Chapter 4
Cultivate your Skills
To this point, the Finch Effect has called upon you to focus most of your efforts on intellectual and theoretical strategies, including adopting the gig mindset and building your professional brand. These strategies have kept your efforts in the realm of perspective, the element that accounts for 90 percent of evolutionary success. Now with the third strategy of the Finch Effect, we are going to begin to shift our attention away from perception and toward the process of identifying, preparing for, and implementing action. Specifically, this third strategy explores the actions you can take to cultivate your skills.
Even though action is only 10 percent of what allows our careers to evolve, it is an essential 10 percent. It comprises polishing existing skills and acquiring needed new ones, as well as letting go of behaviors or habits that hold us back. In a precarious job market, all of us can stand to improve and upgrade our professional skill sets, whether we are at the top of our industry or just starting our careers. In times such as these, all professionals are on call to play beyond their “A-game” in order to maintain control of their careers and communicate a stellar adaptive professional brand. Having a skill set that is up to date and continually polished puts you in a position to take advantage of a great gig opportunity, parlay that part-time job into a full-time position, move strategically within your organization, or approach the job search with confidence.
In terms of the Finch Effect, cultivating your skills is not just about nurturing skills you want to improve but also about managing and releasing counterproductive habits or behaviors that interfere with the communication or delivery of your adaptive professional brand. We are all made up of professional virtues and vices—even the most accomplished among us—and the goal of this strategy is to highlight the virtues and downplay the vices.
Promise and Delivery
It is important to cultivate your skills so that your adaptive professional brand (APB) accurately reflects your capabilities and skills to your target market. Disappointing employers, clients, and customers by promising one thing but delivering something much less can derail your career. We've all seen it happen with highly paid sports stars, much-anticipated movies, and politicians who can't live up to their campaign buzz. But it can happen to people outside of the spotlight as well.
When it comes to surviving in the job market of tomorrow, members of the Fittest know it isn't enough to talk a big game about how you are better than your competition and package it all in impressive branding. You have got to be able to deliver on the promise of your differentiation to your target market. As you are considering the branding questions from the previous chapter, it's easy to start envisioning a totally new professional you . . . and that vision can easily run away with itself if you are not careful.
And herein lies the challenging part: there is meant to be an aspirational element to your brand. I mentioned that incorporating aspirations into my APB helped me select opportunities that supported those goals. However, you have to take care that only a few choice elements of your brand are aspirational and that you clearly communicate to members of your target market what skills are current and what are “upcoming.” Obviously, I couldn't tell people I was a published author when I wasn't. That would have been false advertising, a brand killer in any market. But I could and did tell them I was working toward being published, thus truthfully leveraging that component of my brand.
Let me share with you an example of overpromising and underdelivering gone wrong. My first real job was working as a hostess and sometime waitress at Bickford's, a breakfast-anytime restaurant in Hanover, Massachusetts. Sure, the food was subpar at best and the clientele was predominantly made up of the elderly and butt-pinching truckers (an interesting mix, I assure you), but it was the only place I could work. I really wanted to work at the Italian restaurant up the street but couldn't, because at 17 I wasn't old enough to serve alcohol.
So I set my sights on Bickford's, and pleaded with the manager to give me a chance over the other kids looking for summer work. “I can do it all,” I promised her as she eyed my job application skeptically. “I can deal with customers, manage the register, and wait tables. Please give me a chance!”
My term of employment there was little better than a disaster. I was overwhelmed with just about every portion of my job, from making the coffee to dealing with customers. My then-boyfriend even liked to joke about how I turned my hostess responsibilities—which consisted of a simple section rotation—into a confusing, flustering problem. When I left at the end of the summer, my manager made it clear that I shouldn't bother coming back until I could perform simple tasks, like brewing the coffee properly. Ouch . . .
I share this shame with you to illustrate how failing to deliver on your hype about why you are the best choice for a job or contract is the fastest way to go extinct. And keep in mind that my breakfast-joint fiasco occurred a decade ago. In the current job climate, the horrendous review my Bickford's manager would give to my next employer would have been a vocational death sentence. (Thank the gods for compelling teacher referrals.)
