Harnessing Character-Shaping Experiences To Grow Your Skills For Work
I’ve learned that the most dangerous thing that can happen to us, is to not be exposed to the ups and downs of life. To not have had the chance to appreciate the experience that failure and loss has to offer to your personal growth. To not have the humility to understand that winning and being on top of your game is not finite, and that pragmatism requires you to understand and prepare for the fact that winning and losing are cyclical by nature.
I’ve seen first-hand how the lack of exposure to these character-shaping experiences breeds people who are fragile, self-entitled and lack the required maturity.
But it isn’t the exposure that matters. What really matters is the self-awareness of the experience and what it has to offer towards your personal growth.
As well as the ability to LEARN and immediately ACT upon these learnings with the curiosity and appetite that is usually displayed by people like scientists, researchers or even athletes who have a long term vision of their development goals.
Can Jobseekers and employees adopt this same thinking towards becoming more employable, or growing their potential and skills towards becoming future leaders or innovators or people with impact?
When I left a regular job in the bank, it was really because I felt unhappy with the kind of person I had become. I felt that I was far from my personal goals of growing my leadership and influencing skills. I felt that stuck in a place I dug for myself, where I lacked the ability to bring clear impact to my team, family and community.
These things really did matter to me. They mattered so much that I found myself slowly experiencing demotivation and what I’ve come to realise today was depression. Very few people close to me knew it.
To everyone else, I was just a regular employee who worked long hours and enjoyed my time alone.
Employers underestimate the connection between an employee’s ability to contribute and bring value to the organization, and their personal self-esteem.
The message so many employers convey without actually saying it verbally is “just get on with it now”. Does this serve the organization well in the short and long term? Our experience proves otherwise.
I’ve always been fascinated with harnessing experience’s life-changing role to tap into ‘real’ potential talent and future leaders. I’ve been keen to incorporate this in the what we offer to employers and jobseekers we deal with.
So what do I think can be done?
1️⃣ Jobseekers can start with themselves by making it a point to embrace the different experiences our life and work offers. Don’t be disheartened and quit just because you have to deal with politics in the office. Don’t bail out from the responsibility of managing a difficult team. Don’t give in to the frustration of reporting to a difficult manager. Instead view this as part of a long journey towards self-growth. Develop the self-awareness needed, and grow more resilient.
2️⃣ ORGANIZATIONS can tap into the power of experience in developing their employees’ capabilities by running a program that throws employees in the deep, while providing them with the necessary skills and coaching support to help them swim on their own. We call these Talent Accelerators.
We have tried this in our Talent Accelerator platform taking a group of wide-eyed fresh university graduates with virtually no experience in the world of work, and we then proceeded to work with them, guide them and challenge them throughout an 8-week talent accelerator program designed to prepare them for their new and demanding job roles. Check us out in https://sdara.co
There’s a great dialogue from the movie Limitless, where the character Bradley Cooper plays grows overconfident and is hence warned by the character Robert De Nero’s with this stark message:
“Your deductive powers are a gift from God or chance or a stray shot of sperm, or whatever, or whoever the hell wrote your life script, a gift not earned.You do not know what I know because you have not earned those powers. You’re careless with those powers.You flaunt them and you throw them around like a brat with his trust fund.You haven’t had to climb up all the greasy little rungs. You haven’t done the time in that first marriage to the girl with the right father. You think you can leap over all in a single bound.You havent had to bribe or charm or threaten your way to a seat at that table.You dont know how to access your competition because you have never competed”.
Life experiences might be frustrating and painful now, but trust me you will reap the fruits down the line.
