The 3 Helps principle or a recipe for lifelong fulfilment (Part 1 of 3)
Positive Minds | Positive Stories | Edition 020
Principle #1: Help Yourself.
“Once you stop learning, you start dying”. This wisdom-filled quotation is credited to the genius of geniuses: Albert Einstein. A more positive way of putting Einstein famous quote would be “living is a journey of continuous learning and improvement”. So, how do you learn continuously and improve?
Throughout my career, I have been confronted with this simple question yet very hard to answer. And, as is often the case, we turn to the internet, in search of a solution. The first step is often to enter keywords such as "continuous learning" in Google.
Google's answer is astonishing: about 723 000 000 results in half a second. In other words and assuming that each result is 1 page and that you take about two minutes to read each page, it will take you 361 500 000 minutes or nearly 900 years to go through the search results. That's impossible. So, what do you do?
About ten years ago, here's what I did instead: I develop my own recipe for continuous learning. I branded it the “3 Helps principles”: Help Yourself, Offer Help, Ask for Help. Together, they form my recipe for lifelong fulfilment. I will cover these three principles in a series of three blogs. In this blog, I talk about the first principle: Help Yourself.
The ‘Help Yourself’ principle is the foundational principle and the most important of all three. If you don’t help yourself, other people will take control of your life. And if they do, they might take you to where you didn’t want to be. ate the first place. Never ever allow other people to control the direction of your life.
There is one way to help yourself: develop yourself. To develop yourself, you need to develop both your technical skills (also known as hard skills) and your people skills (referred to as soft skills).
Let me start with technical skills. There are tons of definition of what ‘technical skills’ mean. In substance, they refer to teachable abilities learned in the classroom, during workshops or training, through books or other materials, or most importantly on the job. While you must demonstrate a high level of competence in your functional area, your value lies in the so-called "transferable skills" also known as “portable skills”. In this respect, two skills put you above the rest.
First, your language skills. In a global and interconnected world; writing and speaking only one international language, be it English, limits your horizon and your potential. Bilingual, or even trilingualism, with English as a 'must-have', opens up and widens your horizons and possibilities to the infinite.
Second, your computer and digital skills. Here, I am not talking about being an Analyst Programmer, a Big Data Analyst or a Data Scientists, even if these are top digital skills companies are looking for nowadays. I am talking about the basics such as knowledge of Microsoft Office applications but also the most relevant technical software in your industry. Know what is trending in your specific field and master them. For example, if you are in the field of finance, you need to master the best ERP software such as SAP, ORACLE, SAGE or Microsoft Dynamics. If you are an M&E professional, ActivityInfo, KoBoToolbox, STATA, SAS would be a must. For HR people, the golden standard would be BambooHR, SAP SuccessFactors, Workday, ADP.
Let’s face the truth, tomorrow's illiterates are not those who cannot read and write. Tomorrow's illiterates are unilingual with no digital skills. In the word of tomorrow, English, and digital skills will be the equivalent of passports and visas. To travel, you need both. The good news is that both skills can be easily developed through self-training and often at no cost.
Tomorrow's illiterates are not those who cannot read and write. Tomorrow's illiterates are unilingual with no digital skills.
What about soft skills? These are your "people skills" or "interpersonal skills" and relate to the way you relate to and interact with other people around you. Let’s make no mistake. Yes, technical skills are important but soft skills are the game changer to your career. Like technical skills, there are hundreds of soft skills. But to me, there is one umbrella skill that encompasses all of them: the emotional skill are also known as the emotional intelligence popularised by the American author and psychologist, Daniel Goleman. Why is it so important to develop emotional intelligence? Because research shows that only 15% of our professional success is due to our technical abilities. The other 85% is due to our “people skills,” or skills related to emotional intelligence. SO, to develop your soft skills, start with your emotional skills.
Next week, I will talk about the second ‘Help’: Offer Help.
Stay tuned.