If you are going to include aspirational elements in your APB—which I do recommend—you need to use them as an immediate call to action to improve your skills. This is what cultivating your skills is all about. The implementation of this strategy requires a two-pronged approach that will have you first improve the top five to seven skills you outlined during your APB diagnostics—these are your differentiating skills—and then choose just one of them to refine and showcase as your centerpiece skill. Upgrading the skills you outlined in your APB will help you not only have the courage of your vocational convictions but also earn more attention from your target market, whether you are reaching out to current employers, future employers, or clients.
One of my favorite examples of how cultivating your skills can make all the difference in achieving your spot among the Fittest is Mary Beth. As an unemployed freelance writer, Mary Beth knew she had to stand out from myriad other writers fighting for the same opportunities. So she joined a local writer's club in Rhode Island to improve her writing skill set. On a whim she hired a tech-savvy neighborhood kid to teach her how to write iPhone apps. “I had dabbled with some programming in the past, but nothing too formal,” Mary Beth notes. It wasn't until a prospective client brought it up that Mary Beth realized the potential of being able to write apps. “It's a rather unusual accomplishment to have on the résumé, and somehow it intrigued clients because they themselves want to produce, write, and sell apps,” she notes.
The $20 an hour she paid her neighbor to help her refine her app skills paid off and eventually helped her land a six-month trial contract with a small insurance agency in Pennsylvania. “It was great to go into an interview and say, ‘Let me show you my app on my iPhone . . .’ Having that kind of proof of my skill was really helpful.”
The skill that Mary Beth chose to highlight as her centerpiece skill became clear to her in a flash of inspiration. But for the rest of us, figuring out where to put our time, money, and effort in perfecting our skills can be a little more confusing, right?
Not really; at least not if you are paying attention to the finches.
Exceptional to the Rule
When it comes to surviving in the age of vocational Darwinism, being a member of the Fittest requires you to bring your differentiating skills up to snuff, then pick just one to make your crown jewel centerpiece skill. Choosing one exceptional element is an easy way to elevate your entire brand to wow-worthy status.
The fact is that we don't need to be exceptional at all the skills we outline as our differentiators: one is all it takes to push us over the threshold from just surviving to being able to flourish. In fact, niche exceptionalism is a key facet of evolution. Most of the species on the planet today have survived not because of an ability to be awesome at everything but because of their ability to be exceptional at just one (maybe two) things.
Think about Darwin's finches: those little birds are not particularly exceptional at flight, and they don't have very colorful feathers. But they are pretty fantastic at finding new ways to get their dinner (pulling larvae out of tiny holes in the rock, digging into cactuses), and as we know by now, those skills have made all the difference in their ability to thrive.
In the professional food chain, it's the same. Having one exceptional skill, supported by other pretty good skills, can help you earn your membership as one of the Fittest. The most obvious examples of this fact include the media moguls and celebrities that fill our pop-culture minds: Oprah, David Beckham, and Martha Stewart all have exceptional skills (show hosting, soccer playing, homemaking) that are supported by other, pretty good skills (savvy marketing know-how, writing ability, product promotion, and so on). The combination of those two distinct types of skills has not only rocketed those individuals to fame and fortune but kept them on top for a decade or more.
We lowly members of the masses can also use this two-pronged approach of (1) improving our skills and (2) exceptionalizing them for our own survival. Take Jamie, for example. Jamie knew he was always going to be lost in the crowd of outside salespeople at the midsized dietary-supplement company he worked for. Nothing about his modest sales skill set stood out. When he was one of the first to be laid off after the financial crisis, his vocational mediocrity became unavoidably obvious. The time had come to stand out from his peers or sink like a stone.
After spending some time brushing up on his basic pitch, cold calling, and lead qualifying skills—his competitive differentiators—he decided to add a unique extra skill to his résumé: he earned an associate's degree in web design from an online university. Eighteen months and two website prototypes later, he found a new supplement company that really dug his plan to develop his own product sales websites catering to each of the specific demographics of his selling radius. “They were pleased with my skill set in general, but were really sold on my ability to make high-quality web pages that spoke directly to the different kinds of people in this area the products are suited for. If I didn't find something to be really exceptional in, I would probably still be job-hunting with everyone else.”
