the Henny Flynn podcast

What We Already Know: Tapping Into the Skills We Forget We Have (S17E7)

• Season 17 • Episode 7

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I’ve been meaning to talk about this for a while – and then a conversation in my kitchen with a friend reminded me why it’s such an important theme.

In this episode, I’m exploring the power of cross-skilling – noticing how the skills we use in one part of our lives can help us in another. Sometimes we forget just how capable we already are because we keep parts of our lives too separate. What if we could gently bring more awareness to the strengths we already have and use them where we most need them?

Here’s what I cover:

  • Why cross-skilling matters – and how we often miss the skills we already have.
  • The “ant brain” – my way of describing how we can tune in deeply to what’s happening around us (without falling into groupthink).
  • The risk of unconscious patterns – how to avoid applying old, unhelpful strategies, like people-pleasing, without realising.
  • A real-life example of discovering hidden skills – how a client realised they were far better at admin than they believed, simply by looking in a different part of their life.
  • The role of motivation and nuance – and why it’s not about doing everything everywhere, but about consciously choosing what supports us.

If you’ve ever felt stuck or believed you don’t have the right skills to face a challenge, this might open up a new way of looking at it.

Henny x

SHORT COURSE: Understanding Boundaries - free 5-day audio course

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Speaker 1:

I've been thinking about doing an episode on today's topic for some time and then, lo and behold, I'm sitting in our kitchen with a friend and the same theme arises. So today I'd like to talk about the power of cross-skilling. Welcome to the Henny Flynn podcast the space for deepening self-awareness with profound self-compassion. I'm Henny, I write, coach and speak about how exploring our inner world can transform how we experience our outer world, all founded on a bedrock of self-love. Settle in and listen and see where the episode takes you. Sounds a little bit corporate. It would be. I'll come on to this actually in a bit. But my sense is that we can use skills that we have at home or that we've learnt in our place of home when we're in the workplace, and vice versa. We're good at facing into difficult conversations at work, but we find it skills that might be what we need to navigate potentially challenging situations at home. So even if we haven't yet mastered that skill that we need in a difficult situation we're navigating in our family life, for example, we might be able to see opportunities in the workplace where we could gently, consciously, wisely explore how we might build those skills in a really safe environment, if work feels like a safe environment for you in order to then be able to pick those skills up and apply them at home. Um, and you know vice, there may be things that we're really good at managing in our family life. You know, maybe there are complicated relationships with people in our family system. We all have those. Well, my experience is many of us have those no assumptions, assumptions, um, but um, but at the same time, we might find that there are some people at work that for us feel really really hard to deal with. So, even though we might be the person in our family system that everyone relies on to pour oil on troubled waters when we're at work, um, we kind of forget that and actually we just have a bit of a brick wall about how to work with person x. Um, you know, maybe something is coming up for you as I say these things. You know, maybe there's something where you've seen a parallel between two situations. You know something at work, something at home, maybe now, maybe in the past, um, or maybe you've handled something really well in the past that could possibly help you handle something that's happening right now. You know, just just kind of opening up and letting these ideas sort of filter in and see does it resonate with you? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't.

Speaker 1:

Um, you know I grew up as the youngest in a big, loud and at times quite complicated family system and I recognize that those experiences that I gathered and learned of being the peacemaker, the trouble easer, you know they helped me manage mercurial leaders, potentially volatile groups, you know working groups when we were leading big change programs, or troubled team members. You know those experiences that I gather to me in my family system. They help me in the workplace and and some of those are sometimes that's really obvious. You know, of course. Of course it did.

Speaker 1:

I'm just going to put a little bit in brackets in here, which is you know also some of those skills, for example, that I learned in my family system about maybe a bit of people pleasing or suppressing my own needs in favor of keeping the peace. You know those kind of things. It's not about picking, picking those up unconsciously and applying them. This is about bringing our conscious awareness to the stuff that we have skillfully gathered to us, rather than the unconscious application of old strategies that we might have learned, that have kept us safe, and there is a there's a little bit of gray going on here, and, as with so many of these topics that I bring into this place, there is nuance and so really the invitation is to feel into what that nuance might look like for you. Okay, I'm going to close brackets and let you go back to the episode, but other times we might have almost like a kind of invisible line separating something that we experienced or something that we're good at in one place from kind of filtering through to another aspect of our life.

Speaker 1:

Another sort of example of this that might resonate with you is let's imagine that I have a client this is actually an amalgam of a number of clients, in order that no one person is identified here but let's imagine that this is one client who felt that they were really no good at admin. They were, they had this story about themselves that they were sorry I just got. They had this story about themselves that they're no good at financial or practical details. You know they'd often put themselves down if these kinds of themes came up, and you know it was something that they felt that they really wanted to work on in order to be able to support more in other aspects of their, their family life. But then, when we looked more widely, um, they also helped run a local sports team uh, amateur, you know, sports team, kids team, and what they recognized was that they were actually really good at doing admin there, um, and they were often the one who had a handle on all of the details, who understood what was going on with the finances and with this particular person.

