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Reports : Developing Sustainable Rewards
Metaskills are the core skills to aim for in our own personal development writes Peter Rogan of Future Positive Consulting Ltd. They are the skills that the truly insightful coaches know to focus on. (Less skilled coaches focus more on surface level techniques and short-term results). Both in our own personal development and in coaching others working on metaskills brings the biggest sustainable long-term return for the time and effort we invest.
What therefore can we learn from Peter about developing these skills?
"Metaskills are not fixed attributes but learnable skills, which can be continually developed and honed. Indeed they have to be learned, in that they don’t tend to occur naturally in most of us in huge quantities".
What are the metaskills?
Metaskills include some obvious and familiar things which it’s easy to miss the full significance of and some less obvious things. Here’s a quick list, they are not necessarily in order of importance, indeed you’ll quickly see that they all interrelate (which is good news because it means that if you develop one, it’s easier to develop another)
Emotional intelligence: Developing self-awareness, self-regulation (the ability to stop ourselves giving in to the temptation to do what we know is the wrong thing) , self-motivation (to consistently discipline ourselves to keep the positive promises we make to ourselves), situational awareness (the ability to read people and situations and know what to do) and interpersonal effectiveness (the skills required to respond skilfully to what a situations demand, be that directness or diplomacy or everything in between)
Coachability: This involves the ability to learn and also the ability to take feedback, analyse it in a balanced way, extract the key messages and take appropriate action. One of the real hallmarks of top performers is that they don’t need much feedback. They can pick up their own slips and sort them without any input. They also actively seek feedback and are very open and sensitive to (in a positive sense) even very subtle feedback. In short, they just need a light touch to get the message, they understand it well and respond appropriately. This makes them high-performing, low-maintenance and continuously improving: An outstanding combination. (This stands in sharp contrast with people who need lots of reminding and never seem to either get or act on the message)
Positivity and resilience: The ability to stay optimistic and upbeat in difficult circumstances and always find the next most positive step that can be taken is – and to take it, no matter how small or doubtful that step is. (As opposed to getting downbeat and going into victim mode and finding excuses to give up or blame other circumstances or other people).
Concentration: Maintaining focused attention, despite setbacks, fatigue, and other distractions
Reflection: The skill and habit of looking back and learning on every day, week, month and year, every project, every meeting, taking even something that will make a 0.01% difference to our performance next time the wheel turns! (This one is strongly linked with coachability)
Planning and organising: An old standard favourite that many people still struggle to keep on top of. How well we spend the minutes doing this, profoundly affects how the subsequent hours will be spent and what they’ll yield.
Getting into flow: The ability to hit – and stay in for prolonged periods – that space where we are productive, producing great quality, enjoying ourselves and where time flies by.
Developing confidence: Confidence, that emotional feeling we get in situations isn’t something that we mysteriously have or don’t have. It’s the by-product of the consistent application of the metaskill of developing confidence: The learnable and improvable skill of recognising our progress, victories, achievements, talents, capabilities and potential. The metaskill of reflection really helps here as long as we remember to point it in the direction of looking for positives.
Learning to trust (self and others): Not everyone masters this one – and like confidence it’s something most of us don’t necessarily do well automatically but which can be developed with conscious effort over time. Partly this is learning to look at the positives and draw confidence from them (in ourselves and others) and partly it’s about taking managed risks in trusting yourself or others to try new things. It’s also partly about recognising that slip up and setbacks are inevitable in this but can be worked through with some reflection, the exercise of perspective and some coaching and encouragement.
Gratitude: We can often feel dissatisfied with things that go wrong or with things we don’t have, and we can maybe point to genuine reasons for this. But if we don’t have a decently well-developed sense of gratitude we’ll always be dissatisfied, because we’ll simply never really recognise or enjoy the good stuff that’s there already, and that’s to live in some kind of self-inflicted emotional poverty. It’s all too easy to lose perspective and forget all the great things and people we have in our lives that we’d miss if they weren’t there. (One of the best tips I ever got was every night when my head hits the pillow to go through in my mind all the things I have to be grateful for. It’s great for de-stressing getting perspective, ending the day on a high and dozing off into a contented sleep).
Developing metaskills
The key to developing metaskills is directed practice (arguably the meta-metaskill!) The gist of it is this:
- To recognise the importance of these skills
- To form a genuine commitment to enhance them
- To be aware of how well you are doing at the moment and where there are gaps
- To look for opportunities to practice, to do better.
Everyday life is great at providing endless opportunities in the hurly burly of daily life to practice these things in ways which will immediately benefit us (if only in a small way, but will build into something more substantial and longer-lasting the more we do it)
making and breaking habits
“There is no instant pudding” (Deming)
Success with these kinds of techniques is usually not instantaneous. The first month you spend doing this exercise it might just feel like a silly waste of time: Sometimes its awkward making changes, trying new things, letting go of old habits. But as with all the other things in life you’ve mastered, you’ll know that directed practice is the key that unlocks the door to sustained success: Commitment, persistence, mindful effort, building on small successes, making small adjustments until it starts, bit by bit to start really working. Even then it can be hard to see exactly how it’s working. Sometimes people only realise when, after a few months they stop doing it and all the old familiar problems which had somehow disappeared start again. The underlying psychology is again simple. Research suggests that it takes between six and eight weeks to either lose a habit or develop a habit. While one can change a behaviour pretty quickly (hence all the “change your life in seven days” style books) sustaining that behaviour change is where real success lies. The bad news is that it takes time. The good news is that all it takes is time and perseverance.
Who is Peter Rogan
[click here]to see Peter in discussion with information marketing entrepreneur Chris Peacock of Chris Peacock TV
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