[Part 3] What Skills Do You Need to Develop?

Over the last few weeks we’ve been looking at the process I worked through to create a life plan. It helped me get clear about where I was starting from and what I would need to do to make more progress. In this post I broke the process down into 4 questions:

1. What skills do you have to start with?
2. What skills do you need to develop?
3. How are you going to get the experience you need?
4. Do you have any personal challenges to overcome?

This week, we’re reviewing question #2: What skills do you need to develop?

Once I dialed in on my strengths (this post and this post), the next thing I did was identify and start to develop the additional skills I needed to complement my strengths and achieve my goals.

Working through this question took alot of work. Some of it was fun, and some was not. The fun part was figuring out what I needed to learn to move forward towards my goals. My thinking went something like this: I am at point A, I want to get to point B. What do I have to do to get there? This involved alot of visualization and clarity about what I wanted.

The not-so-fun part was addressing my weaknesses. Really, who likes thinking about their weaknesses and deficiencies? After all, the last two posts talked about playing to our strengths. Why did I need to look at my weaknesses? Because I needed the real picture of where I was starting from (check this post for more about that). I needed to know my blind spots so I could manage myself and compensate for them.

I found my weaknesses fell into two categories:

1. First, there were weaknesses that I am just naturally bad at (i.e. punctuality). I have not given up improving myself, but weaknesses in this group will always require alot of effort for minimal improvement.
2. The second group of weaknesses are weaknesses because of ignorance (i.e. goal setting, time management, productivity). Once I started paying attention to the items in this group, I started noticing alot of rapid improvement in them.

Input from friends and family helped add to the list of weaknesses I created. To gather their feedback, I send out an anonymous survey to avoid any awkwardness. I wanted to make sure my friends felt safe giving honest answers to my questions. It was a good thing I did it that way, since there were a few responses that I wasn’t expecting. It took a few days until I could read their answers without feeling hurt. It was awesome that they were so honest with me, and their answers gave me food for thought.

Enough about me. How can this help you?

Do you have goals to achieve? Are you at point A in your life and want to get to point B? Hopefully you answered yes to both of these questions (if not, read this). On your journey, you will need to avoid your natural weaknesses (group 1). And it will probably take more skills than you have now to achieve your goals (group 2). The process I’ve explained here can help you accomplish that. It’s some hard, honest, introspective work. But it will propel you on to the progress you want to achieve.