Skill Up: Why and How?

Tried to explain why we need to skill up everyday and how efficiently it is possible.

We all have read about self-education, about moving through the levels of expertise and skills, practicing them more effectively and efficiently but not much so far on how to choose what you should to learn.

Today’s university students prioritize what they learn based on what they, or their parents, think will earn the most money. The unanimous myth is that outside of a few areas, it’s hard to earn a good living. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

“The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways.” — Robert Greene.

At a reasonable level of ability, in most skills you can make enough amount of money to make a comfortable living as long as you think beyond the limited mindset and outside the box of what your peers and parents are confining themselves to.

A skill only needs to meet a few criteria to have the potential to become your career:

• It needs to be a skill that pays money in a reasonable way.
• It must be a skill you enjoy learning.
• It must be a skill you can start developing on your own.

To become who you really want to become, you’re going to need to change, and change doesn’t happen overnight. Two to three months from now though, that’s reasonable.

Skill#1: Learn to Learn

Organizations today are in constant flux. Industries are consolidating, new business models are emerging, new technologies are being developed, and consumer behaviors are evolving. For executives, the ever-increasing pace of change can be especially demanding. It forces them to understand and quickly respond to big shifts in the way companies operate and how work must get done. In the words of Arie de Geus, a business theorist,

“The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage.”

Why bother having to learn something if you had the choice for any superpower, why not go straight to knowing everything?

Because learning is the fun part. Knowing everything already would be a boring life. Have you ever seen how a 4-year-old walks into a park? Now compare that to a 40-year-old.

If you can learn how to learn, you can apply it to any other skill. Want to learn programming? Apply your ability to learn. Want to learn French? Apply your ability to learn.

I am not talking about relaxed armchair or even structured classroom learning. I am talking about resisting the bias against doing new things, scanning the horizon for growth opportunities, and pushing yourself to acquire radically different capabilities — while still performing your job. That requires a willingness to experiment and become a novice again and again, which can be an extremely discomforting notion for most of us.

It’s easy to see aspiration as either there or not: You want to learn a new skill or you don’t; you have ambition and motivation or you lack them. But great learners can raise their aspiration level — and that’s key, because everyone is guilty of sometimes resisting development that is critical to success.

Think about the last time your company adopted a new approach — overhauled a reporting system, replaced a CRM platform, revamped the supply chain. Were you eager to go along? I doubt it. Your initial response was probably to justify not learning. When confronted with new learning, this is often our first roadblock: We focus on the negative and unconsciously reinforce our lack of aspiration.

When we do want to learn something, we focus on the positive — what we’ll gain from learning it — and envision a happy future in which we’re reaping those rewards. That propels us into action. Researchers have found that shifting your focus from challenges to benefits is a good way to increase your aspiration to do initially unappealing things. For example, when Nicole Detling, a psychologist at the University of Utah, encouraged aerialists and speed skaters to picture themselves benefiting from a particular skill, they were much more motivated to practice it.

“Focusing on benefits, not challenges, is a good way to increase your aspiration.”

Skill#2: Curiosity

Curiosity is what makes us try something until we can do it, or think about something until we understand it. Great learners retain this childhood drive, or regain it through another application of self-talk. Instead of focusing on and reinforcing initial disinterest in a new subject, they learn to ask themselves “curious questions” about it and follow those questions up with actions. Carol Sansone, a psychology researcher, has found, for example, that people can increase their willingness to tackle necessary tasks by thinking about how they could do the work differently to make it more interesting. In other words, they change their self-talk from This is boring to I wonder if I could…?

You can employ the same strategy in your working life by noticing the language you use in thinking about things that already interest you — How…? Why…? I wonder…? — and drawing on it when you need to become curious. Then take just one step to answer a question you’ve asked yourself: Read an article, query an expert, find a teacher, join a group — whatever feels easiest.

“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.” — Albert Einstein

Skill#3: Change Adoption Capability

Once we become good or even excellent at some things, we rarely want to go back to being not good at other things. Yes, we’re now taught to embrace experimentation and “fast failure” at work. But we’re also taught to play to our strengths. So the idea of being bad at something for weeks or months; feeling awkward and slow; having to ask “dumb,” “I-don’t-know-what-you’re-talking-about” questions; and needing step-by-step guidance again and again is extremely scary. Great learners allow themselves to be vulnerable enough to accept that beginner state. In fact, they become reasonably comfortable in it — by managing their self-talk.

Generally, when we’re trying something new and doing badly at it, we think terrible thoughts: I hate this. I’m such an idiot. I’ll never get this right. This is so frustrating! That static in our brains leaves little bandwidth for learning. The ideal mindset for a beginner is both vulnerable and balanced:

“I’m going to be bad at this to start with, because I’ve never done it before. AND I know I can learn to do it over time.”

