Skills mirror exercise

This tool helps you think about your skills through people you know in different areas of life.

  • Duration: approx. 20 minutes

  • Participants: individually or with others
  • What it is suitable for: thinking about your skills from different perspectives, using other people’s skills as a mirror

We all have lots of knowledge, skills, capabilities and strengths! We accumulate them at work, in daily life, in our free time, hobbies, human relationships – in practically all kinds of situations. All skills are valuable, but we are sometimes unable to recognise our own skills.

We may be blind to our strengths or overly self-critical. Especially in competitive situations in life, we tend to focus only on what we cannot do. Sometimes, we may not recognise our skills as skills unless we have a certificate for it, or if someone else is better at it than we are.

Nevertheless, we all have skills that we sometimes don’t even realise we possess. Other people are like mirrors that help you recognise your skills.

This tool helps you think about your skills through people you know in different areas of life.

Instructions:

  1. List three people who know you well.
  2. First write a list of things that those people are good at. They can be any kinds of strengths that those people possess – skills, knowledge or attitudes.
  3. Now write down a list of things that you have helped those people with or given them advice on.
  4. In the first list, underline the items that you are also good at, and add them to your list of your strengths.
  5. To finish, you can share the strengths you listed for each person with them to “pay it forward”.

Also check out the other tools for recognising your skills on the Reveal Your Skills page.