How To Improve Your Business Skills To Be More Successful

So how do you actually get better at business skills?

In a previous post, I covered what the core business skills are.

Let’s say that you agree that those are the skills, and you’re committed to getting better at them.

What I said in that video was, “you can’t just read books and sit there and “think thoughts” to get better you have to DO.”

So how do you actually get better at those things?

Well, I’ve got good news and bad news.

The good news is learning a business skill is just like learning any other skill. The same rules apply.

My bad news is most of us haven’t really ever had to learn a skill in the way that I’m talking about.

The Two Ways of Life

So there are two “ways” of life.

1. There’s the “life” that we learned in school and in growing up.
2. And then there’s the “life in the real world.”

The problem with the “school life,” is that there are these very narrow tracks and rails. You do a test and it’s “True” or “False”, it’s either the “right answer” or the “wrong answer.” You take these five classes and then you can graduate. It’s all very rigid and structured.

In the real world instead, it’s all fuzzy and hazy.

When things are right or wrong, (“A or B)” you know, “I got the answer, right” or “I got the answer wrong”.

But when it’s all fuzzy. It’s much harder to tell if you’re on the right track or not.

So learning a “right answer” and learning a “skill” are NOT the same thing.

What Is A Skill?

Learning a skill means that you can

1. Take in the information of the situation
2. You instinctively are reacting
3. With the correct appropriate response
4. In order to have the best chance of success.

That’s when you have a skill ingrained in you.

Now the bad news is we ALREADY have a reaction to whatever is happening to us, but it’s probably not a HONED reaction.

This means, whatever happens, is extremely variable.

When I react randomly…

• It goes OK one time,
• Horribly the next time,
• Wonderful the next time
• Mediocre
• Don’t even notice we were supposed to have reacted…

We have a large variety.

As we build a skill we can recognize

• This is the input
• These are the reactions I should have.
• And the output happens more naturally.

That’s the benefit of a skill is you reduce chaos.

The First Step To Becoming Better At Something Is Becoming Worse At It First!

Now the problem is, is that when we first learn a skill, the rule is that you ALWAYS are going to get worse at whatever you’re doing!

So just acting on instinct is always going to be a higher level result than stopping, thinking, processing, and making decisions. Within that delay we’re gonna get bound up we’re gonna make bad choices.

Making those bad choices is part of learning how to get better itself!

An Example

So I’ll use an example. If you’re used to writing with an ink pen. And you’ve always written like a kindergartner with a crayon… That is NOT the most efficient way to write. But you’ve gotten pretty good at working around that and writing in that “incorrect” way.

Now, if someone takes you and tries to morph you into writing in a more traditional style, at first, your writing is going to be WAY worse.

And oftentimes, when we’re learning a new skill, at that “way worse” section we’re essentially saying “Naaa… I like my way better, and go back and double down on this. This works ‘good enough’ for me.”

Now in these business skills, if you do that you will NEVER be able to get to that next level. You will be constrained by your lack of flexibility to grow and to have things break and get worse.

If eventually, you can stick with this and be okay with it not being great, your end result can be at a MUCH higher level than a ceiling of writing like this.

Laying The Foundation To Learn A New Skill

So with that in mind, when we’re learning a new skill, there’s a large variety of pieces we have to focus on.

Typically, when learning a new skill, there are about 10 things that happen before you ever even can just start improving on the skill itself.

An Example Of How I Have Struggled With A New Skill

I don’t do New Year’s resolutions but I do pick an area to focus on each year. My focus this year is to meditate for five minutes every day.

We’re about halfway through January and it’s been kicking my butt. It’s been super hard!

I have probably had two good days of meditation out of all the days so far, because I’ve been having to learn the foundational elements to even have a chance to work on the skill.

What do I mean by that?

The Foundational Elements

I’ve been having to learn “what is the correct timing for me to try to meditate?”

It does NOT work at night when my mind has already been racing. I’ve realized that for me the morning is the right time. So it took me two or three days of meditating in the afternoon or the evening to realize that’s not a good time to try it in the morning. “Hey, that felt better.”

Then it took me three or four days to try to meditate in different chairs and positions before I found that, “Gey, these three chairs don’t work. This one kind of does. Laying down I’m gonna fall asleep…” I was able to eliminate the foundational elements that were in my way.

Each time I “failed,” but I also learned a lot more!

It is only in actively doing and staying committed to learning the skill that I had a chance to understand what these foundational elements were.

Now I’m almost at the point where I have a lot of those elements together. I’m just able to sit down and focus on trying to figure out the meditation part itself (the skill I came to learn!!).

So getting back to that example like if you’re trying to adjust your writing technique, some of the first things are

• “How do I hold the pen so that it feels somewhat natural?”
• “What’s the correct extension?”
• “How do I not drag my hand on the paper?”

There are a lot of variable pieces that you’re going to have to learn BEFORE you even worry about how you might form the letter “A” versus how you used to form the letter “A”.

The Guaranteed Results Only Cost Time

So learning a skill has foundational elements, and it takes an incredible amount of time.

The good news is that if you put in that time, you WILL have the result, GUARANTEED!

Many people don’t put in the time.

They hope instead for this magic wand solution. When you take this waiting approach, you will get your heart broken!

When you put in the work day in and day out – in the end you WILL have the skill

No matter what happens… if you’re dropped off with a parachute in the middle of nowhere, with no one to help you – that skill is still with you and you can deploy it right away!

That’s the essential goal.

In building a skill in business our goal is to make it so instinctual, doesn’t take effort or energy and it reduces the chaos.

I hope this has helped you understand some of the basic ideas of building a new skill.

I know you can do it but it is going to be a frustrating and long process, but it’s definitely worth it.

I will cover some of the details of building skills in more specific ways in future content.

If you would benefit from 1-on-1 mentorship time to build your business skills, schedule a time to visit with me to see if starting a consulting relationship makes sense.

Thanks. Have a good day!