Putting together my skills inventory was a very worthwhile project. It forced me to examine not just who I am and what makes me up, but of what value I can be to other people. It’s a very small wedge to drive into your thinking, but it is a very important one. A life lived in loneliness leads to dying alone. Humans are not just social animals, but for the fulfillment of our very souls we require other people to serve, to balance us out, to enlighten us and to love us.
But, we can’t effectively do any of that stuff until we master ourselves. Why not? Because until that point, we will be driven by unexpressed drives and desires which we’re trying to ignore or deny. We will be manipulated by our own and other people’s emotional cons. And we will not be able to be clear about who and what we really are and what we require as individuals. Overcoming all of these things is what the process of attaining self-mastery has been all about. I have not reached any kind of “end-point”, but any means, but I have gained enough perspective to see these things clearly.
Working on my skills inventory got me to thinking more about the nature of the individual in relation to the shared value community. Creating a skills inventory and publishing it establishes you as an available resource for people interested in the same subjects to contact you. It’s like MySpace if you took out all the posing, social anxiety and bullshit. A skills inventory is also an excellent first step towards creating agreements or contracts with yourself and other people.
What I mean by that is, you’re saying to yourself, “I am good at these things and would like to talk about and help other people with these things.” This is the rudiments of what I call a “self-contract.” We can break it down into sections, which we can hopefully continue to build on in our conversations:
- “I am good at _____” - You are announcing to yourself the positive aspects of your life and choosing to focus on these. That’s not to say you ignore the negative things: you just learn to focus your time and energy on the good instead of the bad. This is one of the most important steps to repairing one’s self-image and promoting intent/action harmony.
- By offering yourself as a resource to talk about your skills, you’re further committing yourself to certain spheres of action, and realms of knowledge. If someone knows that you like kung-fu and enjoy talking about it, they will know to send you information or approach you with things which would be of the most interest to you. By recognizing the things you’re good at, you repair your self-image. By announcing them to others, you begin to align other people’s image of you to your own self-image. As those two become more and more in line, you begin to learn about more effective communication: how to say what you really mean and how to have people understand you more readily, because they understand the context from which you speak.
- Putting yourself out there as not just a conversational resource, but as a practical resource (i.e., “I will help you mow your lawn”) and then following through on it is being fully committed to actualizing the positive aspects of yourself. You’re not just talking about it. You’re not just projecting images of who and what you are, but you are standing fully behind them and actually living it.
Aligning yourself in this way - whether or not you adopt terms like “skills inventory” and “self-contract” - sets you up for a great deal of clarity: you begin to understand yourself and act according to that understanding. And you begin to allow other people to see who you are, and to really prove it to them by your actions. There is obviously more to it all than just that, but that seems like a good place to start. What do you think?
Self-Contracts by Tim Boucher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Canada License.
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