First up we’re going to work to uncover your skills.

For some people this is easy. You know what you’re good at!

For others it’s an excruciating process.

If you lack self-confidence, or are just super modest, you might think you aren’t really very good at anything.

Generally this isn’t true. You will have skills but not the confidence to declare them.

Alternatively you might be so good at some things that you no longer think of yourself as good at that thing.

For example just yesterday I fixed my mum’s printer. I don’t consider myself “good at” printers and certainly wouldn’t list it as a skill but I got the issue solved in a few minutes.

Objectively it is a skill that I have, even if not explicitly recognised as such. You’ll have lots of similarly unrecognised skills.

We’re going to use a coaching prompt to elicit our skills from us. Here’s the prompt:

Act as a coach

I often find it hard to know what I'm good at - please coach me to help me curate a list of my skills.
 
Ask me questions about life, work and my hobbies until you have extracted my skills.

Use this in a new chat and ChatGPT will begin a coaching process, much as if you were sitting with a human coach.

Prompt Output

ChatGPT will first ask a broad set of questions:

Choose an area to explore. Don’t worry about doing them all in one go. For example I can respond “Work experience current job : digital marketing, teaching”.

ChatGPT will follow up:

For each area ChatGPT will ask supplemental questions. Answer as much as possible here, using the numbers ChatGPT gave you for simplicity.

Here I respond “Digital Marketing 1 SEO, cold emailing” for the example. I get this response:

Amazing - these are the actual skills involved and I have them all. I just would have struggled to write these out if you point-blank asked me “what are you skills?”

I tell ChatGPT “save these and return to the top level”.

That’ll cause ChatGPT to record these are skills that I have and then it’ll go back to the beginning for me to explore other areas.

Alternatively copy/paste these skills and just restart the process with the same prompt in a new chat.

Continue this process to collect up all your skills from all different facets of your life, work and hobbies.

Warning - this is a long process if you do it properly. But the end result will be a powerful inventory of your skills. We’ll be using this in later steps.