MBA Voices: The Art Of Reinvention: The Myth Of Starting From Scratch

In my first ever MBA interview, I was asked about my former career as an opera singer. The interviewer wanted to know which skills would be applicable to the MBA journey.

Confidently, I gave a well-rehearsed answer. I repackaged my strengths to make sense in the context of the question. I explained that opera singers are constantly working in teams, so I knew how to be a strong team player.

Without missing a beat, the interviewer asked me what other transferable skills I had.

I paused, thinking about what else I could add. Years spent alone in a practice room, I explained, had left me capable of enormous self-discipline and focus.

Again, she pressed me. “What other qualities could I rely on from my time on stage?”

I tried again. Years of auditions – with roughly three rejections for every success – had taught me resilience.

She looked me dead in the eye and said: “You’re missing some obvious ones.”

There was no malice in it. If anything, it seemed to be a comment of genuine surprise. But that statement has stayed with me ever since. It wasn’t until I was halfway through my MBA that I began to understand what she meant.

MISTAKING LEARNING FOR STARTING OVER

You see, I began the MBA process unconsciously believing that I needed to be quiet, listen, learn, and act as a sponge. After all, there was so much knowledge surrounding me. I was coming from an unconventional background. I had spent my career in rehearsal rooms and on stages, not in deciphering Excel sheets or building pitch decks in a corporate office.  There was an enormous amount I didn’t know, and I knew that. Somewhere along the way, however, I had translated “There is a lot I need to learn” into “I am starting from scratch.”

The same mentality had followed me when I started my business two years before beginning the MBA. At the time, I thought I was building it using what I had learned about my industry, rather than what I had learned from working within it.

In hindsight, I realise it was an amalgamation of the two. Knowing an industry isn’t enough to build something that sticks. I was relying on capabilities developed over years without recognising them as strengths at all. And when I sat in that MBA interview, I hadn’t even factored the experience of building a business into my assessment of what I brought to the table.

Of course, entering a new environment requires curiosity. There is immense value in being humble enough to recognise what you don’t know and open enough to learn from the people around you.

But being open to learning and knowing your own worth are not mutually exclusive.

There is a difference between walking into a room ready to learn and walking into it assuming everyone else has something to teach you while you have nothing to teach them.

WHAT THE COHORT TAUGHT ME ABOUT MYSELF

During my MBA, I have been a part of teams of almost every shape and size. This included an appointed year-long study group of six people, each of a different nationality, a core feature of the LBS ecosystem. In mine we represented Colombia, Indonesia, the United States, England, India and South Africa. Alongside this, I have worked in a range of diverse teams, competing in case competitions, one which was sponsored and judged by All Nippon Airways, and delivering external consulting projects for major UK companies, including working with an LBS appointed team for three-months with ITV.

Working closely with people from completely different industries, cultures, and professional backgrounds has taught me an enormous amount about them, and, unexpectedly, an enormous amount about myself.

By observing the things I do differently from others, I have started to understand what my transferable skills (and weaknesses) actually are.

They go far deeper than the answers I gave in that interview.

Some of the common characteristics within an MBA cohort are incredibly familiar to anyone who has survived a performance career or another equally competitive environment: determination, ambition, self-confidence, and an unrelenting work ethic.

But some of the more interesting skills I brought from the arts took me longer to recognise.

Rejection and criticism, for example, don’t frighten me. They were such a normal part of my previous career that I learned not only how to tolerate them, but how to embrace them. Performers receive direction and public criticism constantly. You have to take feedback, adapt quickly, and try again, often in front of the person who has just told you what you did wrong.

Performance also teaches you to function under pressure. If something goes wrong on stage, there is no opportunity to pause the performance, convene a meeting, or develop an action plan. You react, problem-solve in the moment, and keep going.

There is the willingness to take risks and to go against the grain. There is creativity, not simply in the artistic sense, but in approaching processes from unusual directions. And there is a deep level of care and attention to detail that comes from spending months refining something that an audience may experience for only a few minutes.

It is almost embarrassingly clear to me now that I failed to mention one of the qualities most deeply embedded in the life of a performer: the ability to communicate. That translates directly into business. It affects how you speak with senior colleagues and clients, how you present ideas, how you read a room, and how you hold people’s attention when you need them to listen.

Communication, along with many of the other skills I have mentioned, has been an asset throughout my MBA. In core classes, we are regularly expected to present our work with little preparation, contribute to class discussions and debates, and pitch our ideas. I have often found myself nominated to speak on behalf of the team. One thing I have learned is that even the strongest work can fall short if you cannot explain it simply and confidently.

I saw this first-hand when I was nominated to co-present in a pitch competition. Every member of our team developed an idea before we selected one to pitch as a group. Ultimately, we chose an idea that wasn’t mine, yet my team chose me to present it alongside its originator.

I had to understand someone else’s thinking well enough to distil it into its clearest form, communicate it confidently, and convince an audience of its value. While we didn’t progress to the final round, our pitch was highly commended and led to a lengthy discussion with the judges about where the idea could go next.