Speaker 1:

Partly that was because they were really interested in providing that support. It really gave them a sense of purpose. They really loved being part of the team. Um, they got reward for knowing these things, um, whereas, um, in the other part of their life where they felt that they didn't have, you know, any skills at it and they, you know, weren't any good at it, uh, they were just. They just got criticism either from themselves or from others, and so their motivation for applying these cross skills was fairly limited, to be honest. So, understanding where their motivations lay and recognising that they actually did have these skills was so useful, because they were able to then pick up the stuff that was really helpful for them to make the changes in the way that they motivated themselves for the aspect of their life where they wanted to be able to apply these skills in a different way, and my feeling is that when we look at this kind of this sort of work around cross skilling, it's often where we're most oblivious to the skills that we have.

Speaker 1:

You know, in the workplace. We might just accept that we're good at dealing with complicated leadership teams or something like that. We might not really recognise that actually that is a skill, it's just like well, it's just me. It's just me, I'm just, I can just do that. And so, because we're oblivious to it, we might not recognize all of the nuances that go on, um, that enable us to be able to manage.

Speaker 1:

You know the different layers that are, um, that show up when we're in a um a situation with someone who someone else might find complicated. We don't necessarily recognize the layers of skill that are in there. You know from listening deeply, from empathy, clarity of speech. You know all of these things. They're all really important. When we're oblivious to them, we don't know how to access them consciously. And so, by developing our conscious awareness, we can then go oh, actually, I'm good at this, I can pick this up and I can use it somewhere else, and that might be incredibly powerful. And so that's why you know, that's why, um, this is useful.

Speaker 1:

It feels, um, I feel like I kind of dived straight into this today, um, but, uh, hopefully there's something here that resonates with you and um, uh, yeah, you know, so we might feel that we have a place in our life where we're stuck, or we just can't move forward because we believe we don't have the right skill to do that. So, or it might be that we, um, just find ourselves constantly overthinking, you know, are constantly looking at all the different variables around a problem that we're trying to solve, but and kind of feel as though, well, I can't stop doing that because that's just what I'm like, whereas in another part of our life we might have developed the skill of being able to say, ok, well, this feels tricky, but let's just let it play out, let's just see what happens next, and then we can work out what our next step is. So we're able to shift from believing ourselves to be an overthinker, a kind of constant, you know, worrier, worrying at something, into being someone who is able to pause and let something flow, surrender into something, um, and what this sort of means. Is that, um, we, when we can recognize this, we might see that actually we do have all of the requisite skills to change the thing that maybe we believe we can't change. We just might need to put them into place in a slightly different way. Or that Andre Previn joke from was it Morecambe and Wise? You know I'm playing all the right notes, just not necessarily in the right order. You know we can take all of the requisite skills and we can put them into a different order and create a completely different piece of music.

Speaker 1:

So a sort of slight tributary of this thought stream is that when I was doing consulting as part of my old corporate life, each new role that I went into and I didn't consult in hundreds of different businesses I tended to stay in a place for quite a long project and then I'd move on to somewhere else. But I used to think about it like switching on my ant brain. That was the phrase that I had, which is a little bit different from the concept of the hive mind. If that's something that you've come across, which I think is a little bit more like the borg in Star Trek, and if that cultural reference passes you by, then think about a single swarm of bees all acting in unison. You know that's the hive mind, or it can show up as collective intelligence emerging from online communities. You know where you get this kind of zeitgeist happening. Of you know everyone thinking the same thing simultaneously. Of you know everyone, uh, thinking the same thing simultaneously. That's the sort of hive mind and um.

Speaker 1:

And then that makes me think about, uh, groupthink and um, I could don't go down a sort of rabbit warren about that, but just very, very quickly. You know how this relates to groupthink, which is, um, a psychological phenomenon where a group strives for consensus at the expense of critical thinking and sound decision making. And and what happens when we slip into groupthink, um, is that often we end up suppressing dissenting opinions. So if I'm slipping into group think, you know I'll agree with someone in the role of leader because I think everyone else agrees with them, even though they might all be doing the same thing, and we all secretly doubt that leader's abilities. We suppress that doubt in favor of conforming with the group, and so that's group think and hive mind can be a little bit like that, but it's slightly different.

