBA/iMacros and gradually gained more and more time back for fishing. And as of today, the claims and other processes in Crystal’s practice are close to full automation. All I do is press a few buttons and many of the tasks don’t even require that (“crontab” still works just fine). Magic! Let’s go fishing.

I then started noticing the projects at work had unwritten requirements for getting various amounts of transformed data to the people that needed it when they needed it. A project’s process pain points could be smoothed out by setting up some “data plumbing” scripts integrating seemingly disparate manual flows. The old programming skills have come in very handy on occasion. I’ve since joined Crystal in helping others reach their goals through Life Coaching!

Is it possible that the skills you used early on in your career could be applied to your current challenges? It may not be as obvious a thing as it was for me. But think back on what you did during the earlier parts of your working life. Your routines may or may not have been realized in computer code, but they were there nonetheless. Think back to your interactions. I know a successful career IT leader who says “Whatever I’m doing, I’m selling”. He’s applied that skill throughout his entire career. How can the younger version of you benefit your work today? I’m curious to see if there are others out there with similar examples. If you like, please send me a note with stories from your “Dancing with the skills that brought ya”!