Core Human Skills

I came across this post the other day on one of my favourite sites, The Personal MBA.


I can really relate to this site, which promotes using self learning and your own business networking opportunities for your personal development, rather than spending an extraordinary amount of time and money, completing an MBA at one of the well known business schools. I particularly support the argument that this should not been seen as a cheaper, or quicker way to get the equivalent of an MBA, but it is in reality a superior approach. A big claim yes, but the more I read from this site, the more I agree with it.

I have not put myself on the personal MBA program yet, but it is in my plans...

But I digress.

In this specific post, Josh lists a set of core human skills, that I believe really nails it. These are core skills that if you can master, you can go as far as you want to go, or do anything that you put your mind to, in the organisation of your choosing. Also, your peers, superiors and subordinates will respect you.

Like any of these productivity/self improvement type posts, they may seem obvious, but it is always good to see a list like this, just to remind us of the skills we should always be aware of, and be seeking to develop.

Information-Assimilation

Writing

Speaking

Mathematics

Decision-Making

Rapport

Conflict-Resolution

Scenario-Generation

Planning

Self-Awareness

Interrelation

Skill Acquisition

Rather than steal Josh's thunder, why don't you visit his post and get the detail to each of these skills yourself.

Then it's time to ask, how many of these skills am I proficient in, and how many do I need to work on?

Later.

PS: and just to add to the post below, the other thing to remember is that you know more they do...

Public speaking - a quick and dirty way to beat those nerves

I wouldn't describe myself as an accomplished public speaker, but I certainly need to give talks and presentations from time to time to customers, colleagues, subordinates, peers and my superiors.

It's never what I would call easy, but I find that as long as I am prepared, it is not that hard to stay on song and get the message across.

Despite spending a lot of time preparing, and being completely familiar with the topic however, I can still get a little nervous, particularly when I have to speak in front of people I have never met before. In fact I have a speaking engagement tomorrow morning, and apart from a couple of people I know from the industry, most of the audience will be completely new to me.

How am I going to stay cool, calm and collected, and perhaps even smile occasionally?

Simple...I'll do what I always do. It works every time.

I'll just look at some of the people in the crowd, and imagine them in their underwear!

As I say, it works everytime.

Later.

Hi there

Welcome to my new blog, courtesy of Blogger/Google (thanks guys). I've been on and off the web in the past, and basically blog in order to practice my writing as much as anything. I can't help but think there is still a great novel deep down in me somewhere, and I've always been one to write emails that are just a little too long or write reviews for others, almost just for the sake of it.

My web publishing started with a small web site I kicked off in 1996, called Den's den of Quake, where I would review one single player Quake or Quake 2 map per week. The site is now long gone, but I still see my name pop up in the odd text file from some of the older Quake downloads from time to time. (Thanks Neil.) I also had a sister site, called Den's den of Duke to cover user made Duke Nukem maps, but it never received the same attention from myself or the gaming community so it was retired.

Through my little website, I managed to score a brief stint as a game reviewer for the Australian edition of PC Gamer. This was a lot of fun, but also harder than I thought. Yes, I was sent games for free to review, but I was expected to play them all the way through in as short a time as possible, and give a thoughtful review. I used to find it enjoyable for big title games I was interested in, but it was bloody difficult when it came to being sent some very ordinary piece of gaming software that history would soon forget. Unfortunately PC Gamer made a good go of it, but it couldn't crack into an already fairly limited market space in Australia occupied by two other publications, PC PowerPlay and Hyper, and after about 13 issues, it went out of business, which was a shame.

More recently I turned to a basic blog, just to keep my writing brain active as much as anything.

I've only ended up here because my existing blog has just stopped working. When I decided to try and blog on a semi regular basis, I opted to host my own at the time, using Greymatter on my allocated webspace included with my internet account at iinet. The pages are still there if you want to check them out.

The Greymatter engine however appears to have fallen over, and to be honest, wasn't giving me what I really wanted anyway. I could try a little harder to fix it, as it is probably just a broken script or perhaps some changed permissions, but I think in reality it is a sign for me to try something else, so here I am!

My profile already describes me fairly well, but in essence I am a 40 something year old husband and father of two, who loves gadgets and generally just finding stuff on the web to try out. I also really enjoy movies and music of all genres, and while I come from a technical/engineering background, I turned my back on a professional music career early on, so I do have that fairly unusual mix of left brain/right brain, science vs arts aspect to me, and I am equally comfortable talking about both. Lately, as I have had more at stake with my career in management, I am also paying more attention to my personal productivity. So yes, I can sometimes get a little preoccupied with how well my own application of GTD is progressing, and more recently I have been dabbling in Autofocus as well.

Maybe one day I will get that novel out, but in the meantime, I'll keep practicing expressing myself through my ramblings as a travelling manager.

Later.

PS: I must say for my first posting, the tools here at Blogger make it very easy. I'm starting to wonder whether I should have switched to this ages ago!