The Most Valuable Thing You Do Probably Doesn’t Feel Like Anything

Has a client or colleague ever thanked you for something, and your first thought was, “I didn’t really do anything”?

What feels like nothing to you is often the reason people come back and recommend you. If you can’t see it, you can’t lead with it, and the work you most want to be doing doesn’t reach the people it’s for.

The things you do most naturally rarely register as abilities. They feel like the obvious way to think.

Other times it shows up as the opposite. Someone is explaining something, you can’t follow it, and you take that as a sign you’re not smart enough.

What this looks like

An experienced consultant sits in meetings where two people can’t agree, and she picks up that they’re saying the same thing, but in different words. She tells them where they’re saying the same thing and where they’re missing each other, and both parties end up agreeing.

When someone asks how she does it, she says she was never quite sure she was doing anything at all. It’s just obvious to her.

A mentor told another consultant that she can look at a failing project and see what’s really going on. Her response was to say “what do you mean, what was really going on?” She hadn’t realized she’d done anything unusual.

Sometimes it doesn’t feel like nothing, it feels like the opposite.

The same consultant used to sit with people who were getting frustrated trying to explain something to her, and she assumed she wasn’t smart enough to follow. She described it as feeling as though something didn’t add up.

What she found over and over, was that the actual problem that person needed to solve turned out to be sitting in that gap where things weren’t adding up.

The people who needed that exact skill would come out of those conversations grateful, sometimes even in tears. Meanwhile, she’d be thinking to herself, “that was nothing.”

Why it's hard to see yourself

You’ve only ever had your own mind. When you notice that two people are talking past each other, you have no way of knowing that the other people in the room didn’t.

When you think about what you’re good at, you most likely think of the things that took work to get good at. The thing that takes no effort usually isn’t what comes to mind.

But the person you’re helping doesn’t know which parts you worked hard to develop. They’re thanking you for what they got.

And some of what you do best doesn’t feel good while you’re doing it. It feels like you’re the one who isn’t keeping up, or that something’s off in how you’re seeing it. That’s not something you’d think to count as an ability.

Neither consultant could see this on their own. They got clear on what they were actually doing by going back through real situations, one at a time.

They looked at what was going on, what they noticed, what they said, and what happened after. I call this process data collection. Looking at one situation on its own doesn’t tell you much. Across enough of them, a pattern starts to emerge.

What changes when you can see it

The consultant who can sense when something wasn’t adding up still sits with people who get frustrated trying to explain something to her. She no longer takes it as a sign she isn’t smart enough.

When something isn’t adding up for her, that’s her cue to start asking the types of questions she now knows will have her seeing what’s really going on and identify the actual problem that needs solving.

The consultant who translates between people used to describe only the deliverables when someone asked what her work was about. The part people kept thanking her for never made it into the description, because she’d never counted it as work. Now it’s on the list of things she knows she brings.

The situation doesn’t change. Two people are still talking past each other. Someone is still getting frustrated trying to explain something to you. What changes is what you make of it, and what you do next.

Getting clear on the thing you do that comes so naturally you don’t notice you’re doing it is one part of my work.

Once you can see it, you stop reaching the same conclusions. “That was nothing” becomes something worth paying attention to. “Maybe I’m just not getting it” becomes a reason to ask another question.

You can recognize it while you’re in it, use it deliberately, and describe it accurately when someone asks what you do. So you can bring your work forward at the level it’s meant for, and reach the people who need it.

I work with experienced consultants, advisors, and practitioners who pick up on things earlier than the people around them. If any of this sounds like you, you can read more about my work here.