July 30, 2010

Improve People Skills Fast Through Immersion

I’m not generally a big fan of quick fixes and claims of fast improvement, for people skills or any other soft skill. I believe that most of them ignore the natural level of practice and repetition learning requires and they usually over-promise. However, I think there is one smart, effective way to get relatively quick results in developing skills.

Last week, I had a 6-day public speaking training with a very cool group of young participants. The kind of people who definitely had some smart things to say, but hadn’t actually learned how to articulate them with impact in front of an audience. Just the kind of participants I like to work with.

The 6 days of training were an intense learning experience. The participants did speeches almost every day, got and gave feedback, learned public speaking principles and techniques, did exercises and case studies. They got back home each day to research and prepare speeches for the next day, they talked with their friends about public speaking, and they probably dreamed public speaking in their sleep.

By the last day of the training, when they delivered their final celebration speeches, all the participants had made huge leaps in their public speaking skills. They had improved one subset of people skills in 6 days more than most people do in a 1 year.

How did this happen? What we have at work here is what I see as the only effective way to improve people skills or any soft skill fast: experiences of immersion.

Experiences of immersion mean that for a period of a couple of days up to a couple of weeks, you are in a totally different head space. In this period you focus almost constantly on a certain skill and doing the activities which develop it. You eat breath and sleep those activities, you constantly push yourself out of your comfort zone and by the time the period is over, something has visibly changed inside you.

Most self-improvement is done is small, gradual steps. You practice something 30 minutes each day for 6 months and then you see some real progress. With immersion, you practice almost non-stop for 3-5-15 days. There is pretty much nothing for you but that practice in those days. It’s intense learning with intense results.

Before you get too exited and jump into some 1-week bootcamp, I think a small warning is in order: not all skills and not all soft skills develop well though immersion. People skills tend to do so, but on the long run it usually requires a mix between periods of immersion and longer periods of small, daily practice to improve your skills with people in the best way.

This being said, I do encourage you to seek out and get into immersion experiences to improve people skills. Here are some important tips on how to make these experiences happen and make the most out of them:

  1. Save some money. Powerful immersion experiences often involve a training, bootcamp, workshop or adventure of some sort, which will cost you some money. So if you’re interested in one, make sure you put some money aside before you try to get into such an experience.
  2. Take a vacation. Most of us have work, school or families which require us to be there almost on a daily basis. So if you wanna have an immersion experience which will require at least a couple of days, you will probably need to plan and take a small vacation for it. Trust me: it will be one hell of a vacation!
  3. Choose the right people skills. Immersion experiences can be financially, physically and psychologically draining. You can’t afford to do them very often. So when you do, make sure you pick the ones which will improve people skills you find the most relevant: public speaking, conversational skills, confident communication etc.
  4. Don’t loose the momentum. If after an immersion experience you stop practicing, your newly improved skills will usually regress, often at a rapid pace. So keep practicing on a daily basis to reinforce the learning. That initial practice right after the experience is the most valuable one.

In the rushed society we live in, with some many things to do, immersion experiences are a rare thing. And I think this is a pity, since we all want fast growth and this is the only effective way to improve people skills and many others fast. Set the things in place for an immersion, do it, keep the wheels spinning, and you will improve your people skills in a breath taking way.

Image courtesy of Powerhouse Museum

Filed Under: People Skills, Personal Development, Psychology Tagged With: , , , , , 13 Comments
July 21, 2010

Learning Resources to Improve People Skills

I’m on a guest post writing spree this month; getting my ideas out there, spreading the word on how to improve people skills. I want to recommend you a couple of articles related to people skills which I wrote and have been published on other blogs in the past few days.

On Sources of Insight: Top 10 lessons in improving communication.

On Rat Race Trap: Why honesty will save your day.

On The Life Thing: How to be wise by the time you’re 30.

On A Different Kind of Work: Getting ahead by not being a cliché.

While you’re on these blogs, I suggest that you also check out the other stuff they have there. I’m sure you’ll find lots of value for your personal development and for improving your skills with people.

Be cool!

