Skills for now and the future

What qualities will tomorrow’s leaders have?When asked this question, the teachers in leading business schools and universities customarily mention a number of factors: creativity, ability to take risks, flexibility, practical common sense, perseverance, an ability to learn from failure, patience and passion.

These qualities are likely to be cited by professionals in many fields when asked what it takes to progress in their particular area of work.Strangely enough, knowledge of content and subject matter appears less often among the wanted lists, as do technical skills.Maybe, we take these for granted or maybe, in the case of information knowledge, this is accessible nowadays to us via computer and hence an individual does not have to memorise so much data as in the past.Certainly, the focus is now on our ability to manage the material we have and the communication we have with our colleagues, co-workers and other people we need to be in contact with.

Our education systems are taking their time to incorporate the teaching of these skills.You will not find Flexibility 101 at University or a Higher School Certificate subject called Risk Taking.They do not come as neatly packaged informational units.These are practical skills that we need to develop as part of our way of operating in the world and both the ‘teaching’ or ‘acquisition’ of them and the ‘testing’ of whether you possess them require a different kind of classroom to the one that we most commonly find in mainstream education.So, if these factors are so desirable, how do we develop them?Well, much of our experience comes from life, but we are not always conscious enough of this to make the most of these lessons.Sometimes an event occurs and we look back a long time later and realise that we learned a lot from it.There will be some input in the education system: creativity and common sense form part of some courses, mostly as animplicit, rather than explicit, learning objective.Otherwise, we have been obliged to look at the myriad courses in personal development and further education that are run often, but not always, by the private sector.Here, we have training in reflective practice, multiple and emotional intelligences, cooperative learning, coaching, task-based learning, education for life, learning to learn, critical thinking, etc., etc.

In our experience, Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) unites features of many of these valid forms of learning and allows us to find successful ways of developing the qualities set out at the beginning of this article.The eclectic nature of NLP, with its sources including anthropology, general semantics, cybernetics and systems thinking, linguistics, hypnosis and simply excellent practice in different fields of human endeavour, approaches the world from the way that each of us make sense of reality through ourindividual mental maps.In this way, we learn what works or doesn´t work for us, or for others and the steps to start gently tweaking our mental processes so we can retain what we like, reformulate what is no longer useful to us and acquire the new skills we would like to have.It is a process-based means of learning with a great emphasis in “How”.How can I become a better X?How can I overcome this obstacle?How can I really learn something more fully and completely?

In the first place, we work with ourselves in order to enhance our abilities.Certainly, we can teach others techniques to do things better, but the key is in how each individual incorporates that skill.So, we need to understand how we go about something, first.How does this skill, behaviour or belief fit in with what we do and who we are as a person?Once we know this, our help to others is more respectful and perceptive.

To flourish in the famous qualities sought by the business school teachers (or any top professional) NLP has numerous techniques and tools that can help. Which ones we use will depend on each case.Nevertheless, some general ideas on how NLP may serveus include the following:

Creativity and Passion – knowing how to access our flow state give us the key here.This state is fundamental to our most creative moments.We can also develop our skills at visualising and at producing huge quantities of new ideas and concepts, if that is what we want.

Ability to take risks – One useful tool is being able to set realistic and congruent goals, which reduce the chance of contracting overwhelming risks.We can also learn how to detach ourselves emotionally from critical moments, so that we are in the best and most attentive state to deal with the situation and better decide which risks are acceptable for us.

Flexibility – Giving ourselves and others choice is at the heart of NLP.We learn how to do this and how to become more physically and mentally flexible, while maintaining our goal in mind. We can explore the richness of there being no one set way to do anything.There is always a choice in how we achieve what we want.

Practical Common Sense – Really knowing where we are now and what we feel may seem an obvious ability, but many people still have to learn this more completely.When we are fully aware of ourselves in the present, we know what resources we have, what ones are lacking and how to step forward to our future.We often use the Disney strategy and Dilts´Perceptual Positions to help us discover the practicalities of our current situation and the tools we need to improve on it.

Perseverance – We can keep working at a project and feel we are not making any progress.Sometimes, we need to know how to fine tune our efforts so that they come closer to our desired result.Otherwise, like Edison, we will have to persevere for a long time to get what we want.Some things, though, do take time and we can learn to recognise when we have to keep pushing forward and when we need to do something different.

Ability to learn from failure – A special NLP technique is called reframing and allows us to find a different perspective from which to view an unsuccessful or undesired moment.What was the purpose of this failure?How can we do things differently to avoid a similar result in the future? What benefits can we take from this outcome?We take failure as feedback, as useful information for the future.

Patience – By learning that everyone has a unique way to see the world and a unique way of working with life, we can begin to see our surroundings as a system and more clearly view the actions and intentions of others and/or the system in its wholeness.With a wider knowledge, we can understand and value the efforts of others (and their quirks) and, of course, our own role in this system.

So, in a straightforward, non-judgmental way, NLP gives us more understanding about what we and others are doing.Knowing this helps us to adjust our behaviour and communication to improve our situation, both for ourselves and for others.Since it all relates back to the individual and her interpretation of the world, having this wider knowledge and more finely honed talents can be of great use to teachers, as we work with people and with their growth and development as human beings.

Ó Laura Szmuch and Jamie Duncan 2003