Speaker 1:

But for me, my ant brain is different. Again, the sense I had of my ant brain was that with each new role, I would somehow consciously tap into what I intuitively felt was important in different parts of the organization. So it was a bit like, you know, I'd kind of come into the job, make connections with people, start listening deeply, and it was a bit like I kind of opened myself up to the system that I was in. And I strongly suspect that I am not by any means the first person to have noticed this, and if you have, or if you know someone who's written about it, I'd really love to hear from you, because I'm really fascinated in this, this ability that I think many of us have all very possibly, and so the ant brain enabled me to access different parts of me as well as different parts of the organization. So I was able to pick up on data that was happening around me Little cues, words, phrases, body language, you know the whole thing. I was able to sort of bring a kind of conscious awareness to all of these different bits of data, which we often just absorb unconsciously, of course, because that's, you know, it's part of how we stay alive as humans is this ability to pick up on, on all the data that's going on and filter out what isn't useful and let in what is useful. And so, as I was able to to access all of these external bits of data, I was also able to access internal bits of data, so different memories, learnings, knowledge, skills, and seek and filter through what would most support me in my new role.

Speaker 1:

So as a consultant, of course, it's vital that you hit the ground running. You know you're constantly reading each situation. I mean this applies to any place, to be honest, going into the school playground of your child's first day of school, or going into any new job or any kind of social setting and to gather as much useful data as you can in order to provide, in my case, as a consultant, in order to provide the maximum benefit from the time that I had with that organisation and, like I said before, I think we all have this capacity. It's just that thinking in this way can be utterly exhausting, of course, because we're on high alert, um, and you know I loved some aspects of doing that work because I really enjoyed the high alertness at times. You know, it's a little bit addictive that adrenaline and cortisol and also the dopamine hits that you get from getting things right, reading the data right, being interconnected, um, you know, but it's also exhausting and it's one of the reasons why so many people experience a form of burnout, you know, of one kind or another. And I found that after I left that world, that I would hear myself, you know, say things like I never want to work in the corporate space again.

Speaker 1:

But when we shut down and this is the point of that very long explanation but when we shut down whole parts of our past or even completely segment work life from our home or social life, work life from our home or social life, my premise, my observation, is that we may risk missing out on things that could really support us. You know, this idea of being able to cross skill across different parts of our lives. Now, of course, it doesn't mean leaving, you know, all aspects of our life completely blended. You know we also need boundaries. They are so important and, um, if, if you're curious about boundaries, then, um, take a look at my short course on boundaries. I've gathered together all of the podcast episodes that I've done on boundaries and pulled them together into a short five-day course. It's completely free, you can access it. I'll put a link into the show notes for you, um, and you know.

Speaker 1:

So we need to have these boundaries. We don't want to be completely blended, um, you know, because actually that can leave us, uh, feeling you really exhausted, because you know we need the boundaries in order to create space that is ours and not just, you know, merged into the external. We need to be able to have this internal space for us too, and you know time for us too too, and you know time for us too, um. But so for me, this, um, this ability to cross skill, it means bringing some conscious awareness to the skills that could potentially support us elsewhere in our life and learning. This has helped me enormously and, you know, maybe something in what I'm talking about today is resonating with you. Maybe there's a recognition of something that has helped you, or maybe there's something sparking where you're going. Hang on a minute.

Speaker 1:

I do have some of the skills to resolve this issue I'm facing into if I look more widely across my life, rather than that slightly kind of myopic thing, that short-sighted thing that can often happen to us, because we're human, where a problem looms so large in our field of vision that we forget that there's anything else around that we could look at and maybe learn from. So for me, I finally had the realization one day. Um, you know, on this point around, I never want to work in the corporate world again. You know who better to help exhausted executives with managing the risks and realities of burnout than someone who had been there, someone who had almost died because of their unwillingness, or yeah, yeah, let's stay with that to recognize the risks and someone who'd not only survived that process but actually thrived in the choices that she then made. And and obviously that someone is me, in case in case that wasn't clear, and you you know. So now I work with many executive clients. You know I don't really see any distinction between the path that any client takes comes to me, but many of those people are executive clients, as in, they're working in corporate environments and I even teach coaching skills to leaders in the corporate environment.

Speaker 1:

And choosing to do this work involves switching on different parts of my brain. It involves cross-skilling from old skill sets that I had into new challenges, new opportunities that I'm facing, and my reflection is that it can feel a bit like opening up some back rooms that haven't been occupied for a while, you know, giving them an airing, a dusting bit of a polish, before then kind of realizing oh, they're actually lovely spaces. You, these can be quite nice to hang about in, but, you know, until then we might have just kind of had the door shut and just gone. Oh no, nobody goes in there. There's no point.