Differentiating Skills: Step up your Game
When you think back on the five to seven skills you outlined as part of your APB, what kind of a grade would you give yourself on them?
There are times in life when it is appropriate to B.S. yourself (like how you handled the news that your ex was getting married). This is not one of those times. Overestimating your talent or skill proficiency will land you where I was, with a snaggletoothed high school dropout boss mocking your inability to handle elderly pancake-eaters. Or something like that.
This is a time for honesty and self-awareness. Even if you don't have a habit of denial, it is very important that you reach out to your friends or trusted colleagues and ask them to help you complete this exercise. We're talking survival of the fittest here, and self-deception is counterproductive to your survival and your fitness. I've developed a diagnostic to help you grade your differentiating skills. I use it myself to grade my work at The Life Uncommon, and I always ask a handful of friends, fellow professionals, and readers for their input to ensure I am getting the most accurate picture.
Before you can work on your centerpiece skill (though you can certainly be thinking about it now), you need to assess your other differentiating skills so that you can step up those that are lacking. Here is a sample of the skill scorecard I use personally, and with the people I work with, to get a snapshot of what needs improvement. You can download a blank template with room for up to ten skills at TheLifeUncommon.net.
As you can see, the scorecard is pretty easy to fill in: simply list each of the competitive differentiating skills in the left column, give each one a grade, elaborate on why you chose that grade, and then identify how to upgrade the skill. If you are employing other people to rate you on these skills, I recommend giving them all their own sheets and then compiling those sheets into a master grid, listing the average score.
Once you have used this scorecard to get a descriptive picture of your proficiency in each of your differentiating skills, you can identify which ones need attention and brainstorm what to do about them.
In my experience, you shouldn't spend too much of your time improving skills that are at a grade of 7 or above. While the perfectionist in me cringes to hear this (obviously, if it isn't a 10, it isn't good enough!), the realist in me knows that time and resources are limited and therefore need to be selectively employed. Skills that are at a 7 are skills that are in pretty good shape, and really, that is just where they need to be for now. Employers, clients, and customers will feel satisfied if they find you proficient and capable in these areas and can forgive small imperfections. If you have a burning desire later to update those skills, by all means go ahead. But at this stage of the strategy, embrace your 7+'s and shift your focus onto the mediocre skills.
As for those other, under-7 skills, they need to be whipped into shape pronto. You run the risk of professionally failing to deliver on your personal brand if you are simply average or below average on your differentiating skills. But how do you get them up to snuff?
The equation is mercifully simple: look at the needed upgrades, brainstorm ways you could accomplish them, and then analyze their cost. Let's break this down a little.
Brainstorming Skill Upgrades
In my talks with members of the Fittest, I've noticed that the ways they upgrade their flagging skills fall into a handful of basic categories:
- Self-taught (online research, how-to guides, practice, trial and error)
- Informal apprenticeships or training (learning from working with someone who is proficient in the skill)
- Formal training (typically resulting in a degree, certification, internship, fellowship, or license)
These three categories also happen to be listed in order of general cost (though specific cost would depend on your specific industry). Let me take a minute to review what I mean by the word “cost.” You have three major resources available to you: your time, your energy, and your money. When I refer to cost, I mean a combination of all three of these things. An example of a low-cost endeavor is something that requires minimal time, energy, or money—like buying a self-help book and reading it. An example of a high-cost endeavor is getting your MBA, an undertaking that requires tens of thousands of dollars and several years of energy.
Here are two great examples of how the skill upgrade categories look in action:
Wayne started a web-based company focused on helping people be happier in their jobs. Because his company was a side project to his day job, Wayne needed to find a low-cost way to upgrade his differentiating skills. Before he launched his business, he told me that he “read every marketing and networking website online, as well as every published paper and book on online businesses. I even contacted and interviewed each book author to learn as much as possible.” Using this self-taught/informal-apprenticeship approach, Wayne was able to bring his marketing, networking, and online business skills from 2, 6, and 4, respectively, to 7+'s in a matter of months.
