Sharpen The Overlooked Skills

In my day job and personal live, I am always conscious of skills that are essential to succeeding in and out of the workplace. These skills are often overlooked but they are becoming more important as the world we live in changes.

Story telling

We all have a story to tell and people are more engaged when we share stories that they can relate to. We connect with people better as we learn to tell more impactful stories in a fun, inspirational and provocative way.

Thinking on your feet

The ability to think on your feet is one of those skills that can be life saving, save you from embarrassing situations or help you recover a situation where you’ve put your foot in your mouth. At a recent food festival, I greeted the audience assuming it was still morning but my slot was at 12 noon. I recovered the situation by telling them I had been at the event since before 10am and with the rain dominating instead of the sunshine, it still felt like morning and everyone laughed.

As a speaker, trainer, presenter and content creator, I always find myself in situations like this where the most important skill is to be able to use the challenges in the moment to diffuse what could easily escalate to a stressful situation. Many times even with the best of intentions, the technology or the sound system fails; you have the options to allow this to make you frazzled or you think on your feet and find ways to make the issue a part of your act and engage your audience in a different way.

Emotional intelligence

Understanding and managing emotions, both one’s own and those of others, is key to building strong relationships, effective leadership, and successful communication.

A lack of understanding of your own emotions and not managing them on time could result in frustrations for those around you in the workplace and outside.

Taking time to understand where others are coming from and the uniqueness of their perspectives will make us more receptive to understanding and factoring in the opinion of others. This helps us to communicate with empathy. Clear and empathetic communication helps in building relationships, resolving conflicts, conveying ideas and even delivering bad news.

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving

The ability to analyze situations, identify problems, and generate innovative solutions is highly valued. Critical thinking involves logical reasoning, creativity, and a willingness to question assumptions.

In some cultures around the world, children and young people are meant to be seen and not heard; instead of mentoring them and guiding their youthful exuberance, their mistakes and lack of experiences are often used as reasons to ignore their views.

On the flip side, people who have been suppressed or oppressed and raised in a way that supports the belief that they are inferior, have nothing to contribute to society or they are meant to implicitly trust political or spiritual leaders and the adults around them will never deploy their abilities to critically think through and challenge some assumptions or thoughts.

Sadly a lot of physical, mental, emotional, spiritual or psychological abuse happen because people refuse to critically think for themselves and challenge the status quo.

Problem solving is what we all get paid for regardless of what our business names, day jobs or job titles say. We are there to solve problems that people, businesses or other organisations have and the wealthiest people have learnt to tap into this by building business models that are focused on solving the biggest problems that their societies face.

Cultural Competence

As societies become more diverse and interconnected, having an understanding and appreciation of different cultures, beliefs, and perspectives is important for social harmony and effective global and personal interactions.

Growth mindset and Continuous improvement

Growth mindset is a word that we constantly hear about but for me it’s just the evolution of continuous improvement and a desire to keep learning from experiences and desiring to be better today than you were yesterday.

Lifelong learning is essential for keeping up with changing technologies, industries, demographics and world at large. A growth mindset and the willingness to acquire new knowledge and skills are highly valuable and will remain so.

Resilience and Stress Management

The ability to cope with challenges, setbacks, and stress is important for maintaining mental and emotional well-being. The whole world has been through a number of natural and man-made disasters over the past few years and listening to the news often makes one feel that the bad news are not abating.

The ability to manage our responses to these and other personal situations is an essential skill for everyone.

I would be interested to hear about any other skills that you think are overlooked but needed. Thanks for reading and sharing my post with others. See you next week.