The Skill You Already Have

After I retired I didn't know what I was good at besides going in circles on ice.

That's not false modesty. That's what almost 20 yrs of singular focus does -- my entire skill set was optimized for a frozen oval track. I could read ice conditions the way a meteorologist reads weather patterns, could feel the exact moment to accelerate through a corner, knew the breathing pattern for every distance. None of it seemed remotely useful anywhere else.

So I did what any confused 27-year-old w/ too many frequent flyer miles would do -- I fled to Asia. Buddhist monks in Thailand, rice fields in China, onsen baths across Japan. Searching for something I couldn't even name.

Came back and said yes to everything. Rare earth minerals, cross-border investments, manufacturing, real estate, infrastructure, mining operations, tech startups. Industries I knew nothing about. Walking into meetings w/ investment bankers and private equity partners feeling like an imposter in an expensive suit, reading whitepapers on the plane, Googling terms in the bathroom before the next session.

But something started happening in those rooms that I didn't expect.

I'd be sitting across from a founder pitching a deal and I'd catch something -- a tell, a hesitation, a moment where the numbers didn't match the body language. Not bc I understood the industry. Bc I'd spent 15 yrs studying competitors frame by frame, looking for tells, timing shifts, the micro-movements that predict what someone's about to do. That same wiring was doing work in rooms that had nothing to do w/ skating.

Or I'd be in a high-stakes negotiation where the room was tense & everyone was posturing, and I'd realize my nervous system wasn't reacting the way everyone else's was. Skating in front of 20,000 people w/ your entire career riding on a blade edge -- that recalibrates something permanently. The worst-case scenario in a boardroom just doesn't register the same when the worst-case scenario used to be a crash at 35mph on ice w/ no padding.

And the preparation -- I used to visualize every possible race scenario before I stepped on ice. Every crash, every pass, every position change. When I started doing the same thing w/ business pitches, mapping out every objection, every question, every way it could go sideways, people thought I was some kind of natural. I wasn't natural at anything. I was just using the same system I'd used since I was 14.

What are you good at that you don't even consider a skill?

The thing I've noticed in conversations w/ people going through transitions -- athletes, executives, anyone whose identity was tied to a role that no longer exists -- is almost everyone undervalues what they already know how to do. You get so focused on the specific context where you built your skills that you can't see the skills themselves.

I was so stuck on "I'm a speed skater" I couldn't see "I'm someone who's spent 20 yrs learning how to prepare obsessively, read patterns under pressure, and perform when it counts." The second description is infinitely more transferable than the first.

I think about this when I'm sitting w/ someone who just went through a career change or a layoff or a retirement they didn't plan for, and they're doing the same thing I did -- fixating on the context they lost instead of the capabilities they built inside it.

I spent years after retirement thinking I needed to build entirely new skills for a new life. What I needed was to recognize the ones I'd already built and point them somewhere different. The capabilities that made me an Olympic champion weren't skating-specific -- they were human-specific, and they'd been transferable the entire time. I just couldn't see it bc I was too close.

Took me longer than it should have. But the real gold was already there, the whole time, just aimed at a frozen oval in Colorado Springs.

I write about this in Hard Pivot -- the messy version of reinvention, not the motivational poster version.

--AAO