It was exactly the kind of skill I had failed to recognise. After years of performing, communicating someone else’s ideas to an audience felt so natural that I hadn’t thought to count it as a strength.

HOW TO FIND YOUR OWN STRENGTHS

So, the important question becomes this: how do you identify your own transferable strengths?

The obvious starting point is self-reflection. Think deeply about what you feel most confident doing, what you enjoy, and where you shine. Ask colleagues, friends, managers, and family members what they think you do particularly well. Ask them where they think you differ from others.

Those are useful exercises. But there is another one that has taught me far more: put yourself in different teams and observe.

There are many ways to participate in teams. Join in a professional capacity. Volunteer. Play a sport. Enter a competition. Work on something alongside friends. Put yourself in environments where other people are trying to solve the same problem as you and pay attention to the differences.

Then ask yourself five questions:

1. What do I do naturally that other people seem to find difficult?

The things that come easily to us are often the things we are worst at identifying as strengths. If you’ve been doing something for ten years, you may assume everybody can do it. They often can’t.

2. What do I consistently care about that others don’t?

Perhaps you are always the person checking the details. Maybe you’re thinking about how customers will respond while everyone else is thinking about the numbers. Potentially, you’re the person asking whether the idea is actually feasible, or the one who notices when somebody in the team hasn’t spoken. Those patterns tell you something.

3. How do I react when things go wrong?

Look beyond what you do when everything is working. What happens when a deadline changes, somebody criticises your work, your idea is rejected, or a presentation goes wrong? Our default reactions, shaped by our previous experiences, often reveal themselves most clearly under pressure.

4. What feedback keeps following me?

Think beyond formal performance reviews. What do people repeatedly ask you for help with? What do teammates thank you for? What responsibilities somehow keep finding their way to you? When you receive repeated feedback from different people, that acts as valuable insight.

5. What did my previous environment require me to become good at?

An opera singer doesn’t only learn to sing. A teacher doesn’t only learn to teach. A founder doesn’t only learn to build. Don’t just ask, “What did I do?” Ask, “What did doing that repeatedly train me to do?” Think about what your environment required from you beyond the technical job itself, whether that was thinking quickly under pressure, adapting to constant feedback, managing different personalities, or communicating complex ideas simply. Then ask where those same skills could create value in a completely different environment.

COMPARISON AS OBSERVATION

Why do these questions matter?

Well, working with people whose backgrounds were completely different from mine gave me something incredibly useful: a comparison point.

I know they say comparison is the thief of joy. When it comes to identifying your strengths, however, I think comparison can be incredibly useful. Not comparison in the sense of asking whether you are better or worse than the person beside you, but comparison as observation.

What do you do differently? What do you prioritise? Where are you faster or more precise than others?

I discovered the value of this kind of comparison quite starkly during a consulting project. My instinct was to keep my team updated on what I was doing and where I was with my work. When others were much quieter, I found it stressful and sometimes assumed that silence meant things weren’t moving. What I hadn’t realised was that we simply had different working styles: I naturally create visibility around my work, while others preferred to work independently and update the group only when they had something concrete to share. It was only when our manager advised us to stay more connected as a team that I understood what I did instinctively. Creating visibility and keeping the team aligned wasn’t just my working style; it was actually a strength.

So, once you start noticing similar differences in yourself, work backwards: why am I good at this, why do I care, and where did I learn to behave this way?

That is often where your real transferable skills are hiding.

If I could go back into that interview knowing what I know now, I might arrive with a longer, better-rehearsed list. However, that misses the point. The most important thing is that I would go in knowing myself better.

This extends beyond my own interview. Interviews have a habit of abandoning the script. You can prepare twenty examples and still be asked a question that requires a twenty-first answer. When that happens, resist the instinct to panic.

Pause. There is nothing wrong with saying, “That’s a really interesting question. Let me think about that for a moment.”

Listen carefully to why the interviewer is pushing you. If they ask you the same question three times, as mine did, take it as information. They may be inviting you to think about yourself differently. They are likely trying to help you to see what you may have overlooked.

Changing careers can make you feel like a beginner. In many ways, you are one. There will be new terminology to learn, new knowledge to acquire, and new people around you with years of experience you don’t have. But being a beginner isn’t the same as starting from scratch. You still bring everything that came before with you. The challenge is learning how to see it.

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Denira Coleman began her career as a professional opera singer, spending a decade performing principal roles internationally to audiences of up to 2,500. She went on to found DSC for Artists, a digital growth consultancy for artists and performers, before pursuing an MBA at London Business School. At LBS, she is President of the Entrepreneurship Club, a Student Ambassador, and a Community Representative. She has also taken to the TEDx stage to speak about AI and human creativity. Her writing explores career reinvention, learning, leadership, and the experiences that shape how we work and grow. Connect with her on LinkedIn here.

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