I know a sales manager who was recently tapped to run the Asia-Pacific region for his company. He was having a hard time acclimating to living overseas and working with colleagues from other cultures, and he responded by leaning on his sales expertise rather than acknowledging his beginner status in the new environment. I helped him recognize his resistance to being a cultural novice, and he was able to shift his self-talk from “This is so uncomfortable — I’ll just focus on what I already know to I have a lot to learn about that cultures. I’m a quick study, so I’ll be able to pick it up.” He told me it was an immediate relief: Simply acknowledging his novice status made him feel less foolish and more relaxed. He started asking the necessary questions, and soon he was seen as open, interested, and beginning to understand his new environment.

Why to learn something new.

1. They are useful:

I will start by saying there are (almost) no useless skills. Everything we aim to learn has a purpose.

I use and improve my new skills pretty much every day now. The progress has become organic. I picked up storytelling, public speaking, investing smartly, photography, non-fiction writing, journalism, and much more.

2. Discover Hidden Talents or Passions:

I didn’t aim to write. I didn’t aim to take photos. Yet I’m now getting paid to do both.

If I didn’t try them as new skills, I would never have known that 1. I’d be good enough at them, and 2. I’d really grow to like them.

We pigeonhole ourselves into specific things that we are/do. I’m a business analyst. Most of the skills I learn are counter-intuitive to that.

3. The More You Know the Faster You Learn:

For me that is the best reason. Learning constantly, at a faster pace. There’s (almost) nothing I enjoy more in life than learning. It’s such a great feeling when you reach a level of mastery you never knew you could reach before.

Ways to sharpen any skill.

Mastery doesn’t seem to come from genius, it comes from hard work. Building mastery in a skill takes practice, and not just any sort of practice, it takes challenging, critiqued practice.

* Accept where you’re at:

I recently started to work on two very different skills that I have no experience with, Python learning and French language.

With python, I was able to tell myself that I am a complete beginner, no different than a preschooler. So when my work looked like a preschooler’s I laughed and asked my colleagues who have knowledge about it, how to make it better. This carefree attitude allowed me to evaluate my work as it was, be honest with what needed to be changed, and delight in what was actually accomplished.

French was different, it felt more academic. While Python was my first high-tech programming lesson, French certainly wasn’t my first academic class. Normally I do well in classes, but not so hot in foreign languages. So when I couldn’t perform my mind didn’t go down the “you’re just in kindergarten” route of the python classes, it instead started wondering what was wrong with me and making up excuses for why I’m so bad at languages.

I got incredibly stressed out in class and lost hold of information I totally knew, which led to embarrassment and more stress. That’s what stress does, it shuts down portions of our brain and makes us less functional.

The thing is I was completely new to both subjects, the difference was I was willing to accept this in one and couldn’t in the other. Whenever we start a new skill we really need to be honest with where we are and allow ourselves to be humbled by the process of our skill mastery. This will cut down on your stress and allow you to amaze yourself when you start to improve your skills.

* Challenge yourself with deliberate practice:

If you want to get good at something you need to work at it, and not just what you’re good at, you need to work at what stretches you. Constantly challenge yourself to step into further unknowns. This is how you stay fresh and young at heart, not to mention constantly growing, you seek out what you don’t know and step into the role of a child learning it through endless curiosity. It’s also a great practice at remaining humble, even while you accumulate greater and greater proficiency.

Here are some other tips to maximize your practice:

• Practice in the Morning
• Don’t Practice too long
• Shoot for quality over quantity

* Start:

Whatever you choose to do, choose to start it. Skill development requires practice and practice starts with you. Don’t worry about your proficiency or how much time it’s going to take, just dive in and get started. Put the tools we’ve talked about to use and get someone to help guide you, or plug into a community who is also practicing the skill for some peer critiques.

You’ll be surprised how fast a bit of practice can affect your skills.

Conclusion

What skill or behavior do you want to change? Not tomorrow, but today.

Take a minute and identify something you want to change in your life and already know clearly the next step to take. Don’t pick something you need to research or have to put off, pick something you have already done the research for. Something you can start practicing for just 3–5–10 minutes today.

The ability to acquire new skills and knowledge quickly and continually is crucial to success in a world of rapid change. If you don’t currently have the aspiration, self-awareness, curiosity, and vulnerability to be an effective learner, these simple tools can help you get there.

“Be honest with yourself, challenge yourself and seek good coaching and you’ll be amazed at how quickly you can develop your new skill.”