Life Skills

Developing new skills in your personal life can be a rich source of skills in your business life. Achieving an optimal work-life balance can be difficult if we try to see the two aspects as two different personalities - often one conflicts with the other. Harmonizing at the skills level will help integrate work, home and volunteer parts of ourselves.

First, learning anything is good for our brains. That slightly painful process of acquiring knowledge is like exercise for the body - we learn everything more easily if we are used to the process of learning. Thus, taking a course on how to build a deck will actually make it easier to absorb the changes in an upgraded software program at work. Learning a piece of music will make it easier to grasp new concepts promoted by our employers.

Next, learning is a humbling experience. We may take our competence in our chosen field for granted. Stumbling over elementary steps in another field reminds us what it took to acquire our competence. Transferring this humility to the workplace makes us much more tolerant of younger, less experienced employees who may be stumbling along a path that seems really obvious to us. We should be able to lend a gentler helping hand, or perhaps we will find the patience to let others make the mistakes that will enhance their own learning.