Image courtesy of fofurasfelinas

Filed Under: People Skills, Personal Development Tagged With: , , , 8 Comments
July 6, 2010

My Big Revelation about Improving Self-Confidence

My understanding about confidence and how to improve it, especially in relation with people skills, has evolved slowly but surely most of the time. But every once in a while, I had big leaps forward, rooted in personal revelations about self-confidence.

I want to share with you a big revelation I had a couple of years ago, which I think is very relevant for anyone interested to improve their confidence and skills with people. It came to me from some experiences which created a boost in my confidence that took me by surprise.

The Story

I had been going through a period of figuring out what I wanted exactly in life, what was important to me, and then acting on that knowledge. It wasn’t easy, especially the part about acting on it, but I decided that it was a noble cause so I stuck to it as much as I could. Eventually, I reached a point when:

  • I was living healthy lifestyle;
  • I was working in a field in which I was helping people develop;
  • I was only dedicating the amount of time I wanted to my career, when I wanted;
  • I had close friends that I considered to be very cool;
  • I was more honest and straightforward than I had ever been;
  • I was continuously learning and growing;

I didn’t make any of these things happen to improve my confidence. I did it because they seemed normal manifestations of my most important values: health, developing others, balance, friends, honesty and personal development. I wanted to live a life aligned with these values.

But, as I achieved this and I became aware of it fully, I also got this empowering sense of self-respect and self-confidence. People would start telling me that I stand differently, that I walk differently, that something has changed in my attitude. They would ask me if I had won the lottery or something, because they couldn’t understand it. But I did. Understanding what was happening is the big revelation I’m talking about:

Living a life by your own values is a major confidence booster.

The Explanation

When you live the way you want, when you live in harmony with what you think is important, your confidence naturally and visibly improves. You feel proud, you feel you’re life is meaningful and of the highest virtue. But when you don’t, even if you have things others may envy, you feel like a fraud which is just waiting to be discovered.

The bad news is that many people do not live their lives by their own values. In a way, you could say they are not authentic. Having been on both sides, I now realize why this is happening: in order to live by your own values, you need to fight with enemies like: social stigma, inertia, fear of failure or procrastination.

These enemies can put huge pressure on most of us to live the sort of lives that probably are not the kind we want. Faced with this pressure, many people abandon the fight or they never really engage in it in the first place. They prefer to choose the comfort of living their lives in the ways easiest to them.

I find this to be very sad, and I constantly make a point in my articles, communication coaching and trainings about how much you miss out when you don’t live your life by your own values. It’s one hell of a way to sell yourself short!

As you do live your life by your own values and you’re fully aware of this, not only that you improve your self-confidence and from there your people skills, but you get this appealing shine in your eyes.

Those around you will often detect this shine subconsciously and wonder: “What’s up with him/her? Has he/she discovered the secret of eternal life or something?” In a way, you did.

Image courtesy of hcii

Filed Under: Attitude, Inspirational, Personal Development Tagged With: , , , 11 Comments
May 9, 2010

Why Less Is More in Personal Development

I was reading earlier today a presentation of a one-day communication skills training, and browsing over the content. This training covers everything from non-verbal communication, to conflict management, to business communication, to presenting with impact. All in just one, single day!

There was a point a long time ago when I used to do the same. I thought that if I could get everything in there, in as little time as possible, I would deliver a very valuable training. I would also approach my personal development the same way. I would read and browse like a maniac through 5 or 10 books on people skills, then I would decide to practice it…all.

I was naïve, impatient, and had a fragile understanding of human learning. Looking at this way of doing personal development now, whether it’s people skills, confidence, productivity or anything else, it really amuses me.

Here’s the point: people don’t learn that way. A human being is not a computer on which you can install every piece software you’ll ever need in 24 hours, and get it over with. It’s rather like a computer with a 2 Mb software install limit for each day. So it will take you about 3 years just to install the basic operating system (aham… Windows?).

Trying to absorb a lot of information, on various areas of a big topic, in a short amount of time, and then to practice it all is a highly ineffective attempt some people make at developing real skills. It doesn’t work for a couple of reasons:

  • You try to cover a lot of concepts and ideas, you only get a superficial understanding of each one;
  • You overcharge your memory and you forget that vast majority of the theory you learn;
  • You instantly get de-motivated when you think about starting to practice, because you have so much to practice;
  • You end up practicing a bit of everything, which doesn’t make anything truly stick and leads nowhere.