Colin also wanted to open a web-based business, and chose online advertising for his business focus. When it came to bringing up his differentiating skills to an acceptable level, he tried several different tactics. First he got his master's certificate in online marketing from the University of San Francisco. “It cost me six thousand dollars and was pretty good, but not a great choice for the money and time I had to spend on it,” he recalls. Colin found more benefit from two other skill upgrading strategies: utilizing online tutorials to master Apple video editing software, and learning the inner workings of Google AdWords. He also found a site, Lynda.com, that offered a variety of online courses for under $40 a month. “This was the best place for cranking up my skills. It was a big help.”
These two examples might lead you to believe I don't recommend formal education or training as a way to upgrade your skill strategies. That inference would be partly right. Many professionals today are flocking to advanced degree programs for lack of a better plan; however, this course of action can land you thousands of dollars in debt and with a degree that doesn't really make much of a difference in your vocational future. I don't support the “I'll get a degree so I can feel like I am going somewhere” mentality; it is wasteful and counterproductive, two things that are the antithesis of how the Fittest behave. Of course, there are exceptions: some fields, such as accounting, medical practice, or law, may require some advancement of degree to enter a higher level of opportunity. But when you start to brainstorm ways you can upgrade your differentiating skills, I want you to think about choosing options that are going to give you the most return for the lowest cost. If you can improve one of your skills by reading a book instead of taking a semester-long class somewhere, then my vote would be for the book. (Note that our strategy will be a bit different when it comes to your exceptional skill. But for your other differentiating skills, conserving personal cost is important.)
- What websites focus on this skill?
- What books provide how-to instruction on this skill, and how much do they cost?
- Whom do I know, personally or through connections, that is proficient at this skill?
- What classes are available (online and off-line) that teach this skill, how long are they, and what do they cost?
As you consider your options for upgrading your differentiating skills, think about asking people you know who are good at them how they got to their level of competency. When I built my first website in 2008, my first instinct was to pay for a set of online seminars that covered the basics. However, when I asked a friend of mine how he figured out how to build his site, he directed me to an exhaustive (and free!) online guide that taught me all I needed to know. That gave me an extra $150 to spend on other things, like stock photos, software, and a newsletter service. Sweet.
Getting your differentiating skills up to snuff is essential to joining the ranks of the Fittest. It's all good, whether you choose to pick up a book, read a website, or apprentice yourself to your neighbor's uncle's friend who is great at a particular skill. It is vital to keep an eye on your personal cost, because you are going to need to save all your extra resources—time, energy, and money—to hit a home run with your centerpiece skill.
Your Centerpiece Skill: Mastering Perfection
When you think about your centerpiece skill, your crown jewel, what you are really thinking about is what you want to be known for. This is the skill that will be played up in your tagline and attached to your name at all opportunities through your adaptive professional brand. I've always made writing my centerpiece skill because I love to do it and am proud of my capabilities. Mary Beth strategically made writing iPhone applications her centerpiece skill to add a unique element to her résumé. Jim Carrey chose ridiculous facial expressions as his crown jewel and has been cast in over forty films and counting as a result.
What you choose to be your centerpiece should be something in which you are confident you can be exceptional—and I don't just mean pretty good or noteworthy; I mean industry-leading exceptional. When you feature this skill to employers or clients, you need to do so with the utmost confidence that should they hire you or purchase this skill, they will get more than their money's worth. If they don't, then they know there are plenty of other professionals out there who are dying for the chance to deliver on their brand promises, making you, in a word, expendable. And you need to be able to deliver right from the gate; the Fittest know that they need to establish their proficiency and worth immediately or risk getting pushed down the food chain.
This is why the rules of cost and benefit are different for this one skill compared to your other differentiating skills. While with your other competitive differentiators it is acceptable to have a grade of 7 or above, your centerpiece skill needs to be at minimum a 9, and preferably a 10. This is where impressive credentials, extensive training, and considerable time practicing and cultivating your skills come into play. Instead of looking for an upgrade that will get you the most output for the least input, you need to consider upgrade options that will get you the most impact, whatever it takes. MBAs, CPAs, fellowships, certifications, apprenticeships with industry leaders: all are fair to be considered for upgrading your centerpiece skill.
