Understanding and talking about your unique, marketable skill set with clarity and confidence is essential to successfully navigating your professional path. But what if no one has taught you how to do this?

She's probably said it before, but in the podcast This is Working with Daniel Roth, Brené Brown states that when it comes to your career "nothing is wasted."

That's absolutely true, but it's also a bit more complex than those words imply. I know this, because I used to take the concept that 'everything you've learned is useful' a bit too far.

Here are some myths that have been fully busted.

One of my clients is in the process of earning her graduate degree in organizational leadership and learning.

She’s taking a course this summer on leadership development, and she shared with me that the course materials included a list of 45 must-have core skills for leaders. She wondered about my take on the topic.

My eyes bugged out of my head for a second.

I definitely have a take: 45 core skills for leaders is an impossible standard. It sets all leaders up for failure. It’s unwieldy and overwhelming. And it puts leadership in a place where it will always be just out of reach.

My own leadership philosophy took a while to crystallize, but it's quite simple…

I graduated with a liberal arts degree and absolutely zero understanding of how to frame my skill set. My skills felt like a useless, random, confusing tangle of vague concepts that failed to point me in a clear direction.

It took years for me to understand that, even as someone without specialized expertise, I did have a solid skill set that was marketable, transferable, and valuable—what I didn't have were the right tools to help me articulate and understand it.

Read more about the skills are actually the most valuable and tools in your toolbox—and the ones that you can most easily take with you from job to job.