These Four Soft Skills Are Missing From Your Training

If you're feeling overwhelmed of, I don't have time to learn, I don't have time to read books, I don't have time to learn a whole new topic from scratch. Here's what will help you. One of a learning model is to think of your learning efforts like a tree. - I'm Dr. Grace Lee, and you're listening to the Career Revisionist podcast for executives, team leaders, people and managers, and ambitious professionals from all backgrounds. It's for those among us who can't stay stagnant and admire anyone who demonstrates exponential growth. We challenge ourselves to step out of our comfort zone and into higher levels of leadership. And we are determined to rise confidently in our industry so that we can make our greatest contribution using our knowledge and expertise. We have worked hard to become great at what we do, but only so we can achieve the goals that give our lives meaning and purpose. And while we persevere through a college education to get us here with our technical skills, we understand that to get to the next level where we desire to be, it requires a different kind of skills. We're not comfortable with failure because we experience satisfaction when we are advancing. And while some of us work well under pressure, all of us perform the best when we are part of a winning team. And instead of just hoping to achieve what's important to us, we choose to become a more optimized version of ourselves to make it happen. We're not just A players, we are A plus players, and we are the source of consistent output that makes positive advancements in the world around us. (whooshing) Do you feel overwhelmed with learning new skills? But do you understand the importance of learning skills to be successful? Well, in this video, what I'm gonna share with you are the most important soft skills to learn to be successful in your career path. And I'm gonna be sharing them from my experience as an executive career coach to team leaders and senior executives in corporations. Soft skill number one is prudent communication. Let's talk about what that means. Prudence means it is situationally and personally appropriate. So when you are in communications with one or more individuals, it is important to understand the context of the situation and that your communication match that context. It is important to understand the people that are listening to your communications, whether that be one to one or one to many, that you understand their needs, you understand their frustrations, you understand their perspectives, you understand their values, and you understand their psychodemographics as a result of that, and your communications matches what you're understanding of as that person. So this is what it means to have prudent communications that your audience understands and to resonate with you as well. And that your message matches the audience, it matches the situation, and it matches the purpose of that communication. So that's prudent communication. Now, when it comes to having prudent communication, a lot of the focuses on what you say and how you say it. But equally as important is to being able to listen to the people you are in conversations with. And this is the practice of active listening. Active listening does carry weight because when you are actively listening in your communications, you are getting that real time feedback. And you're also demonstrating your understanding, you're also demonstrating your resonance, you're also demonstrating your support of your audience as well. And it goes a long way to being able to articulate and demonstrate that you are an effective communicator. So this is just as important as what to say and how to say it is active listening. And so all of this constitutes prudent communications. Self-scale number two is learning agility. Now being agile means having the flexibility and the adaptability and the resilience as well. So this applies to learning. So what does it look like? If you have learning agility, it first of all means that you have a hunger to learn and you have a hunger to learn for the sake of mastery. It's not just to learn about a topic. It's not just to learn so that you can regurgitate what you have learned verbatim. That's not the purpose of learning. The purpose of learning is to be masterful, to be able to do something with limited conscious resources. That's the definition of mastery. And so this requires learning agility. Now let's look at this. If you are an expert already in a particular domain, let's say that you are trained in life sciences. You've studied biology, you've studied anatomy, physiology, and let's say that's been your expertise. It's been your background of training. Now if you were to move forward and you were to put all of your learning efforts into life sciences, the question becomes, well, are you agile? Well, not necessarily because this has always been your expertise and you're just being updating yourself in your knowledge in that domain. So learning agility also has a component to it in terms of learning outside of your main domain. The discipline that is your main focus, learning outside of that. And when you learn outside of that, you can truly exercise your learning agility. Because as you're learning, the purpose of learning is to achieve mastery. And you're also looking for the principles that can apply across disciplines. All right, so if you're feeling overwhelmed of I don't have time to learn, I don't have time to read books, I don't have time to learn a whole new topic from scratch. One of a learning model is to think of your learning efforts like a tree, picture a tree right now. It's got a root that go into the ground. It's got a really big trunk that holds its branches. It's got the original branches that come from the trunk. The branches break off into small branches. Then on the outer branches, you have the leaves and sometimes the tree bears fruit as well. So you picture that in your head and that becomes your tree of knowledge. So the way to organize your learning efforts because I agree that you only have so much time to learn and you want to make the most out of your learning time. So here's how you can think about it. Going from the top down of the tree, you have the leaves and wouldn't you agree that leaves are the most numerous? Or there's more leaves than there are branches. There's definitely more leaves than there is a trunk. So the leaves are quite numerous and they are fluffy when the wind blows at fluffstown. And that is how you can see your learning efforts as well is the leaves are quite like distractions. They're really attractive. They're really attractive and they might seem like they're interesting, but they're distractions. They don't really contribute to your discipline. They don't really contribute to principles that you can apply across disciplines, but they're attractive. So that's one learning tree. And I would advise that if you are noticing that a lot of your time is spent learning on distractions, things that don't really help you in problem solving don't only help you to apply and understand principles, then I would say maybe you can organize and reshift and spend lesser time on the leaves. Then you have the fruit, the fruit of the tree. The fruit of the tree you