So how do you choose this one awesome “calling card” skill from your list of competitive differentiators? It should match at least two of these three criteria:
- It is already graded a 9 or 10 on your skill scorecard
- You love to do it
- You have the time, energy, and financial budget to get it to a 9 or 10
Let me explain these criteria further.
One thing that stands out when you look at the survival of a species is how the conservation of resources is always involved. It typically takes a massive shift in external forces or conditions to cause members of a species to stop doing something they are exceptional at in favor of doing something new. For example, some finches are exceptional at eating specific types of larva. They wouldn't suddenly start to eat some other kind of food because they felt like it; that would take resources away from other vital functions. The only thing that would get the finches to pursue a different food source would be the inability to eat larvae anymore.
Likewise, when it comes to your centerpiece skill, it makes little sense to pursue another option when you are already exceptional at something. Why would you spend thousands of dollars to become great at an instrument you don't even play instead of highlighting your concert-level piano skills? That would be a poor use of valuable time, energy, and money.
A poor use, yes, unless you have a burning passion to play another instrument and couldn't care less about the piano. Hence the second criterion. Whatever you choose as your centerpiece skill should be something you like to do, because it is going to be a foundational factor in your professional survival for the foreseeable future. Furthermore, employers and clients get a better product when it comes from a place of personal interest and investment, because you are willing to go that extra mile. I am actually quite fantastic at budget management (and also, incidentally, cleaning countertops), but I don't really enjoy doing it. I would much rather feature my writing, something I love doing, as my centerpiece skill, even though it requires constant updating and enhancement.
The third and final criterion for choosing your crown jewel is whether or not you have the time, energy, and financial support to get the skill to exceptional levels. In all honesty, I've always had an interest in making people management a centerpiece skill, but I haven't been able to invest the time or energy into taking this skill to a 9 or 10. Since I am naturally at about a 3 or 4 with this skill, I would quickly go extinct if I promised employers the ability to manage people exceptionally and then couldn't deliver. It would be Bickford's all over again, on a bigger, more disastrous scale.
Once you pick your centerpiece, it is just a matter of revisiting the upgrade brainstorming questions and choosing the options that will get you to exceptional in the most effective way possible. Our friend Jamie had the idea to feature web design as one of his differentiating skills after he heard about another salesman in a different field increasing his numbers by 125 percent by building demographic-specific sites. As Jamie started to forge a new professional future in the first part of the Finch Effect, he realized that incorporating web design into his sales plan could be powerful, as well as being underutilized by others. So web development was bumped from differentiating skill to centerpiece skill: “I knew that in order to make this skill worthwhile, I had to be able to build high-quality, professional-grade sites.” After reviewing the options for getting this skill—which he initially graded 2 on his scorecard—to a 9 or 10, Jamie decided that an online degree program would give him the most comprehensive experience and exposure to the latest trends. His energy in the program paid off, and the proof is in the pudding: his demographic-specific website sales plan is setting a new standard for sales channels at his company.
Managing Counterproductive Behaviors
While the main focus of this chapter is on helping you cultivate a set of skills to bolster your adaptive professional brand, we need to take a few minutes to review what behaviors or habits you might have that are working against the success of your adaptive professional brand and your skill development so that you can neutralize their impact.
A quick point: no matter what these habits are, you shouldn't feel ashamed, embarrassed, or angered by them. Everyone—even celebrities, Fortune 100 business leaders, and spiritual leaders—has idiosyncrasies, which can run the gamut from barely negligible offenses to quirks that a target market would notice and potentially take issue with. The goal is not to turn you into some kind of Stepford-like professional but instead to make you mindful of how you might be unknowingly working against all the hard work you have done on this and the preceding strategies, and to give you an opportunity to adjust accordingly.
To start identifying these counterproductive habits, you are once again going to reach out to people who are close to you to solicit feedback on your interactive habits. The truth is that we are just about blind to many of our own bad habits. For example, when I was growing up, I said “um” and “like” frequently in my conversations. I only remember that I did this because my father pulled me aside one day and said he was going to make a discreet signal at the dinner table—a tug on his ear—every time I added those fillers in the pauses of my sentences so that I could see exactly how often I did it. You can imagine that by the time dinner was over his ear was bright red and he was deflecting questions from my perplexed mother as to whether he had something wrong with his ear.
