You Have More Job Skills Than You Think: How Everyday Experience Can Help You at Work

“I just dealt with it.”

“It’s just common sense.”

“I was just helping out.”

If you’ve said any of those about work this week, you’ve undersold yourself.

It’s Not Common Sense. It’s Practice.

Do something enough times and it becomes automatic. You stop noticing you’re doing it, so it starts feeling like common sense, instead of what it really is — a skill.

The philosopher Michael Polanyi had a line for this in The Tacit Dimension (1966): “we can know more than we can tell.”

Think about the last time a new coworker asked how you knew something. Which regular wants extra napkins. Which delivery driver always shows up early. When a customer is about to lose it. You probably shrugged and said you just knew.

You did know. You learned it, one day at a time.

Nobody Asked You To

Now think about what “helping out” looked like on your last shift.

Maybe you took a few tables when a coworker got slammed. Maybe you showed the new hire where the extra receipt paper lives, so she wouldn’t have to ask twice. Maybe you walked a customer to the right aisle instead of pointing and hoping.

And none of that was on a checklist. To pull it off, you had to notice someone needed a hand before they said a word, figure out what would actually help, and fit it in without dropping your own work.

You picked it up somewhere: raising kids, looking after a parent, or a lot of shifts where nobody else was going to step in.

Catch Yourself Saying “Just”

Try this for a week. Every time you say “just” about something you did, at work or at home, stop and name what you actually did.

Take these examples:

“I just helped the new hire get set up” becomes “I could tell she was too nervous to ask, so I walked her through the shared drive.”

“I just restocked it” becomes “I noticed we were out of the size everyone asks for and fixed it before the Saturday rush.”

“I just handle the family phone calls” becomes “I keep my voice even with the insurance company, figure out what the person on the other end actually needs, and don’t take the bait.”

As the last example demonstrates, all your experience outside of the office can be just as useful in building your ability to do great work.

Say It Anyway

You’ll still catch yourself saying “just.” Everybody does. The difference is that now, when you tell someone you just handled the rush, you’ll know exactly what handling it took.

‍