Résumé Revisited

When you apply for a job, you brag about your greatest strengths: ‘I am an enthusiastic team player’; ‘I get on well with people’; ‘I am unusually hard-working.’ You usually keep these skills at the forefront of your head until the moment you leave the interview. At which point you immediately forget about them.

This is a shame. Because this method – thinking about your skills, labelling them, occasionally boasting about them – is a powerful tool for working out your strengths.

Consider writing a résumé for the rest of your life. For this exercise, we want you to write down three big achievements from the past year – and reflect on how you pulled each one off. For example, if you’ve written down winning a bike race, endurance might have been key. If you’ve wowed a big client at work, that might be down to your excellent interpersonal skills.

But, at the same time, there is often one factor that unites all of your achievements: your determination to win, or your discipline in getting the task right, for example. Is there one skill that underpins all of your accomplishments? Remember, success leaves clues – what characteristics unite your successes over the past twelve months?