The sore ear was worth the effort: as soon as I was aware of the habit, I began to correct it, and today I can safely tell you my conversations are free of “ums” and “likes.” I didn't realize how valuable that awareness of my word fillers was until I was at a professional event where the speaker was an “um-er” and I heard the disparaging, sidelong comments people were making about it. Thanks, Dad!
- How would you describe the way I verbally communicate? Do I swear, use sentence fillers, or vocalize my comments in too bombastic or too meek a manner? Do I cut people off, mumble, or stutter in my responses?
- What can you observe about my physical presentation that I should be aware of? Do my dress, posture and carriage, physical neatness, and hygiene meet your standards of professionalism?
- Do I use any unconscious and repetitive phrases or actions that other people become quickly aware of (a foot tap, or repeating “you know”)?
- Could you offer any other candid feedback about any behaviors or habits I display in interacting with others that could compromise my presentation or distract from my brand as a professional?
When you receive the responses to these questions, read them over and check their validity against how you see yourself. If something doesn't resonate with you as being accurate, I want you to write it down on an index card or type it into your smartphone and keep it in your pocket as you go through your typical day. At the end of the day, reread the feedback and take stock of its validity again. If it still doesn't resonate with you, you can set it aside and practice feeling gratitude for the responder's effort. However, if upon review the feedback does make more sense, then congratulations: you are now aware of a habit and have the power to do something about it. As I said earlier, just being mindful of habits like these is typically enough to correct them.
While physical and interactive habits are most easily observed by others, there are many counterproductive behaviors or habits that only we are aware of. These include work habits, lifestyle habits, or self-care habits that negatively influence not necessarily how we interact with others but how we accomplish what we want to in the realm of skill and brand development.
The key question you need to ask yourself is:
What am I prone to doing or not doing that interferes (or has the potential to interfere) with my ability to achieve the skill development plan I outlined in this chapter within the time frame I want to achieve it?
Some very common answers to this question include, but certainly are not limited to:
- Poor time management: I am not good at effectively managing my schedule to make room for my brand development or skill development
- Inadequate self-care: I don't have the mental or emotional resources available to address all the demands on my time at work and at home; I am already frazzled, overwhelmed, and in desperate need of a manicure I have no time to get
- Problems with follow-through: I am very good at outlining strategies or action steps but struggle with following through on my plans or seeing them to completion; as a result, I have many half-finished personal and professional development projects
- Poor work/life balance: I can barely balance my obligations at work (or school) with my social life as it is; I am either too socially focused to get my work done, or too work focused to enjoy a social life
- Lost drive: After initially starting a skill development program, I lose interest, get bored, feel unmotivated, or don't see the point
- Development skepticism: I am comfortable with where all my skills are and don't think investing in upgrading them is worth it; I've got it all figured out
I believe strongly that the act of identifying your potential challenges, and then drafting your own response to those challenges, is the best way to prepare yourself for roadblocks in your skill development. It's also the best way to reinforce your capacity to handle those issues and own the solutions. However, if you include any concerns about follow-through or commitment in your list of counterproductive behaviors, then I will make one suggestion: employ the buddy system. Many development and goal-oriented programs out there are built for people who struggle with follow-through, and all of them employ an accountability system to keep participants in check. Think about Weight Watchers: what really makes that program stand out from other diets and continue to be successful is that it has you weigh in before each weekly meeting. As someone who has used Weight Watchers in the past and found it effective, I can tell you that one of the main reasons I stuck to the program and didn't stray was because I knew there was going to be someone whom I would have to look in the eyes at the end of the week and share my weight with, whether I'd gained or lost.
As you work toward upgrading your differentiating and centerpiece skills, I suggest you find a “buddy”—it can be your supervisor, your spouse, your friend, or your priest—whom you will check in with and be accountable to on a regular basis about your progress. Be sure you empower this person to give you a little talking to if you fall off track!
You will also want to be sure this person is in it for the long haul. In working in personal and professional development for the last three years, I can tell you that skill development is never really finished, at least not if you do it right.