can, analogously, the fruit of the tree represents knowledge that is kind of like mind-developing. So these are really interesting insights on old concepts, new knowledge on old concepts as well. And ways to think about things that we've know about all this time, but ways to think about it that is modern, that is applicable, that is new. So those are the fruits. So you can spend a little bit more time on learning the fruits of your knowledge compared to the leaves and the distractions. But watch what happens. You have the fruit, you have the leaves, and all of it comes into the trunk, the thicker branches and then the trunk. So think of the trunk as your principles. And these are the truths that you can learn that stand the test of time. Every discipline has principles like that. Every discipline has foundations. Think about it when you were in college. When you, in first year undergraduate college, what did you have to do? You had to learn the basics of biology. You had to learn the fundamentals of physics, right? The textbook titles. So these are the allergies, but there's other disciplines that don't end in allergy. No matter what discipline we're talking about, there are fundamentals, and these are the truths. The truths are the laws of nature. They govern the way things work in the universe. So familiarize yourself with that. And in my learning time, I focused primarily on the trunk. I focused primarily on that. All most of my learning efforts are focused on trunks so that I can extrapolate principles from old texts, truths that stand the test of time. And then the next area that I spend time on are the fruits. In terms of leaves, by now I don't spend any time on the leaves. So this is how you can structure your knowledge. That way, you don't have to feel overwhelmed with all these different things that you can learn about and you find yourself randomly choosing, randomly choosing areas of expertise. This is the way you can organize it, the tree of knowledge. So far you have prudent communications, you have learning agility, and soft skill number three is self-governance. Everything so far on these soft skills pertains to other people. How you are around other people, how you navigate situations, how you navigate challenges, how you navigate conversations. It all has to do with other people. And it's true because in the workplace, you're not alone, you're not operating on an island, you're not in isolation to other people. And I'm not gonna address working in silos and siloed teams. But generally, in an organization's made up of people, regardless of whether or not you're the only one in your department. So when it comes to that, understanding self-governance, this is a really important soft skill. Self-governance means that you have control over the things that you have control over. Everything outside of you, other people, other people's spots, other people's actions and decisions, and the marketplace, the economy, right? You don't have control over those things because they're outside of you. So in your life, there's only two things you can absolutely control. You can absolutely control. Number one, are your actions, and number two, is your perspectives. And this makes up self-governance. The self-governance piece is so important. It shows up every time. you communicate with someone else. that has quite different perspectives from you. It shows that every time there is a challenge that you need to navigate, every time there's a complexities in decisions and conversations where people come in, they have different opinions, they meet criticize, they might praise, they might disagree, they might agree, and you have no idea what's going to happen. You just can't predict these things because you have no control over them. So the self-governance piece shows up every single time. And self-governance means part of it means you have emotional intelligence, understanding, well, why do I feel this way? Why do I tend to have those reactions? Why am I anxious? Why am I wanting to make that decision? Why am I biased in that direction? So this is the process of achieving that type of that level of emotional intelligence for oneself and this is achieved through reflective self-awareness. And so self-governance shows up. If you noticed yourself, for example, to your public speaking, whenever I'm in the presence of higher ups, I hesitate. Whenever I share my ideas, I'm so scared of getting a rejection. Or, for example, it could be whenever I need to stand up and advocate for myself and concerned about what that reaction might be and concerned about saying the right things. Those are just examples, but the examples are infinite. In real life, it's infinite. And every time you have these slivers of moments in your life in the workplace, it's the self-governance piece all over again. So this is one of the most important skills is self-governance. How might I become knowledgeable and aware of who I am and what's important to me? How might I become truly present and poised in situations? How might I become truly authentic? How might I become unconcerned about what people think of me? But truly driven by, here's my mission objective for my company, for my team, and for my career path moving forward. How might we achieve that with that equanimity from within the calm in knowing who I am and showing up that way consistently? So that's self-governance. It goes so deep, but it is an important skill set that shows up every time you are, whether or not you are technical or non-technical, it comes back to self-governance. Self-skill number four is inward to outward adaptability. Now, you might have heard the word adaptability many times. People talk about adaptability being a very desired trait that people look out for, for culture fit, for having the right personality type, adaptability, that word gets to run out a lot. But what does it even mean? How do you even achieve that? Most of the time when people say we look for someone who can adapt, who is flexible, it's really an outward thing. Adaptability to a situation, adaptability to different people, to your teams, to different outlooks and different opinions, different cultures. But there's really an outward thing. But I submit to you that that type of adaptability is really difficult to attain if you don't first address what's on the inside. Yes, this does go back to self-governance, the point I talked about earlier. But the reason why self-governance exists in through the process of reflective self-awareness is so that you can be resilient. Resilient on the inside or resilient on the outside. And that is the journey to becoming adaptable. So that's why this four skill is inward to outward adaptability when you are adaptable inward, you can now be adaptable outward. And that is how you can be resilient, no matter what comes your way. Because you can plan. You can be a planner, you can be a great fullcaster. You can have all your ducks in a row. But there's no guarantees. In terms of what might come, what challenges might arise, and you're going to get both. You're going to have challenges, you're going to have positive things happen. You're going to have ups and downs as well. You're going to get both in your career path. So can you be adaptable in words and out words? So that is the four soft skills.