The Kid Whisperer
Estimated Reading Time: 4-5 minutes
Image: Blake Emge / Unsplash.
This Career Story is part of the Your Ordinary Superpower series from Waypoint Careers. And no, that's not the real Snowball.
Sometimes other people can see our strengths more clearly than we can.
I was reminded of this during a career conversation with a young woman who was trying to work out what might come next.
She had been looking for work and, like many people at the beginning of their working lives, was finding it difficult to see what she genuinely had to offer.
There were skills, of course.
There were things she enjoyed.
But nothing that immediately felt particularly distinctive.
Then, during our conversation, a story emerged.
And sometimes the story tells you more than the résumé ever could.
Enter Snowball
At one point she had been involved in caring for children.
There was one child in particular who could be challenging.
Connecting with him wasn't always easy. Other people sometimes struggled.
But she didn't seem to.
She had a way of meeting him where he was.
She could settle him, engage him and build trust without apparently doing anything extraordinary.
It had become such a recognised ability that there was even a nickname for it:
The Kid Whisperer.
When she told me the story, she didn't present it as an achievement.
It was almost incidental.
Just something she could do.
Which, of course, was exactly what made the story interesting.
The things we don't put on a résumé
If we translated that little story into the language of work, what might we find?
Patience.
Empathy.
Communication.
Emotional awareness.
Adaptability.
The ability to build rapport.
Perhaps an instinct for understanding what another person needs and adjusting accordingly.
Those aren't insignificant abilities.
And they're certainly not limited to working with children.
They can matter in education, health, community services, customer service, leadership, teamwork and dozens of other settings.
But when something comes naturally to us, we don't always think of it as a skill.
We think it's just something we do.
“Sometimes the thing that comes most naturally to us is the very thing we struggle to recognise as a strength.”
What feels ordinary may not be ordinary at all
That's one of the ideas behind my recent Career Insight, Your Ordinary Superpower.
We tend to notice the obvious career evidence.
The qualification.
The promotion.
The award.
The job title.
But some of the most useful evidence about who we are and what we bring to work is hidden in much smaller moments.
The colleague who always asks you to explain something.
The customer who looks for you when they come back.
The new employee you're asked to help.
The friend who calls because you're the calm one.
The child who responds differently when you're around.
Individually, these moments may not seem important.
Collectively, they can tell us something.
Pay attention to the nicknames
There's another part of the Kid Whisperer story I like.
Someone else noticed first.
That's often how strengths work.
Other people experience them before we recognise them ourselves.
They may even give us clues in the language they use:
"You're so good with people."
"You always know how to explain things."
"You're the organised one."
"I knew you'd know what to do."
We tend to brush comments like these aside because they don't feel remarkable.
But perhaps we should pay closer attention.
A nickname like The Kid Whisperer might sound playful.
It might also be evidence.
A question to sit with
Think about the things people regularly turn to you for. Your help, your judgement, your patience, your ability to explain, organise, listen or simply make people feel comfortable.
What patterns can you see?
And perhaps more importantly:
What might other people already recognise in you that you've stopped noticing yourself?
Sometimes discovering a strength isn't about learning something new about ourselves.
It's finally recognising the value of something that was there all along.