Your Business Tongue

We all grow up (in a working sense) in one industry or another. There is some job somewhere in our impressionable young lives that imprints upon us, and becomes 'what we know'. It's not the first job - cutting grass, babysitting, camp counselor stuff, but rather where we first had to work in a real commercial environment. Where we are first treated as a fellow adult, and given the benefit of the doubt for having some common sense, professionalism and capabilities that are valuable. (clearly, that doesn't happen to everyone, and you know who you are) When we mature in a work sense it has the effect of stamping us - defining our psyche and helping us establish who we are in a workplace vision of ourselves. All well and good if this idea I'm writing about was personal psychology, but I think there's more to it than that.

This first (proper) job imprints upon us it's business model, major players and customer needs - it evolves to become "our industry". By default when we go looking for the next place to work to pursue career advancement or take account of some physical move, we remain in 'our industry' as that's where our skills and contacts reside. Later in life - days or years - we find ourselves doing other things outside of our industry, and realize that there's a whole new set of variables, customer desires and competitor pressures. There's probably a new business model that needs to be learned, and hopefully, there's some advantages that you can bring from your previous experience to this new role - allowing some form of innovation in a great or small sense from what you knew and applied in that other context. You may love the new environment, but whether it fits or not, you will miss the original industry - it's your business tongue - the one you can easily speak, move within and understand the dynamics of almost intrinsically. Sometime we go back, and sometimes we elect to continue to leverage what we learned before, and simply value the experience.

That last bit - experience - is the key I think. After-all, none of us is anymore than the sum of our experiences and its what makes us individuals and interestingly unique. My own character traits, exposed over my experience is what has defined who I am - what each of us are. So look at your experience and specifically your business tongue and ask yourself - What can you bring to your current situation from what you grew up as a worker knowing ? Your personal uniqueness makes this a value that you are probably pretty singularly able to offer.