The only way reading a lot without applying can make practical sense is if you’re in a phase where you just want to expose yourself to as many ideas as possible on a certain topic, so you can then choose on which to focus on. But the way I see it, this isn’t personal development, it’s just a preparatory, exploratory phase. Don’t expect to grow your skills from this.

The effective way to develop real skills and attitudes is to focus on the key ideas which have the most value for you, explore them in more detail, hammer them into your head and practice them consistently. And you do this one by one with each key idea, instead of all at once.

When I do coaching and trainings on people skills, I follow this exact principle. Some of my clients are initially surprised by the small number of ideas I cover, but as they move to applying them, they quickly understand why I have this approach. And have you noticed that I also usually write in the same manner?

There is more to effective personal development than meets the eye. We all want to improve fast, to absorb as much information as possible in as little time as possible, and then to watch our skills grow by themselves out of this process.

But this is not how self-growth happens. It’s a gradual process, which relies mostly on chunking things down, action, and persistence. This is why in personal development, less is more.

Filed Under: Personal Development, Psychology Tagged With: , , , 14 Comments
April 28, 2010

The Simple Guide to Conscious Learning

When you are able to learn effectively, you pretty much have living the life you want in your pocket. Oddly enough, very few people are good conscious learners. Some may know a lot of stuff, but when it comes to actually developing, their learning gets stuck.

There is one thing I found out about a long time ago, which helped me a lot in improving the way I learn and make more, faster progress. It is also something I constantly talk about in my training and coaching programs.

This thing is a simple, powerful model of human learning and personal development. According to the model, our competencies develop in 4 stages:

  1. Unconscious Incompetence – you don’t know, and you don’t know that you don’t know. This is the stage when you are not aware of your flaws or specific areas where you can improve.
  2. Conscious Incompetence – you still don’t know, but at least you know that you don’t know. This is the stage when you’ve realized your flaws or specific areas where you can improve.
  3. Conscious Competence – you know, as long as you practice consciously. This is the stage when you have discovered how to improve, the specific changes you need to make, and you practice them consciously.
  4. Unconscious Competence – you know, without even thinking about it. This is the stage when you have practiced something so much that it became automatic and you now do it naturally.

Of course, once you reach the last stage in one area and you have a new skill, there are other areas where you are at the first stage and where you can evolve through the 4 stages. So this is not really a learning cycle, it’s more of a learning spiral which can go on your entire life.

What effective learning means is moving from one stage to another. Effective learning is conscious, step by step learning. And it’s about skills, attitudes, not knowledge, which is just an intermediary step in the process.

If you look at human learning through this model, you can realize that all human failure in learning is triggered by certain personal or process flaws which make us get stuck at one of the first 3 stages:

  • People who get stuck in stage 1 don’t even think about where they can improve, are not very self-aware or they are too proud to see their flaws.
  • People who get stuck in stage 2 know what they can improve but don’t decide to do anything about it, they try to figure everything our by themselves or they use the wrong ideas and methods to improve.
  • People who get stuck in stage 3 don’t act sufficiently and consistently enough, they don’t plan their practice, they get distracted and they procrastinate.

Look at this model of learning and think about the stages where you tend to get stuck. We all tend to have at least one which is our sticking point. Becoming more aware of this and working on perfecting your learning process is one of the best ways you can use you time and energy.

When you are able to learn effectively, you pretty much have living the life you want in your pocket. Oddly enough, very few people are good conscious learners. Some may know a lot of stuff, but when it comes to actually developing, their learning gets stuck.

There is one thing I found out about a long time ago, which helped me a lot in improving the way I learn and make more, faster progress. It is also something I constantly talk about in my training and coaching programs.

This thing is a simple, powerful model of human learning and personal development. According to the model, our competencies develop in 4 stages:

  1. Unconscious Incompetence – you don’t know, and you don’t know that you don’t know. This is the stage when you are not aware of your flaws or specific areas where you can improve.

