The Hidden Skills You Didn't Know You Had
Updated: Sep 1
THE HIDDEN SKILLS SERIES · PART 1
How Your Natural Abilities Can Strengthen Your Resume—and Your Career
Written by Kristi Windish, in collaboration with Jenna Bottlfsen of Wallace Associates
At True Compass, I spend my days helping students and adults discover their natural abilities and find careers that fit who they are. But understanding your strengths is only half the equation. You also have to be able to communicate them—on a resume, in an interview, to a hiring manager who's never met you and has about six seconds to decide if you're worth a second look.
That second part isn't really my world. So I reached out to my colleague, Jenna Bottolfsen, owner of Wallace Associates, who has spent over 25 years in HR and leadership development across the Wichita corporate landscape, helping people navigate career transitions and land their next opportunity. I wanted her take on a question I hear from clients constantly: how do you turn the natural abilities that make you unique into skills an employer immediately recognizes?
This post is the result of that conversation—her expertise in resumes and interviews, paired with what I see every day in the Highlands Ability Battery results of the students and adults I work with.
Skills vs. Natural Abilities
Most people, when asked what they're good at, will list what they've learned to do. Excel. Public speaking. Managing a budget. Those are skills, and they're worth listing. But very few people can explain why they're good at certain kinds of work in the first place—and that's the piece that's often missing.
That deeper layer is natural ability: the way your brain is wired to process information, solve problems, and take in the world. I use the Highlands Ability Battery in my practice specifically because it measures those underlying patterns instead of asking people what they enjoy or believe about themselves. And what I see, over and over, is that a person's strongest skills usually grow directly out of one of these natural abilities.
Someone who naturally sees patterns often develops real strength in strategic planning. Someone who naturally organizes information tends to become excellent at project management. Someone who generates ideas easily is often drawn to innovation, marketing, or entrepreneurship. The skill is the visible part. The ability is what's underneath it, quietly doing the work.
Why We Overlook Our Own Strengths
Here's something I've noticed after years of working with students and adults: the things that come most naturally to us are usually the things we're worst at recognizing as strengths. We assume everyone thinks the way we do, so we don't think to mention it.
If you naturally simplify complicated information for people, you might think, doesn't everyone do that? If you instinctively notice when something's inefficient, you might just call yourself picky. If people naturally open up to you, you probably think you're "just friendly." But these are often exactly the strengths an employer is looking for—and because they're effortless for you, they're the easiest to leave off a resume entirely.
Where Jenna's Work and Mine Overlap
Jenna shared something with me that lines up with a pattern I see constantly from the other direction. In her experience helping people through career transitions, candidates tend to describe their job duties instead of the value they actually brought to a role. I see the flip side of that same problem: clients who can tell me exactly what they did, but have never connected it back to the ability that made them good at it in the first place.
The strongest resumes do both. They name the accomplishment, and they connect it to the natural strength behind it. "Managed projects" tells an employer very little. "Coordinated multiple stakeholders to launch a new initiative ahead of schedule" tells them what you actually did—and if you know that your natural strength is organizing complex information, you can say so with confidence instead of guessing at generic buzzwords like "detail-oriented" or "strategic."
Finding These Strengths in Your Own Experience
You don't need a decade of work history to find your natural abilities showing up. Students often discover them through school projects, athletics, theater, part-time jobs, or volunteering. Adults find them in parenting, community leadership, caregiving, or a side business that never made it to a resume because it "wasn't a real job."
One of the most common mistakes I see is people dismissing that kind of experience because it wasn't paid. But employers care about what you accomplished and how you think—not necessarily where you did it.
A Better Question to Ask Yourself
Next time you're updating your resume or getting ready for an interview, instead of asking what have I done, try asking:
What kinds of problems do people naturally come to me to solve?
What comes easily to me that seems to be a struggle for other people?
What strengths have followed me from school, to volunteering, to every job I've had since?
The answers usually reveal skills you've been using for years without ever putting a name to them. Once you understand your natural abilities, writing a resume stops feeling like guessing and starts feeling like translation—you're simply putting language to strengths you already have.
Want to Dig Deeper?
Whether you're a high school student choosing a path, a college student preparing for internships, or an adult considering a change, understanding what comes naturally to you is the foundation everything else gets built on. At True Compass, that's where we start. And once you know what you're working with, Jenna
can help you take it the rest of the way—into a resume, an interview, and a career move you feel confident about.
EXPLORE THE HIDDEN SKILLS SERIES
Part 1 · DISCOVER
Why the things that come naturally to you may be some of your most valuable workplace strengths.
Part 2 · UNDERSTAND
Learn what aptitude results reveal about how you naturally think, solve problems and contribute.
Part 3 · COMMUNICATE (Coming Soon)
From Natural Ability to Workplace Skill
Learn how to translate your aptitudes into resume language and find experiences that demonstrate your skills.
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