Most people approach skill development with the idea that they will learn the skill, master it, and then move on with their life. Yet in an ever changing, ever evolving world, such a once-and-done attitude not only is unrealistic but also sets you up for failure before you even start. It's unrealistic to imagine that you will ever close the book on the development of a particular skill. This is because of the constant flow and sharing of newer technologies, better strategies, more efficient tools, and more highly trained experts that our globalized economy and enhanced communication systems have helped to create. Additionally, you are in a constant state of change and growth yourself, so what worked for you at one point in your career might not prove as effective even a short time later. This happens incredibly frequently in the context of skills that utilize the latest technologies (think of Mary Beth and her iPhone apps).
But there is a larger message. Members of the Fittest understand that the work they are doing through the Finch Effect strategies doesn't lead to a final destination but is a career-long journey requiring constant attentiveness and care. In the first strategy, you took on the mantle of ownership for your career, and with it you accepted the responsibility for tending it regularly to help it flourish in any economy. Skill development is such a powerful element of your professional evolution that you need to embrace it as a constant throughout your career, or you will set yourself up for failure. The antithesis of adaptation is stasis and lack of change. Members of the Fittest are all about adaptation.
I'll admit, the idea of carrying these strategies for the rest of your career can be an almost overwhelming concept. After all, depending on your age, that could mean another forty to fifty years of focusing on skill development and implementation—I can see how the prospect might cause some fatigue. You can take some hopeful comfort in that you won't necessarily be working on the same specific skills for the duration of your career—although some people do. The skills we focus on improving will change and grow with us as our prowess increases and we take on new roles. The trick is to keep your motivation, goals, and accomplishments all within view to help you keep perspective. Why are you motivated to be a member of the Fittest in the first place? Is it because you want to provide for your family in any economy, or because you have a specific passion you want to pursue as your career? What are your current goals, and what goals have you accomplished?
As members of the Fittest, we are responsible for putting our own carrot in front of our own horse. Classically, the best way to do that is through a clear understanding of where you have been, where you are going, and why.
Setting the Wheels in Motion
If you are anything like me, your schedule is stuffed to the gills. This is why setting a calendar for skill upgrades has made such a difference in my ability to actually accomplish them. Penciling in time to read that book, or call that expert, or sign up for that class has proven very effective in helping me turn my under-7s into 7+'s so I can confidently go forth and live up to the hype of my adaptive professional brand. You might find other strategies that work better for you; the point is to actively employ something to help you build these upgrades into your daily life. I've collected a small library of tools and tricks from members of the Fittest on effectively maintaining your plans to cultivate your skills; these include time-management strategies, budget tips, resource-analysis spreadsheets, and failure-proof ways to confidently reach out to any expert or skill guru for mentorships and interviews. I've uploaded them onto TheLifeUncommon.net so you can access them anytime. Simply log in to The Fittest members-only section to check them out and start setting the wheels in motion.
As you begin to implement your plans for skill development, I encourage you to be patient with yourself and the process. Change and real development take time, no matter what you do to try to speed up results. In his revolutionary 1995 book, Changing for Good, James O. Prochaska and his team outlined their six-stage model for how to effectively change behavior. In their model, three out of the six stages focus on mentally preparing for action (precontemplation, contemplation, and preparation); only one stage is devoted to the real act of implementing change (action). The warning is that if you rush through the first three stages of mental preparation for change, you will be unable to effectively implement the act of changing, or—arguably worse—you'll be unable to sustain the change in the “maintenance” stage. On his website, Prochaska notes: “Research has shown that up to 80% of people are not ready to go to action right away. It's something they have to work up to, and not everyone moves at the same pace.”1 So as you move into this new stage of your professional evolution, remember that you have been building up to it through the last several strategies. You have complete power over what steps you take, and when. If it takes you two days or two months to start implementing your skill development plans, then so be it. Move at your own pace so that when you get to the action stage you are ready to dig in and start producing results.
Being confident in your skills and knowing that you have the capability to not just talk the talk but walk the walk will reflect in your current endeavors as well as in the projection of your APB. Confidence has that funny way of ringing through all communication, even digital communication. As soon as you upgrade your differentiating skills and get your centerpiece skill to an exceptional level, you can start getting out there to promote your adaptive professional brand.
And in our modern world, some of the best places to communicate that brand start with three little w's . . .