I was recently thinking about skillsets for my self employment as a celebrant and came up with quite a few. With this blog, I hope to be encouraging you to think about your own personal skillsets and the contribution you make to the world with them.

It sounds exhaustive, but for my self employment there are various attributes I need. To be empathetic, to make people feel at ease at often the worst time in their lives, to notice behaviours and adapt your own accordingly, to be non-judgemental, to be highly organised, to be a “people” person even when you don't feel like it sometimes, to be able to multitask and juggle several services at once (with all their individual requirements) in different stages, to be able to hide your own emotions at the appropriate moments (there is the very occasional and rare dislikeable client who you still have to get on with), to remember names (so many of them!!), to feel the fear and go for it, to be a reasonable navigator and a very good time-keeper, to be flexible (but with limits and boundaries too!), to have some history of your own that will actually enable you to sometimes understand what someone is going through and if you don't – to have the empathy to put yourself into that mindset, to be a great listener and an active note-taker when there are distractions (children, dogs, multiple people talking all at once and over each other), to have systems in place that keep you organised (I have checklists, electronic folders and sub-folders), to be creative and do your own marketing (I created my own website, business cards and do a newsletter)... these are just a few and it sounds exhaustive.

Some of these filter over into my personal life. It's good to be organised with personal paperwork but I'm not so great at that... currently wading through reams of stuff about pensions which I hate with a vengeance as it's all SO complicated.

To be a good listener and have empathy is great, however you have to be wary of absorbing too much from other people and then taking on their pain and the worry about them. You have to keep a bit of yourself back and then some more for your own sanity.

To have a sense of humour (even a dark one) is vital as a balance in this wonderful but unique industry of the funeral world.

So enough about me, how about you... what do you feel you bring to this world? What do you bring to others and yourself? You might be surprised at what comes out... I find myself saying (about my second job) that I am ‘just’ a cleaner but that denigrates the role. No one is ever ‘just’ something. We are all important and we all have something to say, to give, to contribute.

Liz

A Moodscope member.