  1. Conscious Incompetence – you still don’t know, but at least you know that you don’t know. This is the stage when you’ve realized your flaws or specific areas where you can improve.

  1. Conscious Competence – you know, as long as you practice consciously. This is the stage when you have discovered how to improve, the specific changes you need to make, and you practice them consciously.

  1. Unconscious Competence – you know, without even thinking about it. This is the stage when you have practiced something so much that it became automatic and you now do it naturally.

Of course, once you reach the last stage in one area and you have a new skill, there are other areas where you are at the first stage and where you can evolve through the 4 stages. So this is not really a learning cycle, it’s more of a learning spiral which can go on your entire life.

What effective learning means is moving from one stage to another. Effective learning is conscious, step by step learning. And it’s about skills, attitudes, not knowledge, which is just an intermediary step in the process.

If you look at human learning through this model, you can realize that all human failure in learning is triggered by certain personal or process flaws which make us get stuck at one of the first 3 stages:

  • People who get stuck in stage 1 don’t even think about where they can improve, are not very self-aware or they are too proud to see their flaws.

  • People who get stuck in stage 2 know what they can improve but don’t decide to do anything about it, they try to figure everything our by themselves or they use the wrong ideas and methods to improve.

  • People who get stuck in stage 3 don’t act sufficiently and consistently enough, they don’t plan their practice, they get distracted and they procrastinate.

Look at this model of learning and think about the stages where you tend to get stuck. We all tend to have at least one which is our sticking point. Becoming more aware of this and working on perfecting your learning process is one of the best ways you can use you time and energy.

Filed Under: Personal Development, Psychology Tagged With: , , , 8 Comments
April 15, 2010

Why Attitude, Not Aptitude, Determines Your Altitude

The more I coach others and the more I grow, the more I’m convinced that attitude tramples aptitude; that in your relationships with people, in your career and in your life, the attitudes you have matter sooo much more than your skills.

A Communication Coaching Story

One of my clients realized at a certain point that when she started to get mad in a conversation with someone else (which was quite often), although she would still speak using tactful words, her voice tonality would change and make her come off as angry and bitter. Obviously, this would make a lot of these discussions go badly.

The thing is, this person had realized this aspect about six months before. Since then, she tried to consciously control her vocal tonality in conversations where in created problems, but she barely managed. Why? Because the change in her voice was automatically triggered by her getting angry, and it was very hard to fight that.

Even if she managed to control her voice for a while, as soon as she would stop paying conscious attention to it, the voice would almost instantly go to the tonality dictated by the anger she was feeling. After six months of this, my client opts for some coaching focused on addressing her anger and changing the attitudes behind her voice tonality.

Why Attitude Tramples Aptitude

For every behavior and for every way of communicating or relating with people, there are skills and also attitudes that make it possible. The skills are the automatic ways of doing things, which create results. They develop by practicing those things, in those ways. The attitudes are the beliefs we have, which generate the way we interpret things in a certain context and the way we react emotionally.

You can teach a person all the best ways to do things. You can teach a person how to communicate assertively, how to speak in public with impact, but if their attitudes in those contexts don’t back them up, they will not be able to consistently practice the behaviors necessary to develop those skills.

Your attitudes determine to a great degree what you are able to do and what you are not, what you are able to practice and what you are not. This is why for example, a lot of people go to trainings and learn all sort of cool ways of relating with other people, but they never develop cool people skills.

It’s funny that I describe what I do as developing communication skills, or improving people skills, because with most of my clients, I spend more time developing the relevant attitudes than the actual skills. I constantly find that when the right attitudes are in place, the skills will develop in a very fast and natural way.

Time to Take the Right Action

Look at the soft skills you want to develop and identify the attitudes that would support developing and maintaining them. How much time and energy do you spend working directly on your skills, and how much directly on your attitudes?

If you invest more in your skills than in your attitudes, I have some news for you:

  1. You’re not the only one; this is what most people do;
  2. Unless you naturally have the right attitudes in place (which is very, very rare), it’s a very good idea to shift gears and invest much more in developing your attitudes.

Work smart! You are wasting your resources working on your skills if the right attitudes are not there. Attitudes make the real difference between champs and chumps.

