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7:26 PM
In life and in career, skills development is key. In fact, I found that those people who has mastery over a certain set of skills often get ahead in their career. There has been much literary work talking about the importance of skills development but what I would like to do today is to focus your attention on THREE KEY HORIZONTAL skills. The keyword from what I just said is HORIZONTAL. Allow me to explain the concept of HORIZONTAL SKILLS by talking about its counterpart, the VERTICAL SKILLS. Vertical skills are skills that focuses on depth and not on breadth. Think of it as a line running from north to south and as you go south you get very specific on that particular skill and you will learn things that are not available or relevant on any discipline. Going vertical is simply a process of specialization of skills. So when you are a doctor or an engineer or a nurse or a plumber or a programmer, you are actually specializing on one particular area and this is very important in your career.
Horizontal skills on another hand are skills that can be applied in almost all areas of specialization. This is a skill that runs from east to west crossing boundaries of specialization. What is good about these skills is that once you develop this skills it will augment your specialized skills. So what are these three Most POWERFUL HORIZONTAL SKILLS ?
For this post allow me to share one of the three key skills and I will share other two on following post.
1. Ability to Communicate.
Communication is a key skill because without it, it is impossible to prosper in your career and specialize on a particular subject. Having an excellent communication skill will enable to you become a better doctor, nurse, accountant, engineer, programmer, and manager. So develop your communication skills and you can do that by:
1. reading a book,
2. joining Toastmasters organization,
3. listening and studying how speakers deliver there point,
4. and paying attention to how actors, politician, and teachers bring their point across.
Communication is not just about talking. Communication can be non-verbal and non-verbal form of communication can strengthen or weaken your point. Imagine saying YES while your body is saying NO. Will it not affect your effectiveness as a speaker? Of course it will because it will confuse your audience.
You probably had an experience where you went into a concert where the performer just sings without so much body language; she just stands there singing doing nothing else. How do you feel? Do you feel fine with it? Even though she has a beautiful voice you would probably feel that she can make it more beautiful by adding a little head movement or eye and hand motion.
Why do you feel this way? Because the body communicates and it says more than what the words say. So in every area in life, communication is really an important skill to develop.
How do you become a better communicator?
I know I have given few tips above but allow me to drop a little tip in improving the way you communicate. OK, so words are powerful so think of words as push pins.So when you try to push that to the body of a person you will realize that it will affect him or her physically. Yes because it would probably hurt her. But what will make it more effective is when you put emotions together with it. Think of emotion as a pole and when you try to combine the push pin and the pole, it will become aSPEAR and with it, you can easily push that push pin through the heart of a person. So WORDS loaded with EMOTION will really impact the life of the people listening to you.
So become a better communicator, study how to communicate and use WORDSloaded with EMOTION. Once you do that you will be sure that your words will become more powerful and it will definitely impact your career.
Next post I will talk about the Ability to Initiate.
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