Speaker 1:

You know, and in each of these back rooms there might be some really useful things. I mean, there might be things that you're not interested in anymore, but there might be some really useful things. You know, skills, knowledge, experiences, um, that can potentially be applied in other parts of our lives. There might also be some memories that we're just like, you know, okay, I'm like I'm leaving that one there, like that's okay, we don't need to to spend a lot of time sitting with that, or old grudges, or you know, or maybe there's some stuff there that actually does really need tending to. That's a completely different podcast episode, but, you know, maybe there are things in there that would be really useful to, you know, apply to other parts of your life. And you know this, this kind of awareness of this ability that we all have to cross skill it's also really helped me with um, you know, creating the courses, creating the group coaching that I now offer, creating experiences like a piece of quiet, and if you don't yet know what that is. It's new and it's wonderful, and I'll share a little bit more about it at the end.

Speaker 1:

You know, and over the years I've often heard parts of me say, and over the years I've often heard parts of me say I don't know, I don't know how to do something. But what they actually mean, or what I actually mean in that situation, is that I haven't yet done exactly that thing in exactly those conditions, for exactly that audience, etc. Etc. But when we remember that we're able to mine our own mind, our own life experience, for the cross skills and cross knowledge and cross references they don't have to be, I just really sounds. It sounds like, oh, it's very angry, but you know, cross-skills, cross-knowledge, cross-references that could really support us.

Speaker 1:

That can then significantly help us overcome the overwhelm of doubt or the voice of the self-critic, the inner critic that might be telling us that we can't do something, whereas if we can just create this little bit of space inside and sit back and go, we might not have experience of doing exactly that, but we have been able to do something similar in the past, been able to do something similar in the past, and it doesn't mean, of course, that there is always something in our past or our present life that relates directly to the thing that we most need right now, but the possibility is that there might be, so maybe it's useful to look. So there we go. They're the thoughts that I threw down on a piece of paper yesterday, this kind of ideas and thoughts, and then, having had the conversation that I had just now in my kitchen with a friend where the same kind of theme came up, it just felt I wanted to come and record this and share it with you, because maybe, maybe, there's something here that resonates with you, um, and if so, I'd love to hear, I'd love to hear from you, um, and if you've, uh, got an experience of the ant brain, then, um, I'd love to hear about that too, if that sparks any thought within you. Um, and, yes, that point around boundaries, I'll, um, I'll put a note into the notes for you so you can sign up for that if you'd like. And then, lastly, um, just to say, oh, my goodness me, I've received some beautiful messages about a piece of quiet um, we have, um, you know, we're into our second week now and the these are a weekly pause every Wednesday lunchtime, and there is a reason why it is on a Wednesday, because I think traditionally we often take time out for ourselves at the weekends.

Speaker 1:

You know that's that's. You know that's the kind of very sort of normal, classic thing for us to do is the reason why we have weekends is to take a break from work, because we know how important it is for people to rest in order to be productive. You know we have to have rest and um at the same time. My sense is that we rest at the weekend and then we uh fire back up for the Monday and we launch ourselves back out into the world. You know and you don't need me to talk about Sunday night, itis you know the feeling of dread that so many of us have about the week ahead, or you know, or just kind of. You know, you get to Monday and you just think, oh, I didn't even, I don't even feel like I've had a weekend.

Speaker 1:

You know those kinds of phrases, and so I'm offering creating a piece of quiet as a weekly pause every Wednesday lunchtime. It's just 20 minutes, maybe a bit less actually, and if you don't want to do the journaling prompt which is part of it, then it could literally be eight or nine minutes out of your lunchtime on a Wednesday and you just sit and listen. You can listen to it through your favorite podcast app it's a private podcast or just straight through the link that you'll get emailed each Wednesday, and it is a chance to take a pause, to have a piece of quiet in your week, to center yourself, to reboot, to regroup, to gather yourself, and for me, there's something really beautiful knowing that others are doing it with you, it with you, and so it's a short relaxation practice that's then followed by a thoughtfully crafted flow journaling prompt that relates in some way to the relaxation practice that we've just done. If you don't feel like journaling that day, that's fine. Just listen to the prompt and maybe reflect on it or not.

Speaker 1:

You know this is your practice, of course, but if you do feel like writing, then the second half of the recording is a piece of music that gives you a Pavlovian response to picking up your pen and writing, and I play the piece of music for eight or nine minutes and the invitation is you write for that length of time and when you're finished, you put down your pen, you close your book and you know that the words have done their work, you close your book and you know that the words have done their work, and this is not about anybody getting anything right or it even being possible for anybody to get anything wrong.

Speaker 1:

This is simply a space to return home, to return to yourself, to return to yourself, and I am so delighted to welcome all the people who've already signed up. And if you would like to join us too, then that would be so beautiful, and there is a link in the show notes. For you and as someone who is part of this community, as a listener to this henny flynn podcast, the offer is a 20 reduction in the subscription for you. Just use the link, or you can always message me and I can send you the link, and I would love to welcome you there. I think you'll enjoy it. All. Right, my darlings, I am going to send you a hug and a wave, thank you.