Filed Under: Attitude, Inspirational, Personal Development, Psychology Tagged With: , , , 44 Comments
April 5, 2010

Men, Women and Personal Development

I recently had my first open training where all the participants were women. This made me realize that in general, my clients who are not sent and paid for by the companies they work for are at least 2/3 women.

My experience here doesn’t seem to be an exception. Other coaches and trainers tell me they have similar experiences. As a general rule, it seems that women invest visibly more in their personal development than men do: training, coaching, books and practice.

Now, I can’t help and wonder: why is this? Do women need more personal development than men? Do men have better people skills, career skills, attitudes which justify them not seeking as much self-growth?

As you probably guessed it, the answer is definitely ‘not’. Men need as much personal development as women do. They just don’t invest in it as much. Talking with people about their views on skills and success, I believe there are a couple causes:

  • Men are less willing to see their flaws and their potential for improvement;
  • Men are less willing to accept that someone else could be competent enough to help them grow;
  • Men are less willing to actually act for their personal development;
  • Men are more confident in their ability to learn on their own.

By the way: I was guilty of all of these at one point or another. The last one might be good or bad, depending on the context and the person. But the first three are definitely trouble. Simply said, they make men in general sabotage their personal development and improve their soft skills at a lower rate than women.

On top of this add the fact that trough our nature, we men are probably one step behind women in our fitness for this modern world we life in. Women are naturally more empathic, intuitive, good at reading body language, and have a wide range of better people skills; men are naturally more aggressive and good at lifting heavy stuff. Great!

Project this phenomena 25 years into the future, and if things evolve in the same way, we’re gonna be living in a world where the average woman is running circles around the average man. She is smarter, more confident, more effective, more successful and has far better people skills than her male counterpart.

The average man will be spinning his head and not understanding what the hell is going on with his life and his career, while a woman will be overtly or subtly running the show. Now that I think about it, a lot of this I already see happening around me. Maybe I just need to meet better men and worse women. Hmm…

Anyway, the good news is that in this hypothetical future, the few men who will be able to match women will be a very interesting and appreciated thing to have around. So, as long as you’re one of them, the future’s very bright.

Filed Under: Inspirational, Personal Development, Success Tagged With: , , , 10 Comments
March 7, 2010

How Knowing Yourself Can Improve Your People Skills

Finding my niche as a communication coach and figuring the lifestyle that suits me was not a revelation, it was a process. One of the stepping stones in this process was knowing myself thoroughly and understanding what I have to offer.

An interesting side effect was how much I improved my people skills, as a result of improving my self-knowledge. There is an obvious link between knowing yourself and choosing the right career. I discovered there is also a strong but more subtle link between knowing yourself and your people skills.

It’s funny how the effective personal development in one area often starts in another, apparently far away area. Here are some specific ways I experienced myself how knowing yourself can improve your people skills:

1. More social confidence. When you know yourself well, you know what you are about and you understand your strengths. From this place, confidence to put yourself out there often comes naturally. Knowing yourself often pushes you to meet people and to express yourself socially.

On the other hand, people who have a blurry image about themselves are more reluctant to put themselves out there. They don’t even understand who the person they put out there is, so they often have superficial interactions with others.

2. Building comfort. I realized one of the best ways to make people feel comfortable with you is to give them the chance to know you as a person. And you do this by expressing your thoughts, values, passions, emotions, in a powerful way.

But of course, in order to do this, you have to know them. As you know and open yourself up authentically, it’s easier for other people to reciprocate by opening themselves up. This two-way process is essential in building strong relations.

3. Investing in the right relations. How often have you heard people complaining about how they have the wrong friends or relationships? It’s easy to get caught up in time and energy consuming relations with people who are not a good fit for you when you don’t know yourself.

However, when you understand yourself, your intuition and your logic will better tell you who is a good fit for you. This will help you invest time and energy in maintaining and growing the relations with the right people for you, and letting the other ones fade.

There is a very simple lesson here: if you want to improve your people skills but you don’t know yourself very well, forget your people skills for a while and focus on this aspect. Get to know yourself better and as you do, you will improve your people skills and you will also create a solid foundation for them.

