New year, new skills
Dec 29, 2023 3:30 pm
Happy Friday!
In my house, the holiday season has been full of family, activities, and food. Not rest, though. Never rest.
Still, I thought I'd write a quick newsletter to say happy holidays and happy new year!
Now, I personally hate New Year's resolutions. Not so much the enthusiasm for change that comes with them but the inevitable disappointment that comes with not following through.
There are plenty of reasons why most of us fail with resolutions, and those reasons are the same ones that many organizations fail at any large change as well. Everything from not understanding the forces at work to overcommitting to not having a clear sense of completion is missing from our resolutions as they are at our workplace.
So, I want to put a twist on this and suggest that in your professional life, instead of making a typical New Year's resolution, make a skill acquisition.
Skill acquisition is a lot easier than a resolution, and by focusing on a skill, you can avoid that disappointment that comes along with most resolutions.
Here are the steps I want to recommend:
- Pick a skill in your professional life. If you want a recommendation I'll say meeting facilitation.
- Imagine what being highly skilled would be like and how you'd know you reached that skill.
- Walk that end state back further and further until you have a sort of checkpoint that you might reach in 1 to 3 weeks.
- Write down this checkpoint and the very end one. You can add a few more, but these will change.
- Pick the simplest thing that can possibly work to meet that first checkpoint, but focus on action.
- Start with 15 minutes a day to devote to acquiring this skill.
The idea here is that you are creating a small, flexible plan that can help you improve a specific skill. I'm not talking about some big life change, just skill improvement. By making some very small and consistent checkpoints, you can experience feedback that keeps you going. By spending 15 minutes a day, you're creating a habit of trying something new or learning. By picking a simple plan, you're avoiding any imaginary barriers to starting and making progress. By focusing on action, you'll get practice with that skill instead of only knowledge of it.
As for me, my skill focus will be in marketing. That's still a bit too broad, but I'll be going through the steps above myself to acquire a new skill in 2024. What skill do you want to acquire or improve?
Sincerely,
Ryan
Here's my weekly update for December 29th, 2023...
I was sitting down having my coffee this morning and thinking of all the stuff that goes on in most companies that I simply don’t have to deal with, and one thing came to the forefront of my mind.
Today, I want to write about one of those lessons leaders learn, often the hard way, which is not always healthy, and what I do about it: Information brokerage.
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”