Filed Under: People Skills, Personal Development Tagged With: , , , , 13 Comments
February 10, 2010

The Ultimate Tool for Managing Your Emotions

One key area of personal development which I notice a lot of people are interested in is managing emotions. This interest has good reasons, as your emotions influence your options and your options influence your results. Plus, it just feels bad to feel bad.

Managing emotions is also one of those key areas of personal development where a lot of people struggle. They read books and articles, go to trainings, try various methods and techniques, yet most of them don’t seem to be able to get rid of those pesky negative emotions they don’t want in their lives.

I believe that managing your emotions is an often misunderstood part of self-improvement, and this makes place for a lot of emotional mastery tools which provide nothing more than false hope or a short lived relief, often for big sums of money.

The Tool I Recommend

Considering this, I’ve decided to write a piece about the primary tool I employ for managing emotions, both with myself and with my clients, and which is by far the most effective I know: CBT – Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (or Therapies). It represents a systemic approach to managing your emotions through changing thinking and behavioral patterns.

CBT has also been turned into CBC – Cognitive Behavioral Coaching – which is what I actually use in my communication coaching activity, but given the major similarities between the two, I will refer to both using the more commonly known name of CBT, to simplify things.

My intention here is not to describe Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in detail, nor to provide a manual on how to use it. You can find this kind of information in many other places.

My goal is only to show you why I think it’s an excellent tool for managing emotions. This will also make my life easier, as whenever I am asked what tools and why I recommend for dealing with fear, guilt, anxiety, depression, anger and so on, I will simply point people to this article from now on.

My Exploration of Emotional Mastery Tools

Over the years, I have looked into various tools for managing emotions. When I say ‘looked into’, this means I have:

  • Used the tools one by one for myself and looked at the results;
  • Gave them to others for testing or interviewed people who have used them;
  • Searched for scientific research to back them up and analyzed the data.

The tools for managing emotions I have looked into include: NLP, EFT, The Sedona Method, positive affirmations, hypnosis, meditation and subliminal tapes. I have found some of these I mention to be effective in managing emotions to some degree, but none of them capable to be a complete tool for this purpose.

Some tools provide only a short term improvement of the emotional state, with no long term change; some of them work inconsistently, for some people but not for many other people. Some tools support the process of managing emotions but do not provide it themselves; some of them just create a placebo effect. Some tools are pure bullshit.

What actually bothered me is that a lot of these methods are marketed as powerful, miracle solutions to get read of all unwanted emotions and they don’t even live up to 10% of the promise.

What amused me is how some people will use an emotional management method for years, will encourage others to do the same and will think it’s a great method, even if it hasn’t really helped them improve more than marginally. That’s the definition of insanity to me.

In the end, I stopped at CBT. Ironically, it’s one of the first tools I have found, but I abandoned it before truly testing it because it didn’t look… sexy enough. It seemed rather repetitive, analytical and programmatic, and I was attracted by some of the flashier tools out there.

Why CBT?

Now, I can tell you about my positive results in managing emotions using CBT, I can tell you about the consistent positive results my clients who used CBT effectively got, I can tell you about the inner logic of the techniques employed.

But from my perspective, all of these pale by comparison with another argument: the fact that worldwide, there are over 2000 rigorous scientific studies on the techniques and principles of CBT, which prove it to be highly effective. In terms of scientific support, it is light years away from almost any other tool out there for managing your emotions.

I know a lot of other methods claim to be supported by science. Don’t be fooled! Anyone can make claims such as these, quote fake research or create bias research, designed to support a certain conclusion. There is a lot more to getting scientific backup in the area of personal development than meets the eye.

CBT is not a miracle cure. It involves getting used to it. It involves a lot of work for identifying your current thinking patterns and beliefs, seeing what is irrational or non-constructive in them, and changing them gradually through cognitive and behavioral techniques.

It’s based on 3 R’s: reprogramming, repetition and reinforcement. If you stick to these three ways, you will see real progress and change in your habitual emotional reactions.

At the end of the day, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy promises less and offers more than any other tool I know for managing your emotions, which is why I recommend it whole-heartedly.

Filed Under: Attitude, Personal Development, Psychology Tagged With: , , , , 14 Comments