Communication Mistakes, Career Break and Learning Mindset

All the meaningful conversations have one thing in common.

They enhance the experience.

Be it a discussion across the table or a virtual meeting, a meaningful input, suggestion, question or a comment, can enhance the experience of everyone involved. And at times it gives entirely new direction to the subject.

Whether your objective is to learn, earn, or to make a personal brand on #linkedin, it’s incomplete without a meaningful conversation.

We had many such conversations last week.

Let's dive into the Posts, Feature and amazing conversations of this week.

Post 1

The habit of not tracking your progress can often result in lack of focus.

In order to improve your focus, the first thing one can do is to start measuring your progress. ?Focus often fades away as the time progresses on any activity and it fades faster when there is lack of feedback.

?? Our brain has a natural tendency to know whether or not we are making progress toward our goals, and it is impossible to know that without any feedback.

From a practical perspective this means we need to measure our results.

We all have areas of life that we say are important to us, but that we aren’t measuring. And we lose the?opportunity?because measurement provide?sustainability?in focus and concentration. ??

??The activities or task we measure are the ones we improve upon.

It is only through numbers and clear tracking that we have any idea if we are getting any better or worse. ??

Unfortunately, we often avoid measuring because we are fearful of what the numbers will tell us about ourselves. ??

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Conversations:

Post 2:

How to be in the learning mindset????????????????????????????????????????????????????

We often are in hurry to ‘agree’ or ‘disagree’ with others.

We are so quick to ‘accept’ or ‘reject’ the ideas, that's why we have created templates in our minds to put things in those baskets without much thinking.

In order to learn, we need to have an open mind. The key is to stay with the thoughts & ideas for a little longer.

We must try to analyze the idea without any bias, And experience the difference, between reality and your opinion.

In the learning mindset, we either practice what we have learned in life so far or we try & learn what we need to practice going forward.

Conversation:

Post 3

The career break isn't an asset until you make it count??

You need to make it count by continuous learning, upskilling, or by learning life skills during the break. It's must to pick some values during that time.

? In order to be fair with others and to your industry, its important to raise the bar by upgrading yourself on?technology?front or?management?front, depending upon your domain and current skillset.

?And this learning & development is choiceless in today's world. The ones who don't have a break in their resumes, are also supposed to learn & upgrade their skills continuously.

You don't need to worry about structured learning too much, for example females on maternity break or similar circumstances of forced break wherein you might not have favorable circumstances for learning or shortage of time &?money?to invest in learning.

In this case, you can still learn a great deal in managing your situation, body, minds and what not.

?? The idea is to have an open mind and apply those learnings, or behavioral skills or physical transformation to make you stronger so that once you are back you are stronger than your previous versions.

Now the next question is ...

How to manage the gap in?Resume?

There could be ‘n’ number of reasons for the break in resume.

Mind that gap in?job interviews, and be prepared that it’ll come up. Interviewer is well within their rights to talk about it

And they would surely want to verify the reasons or circumstances in order to assess your current skill sets and your attitude.

You need to follow the following;

??Be honest but don’t bring in what is not relevant and quite old.

??Explain why you’ve got gaps/breaks in your resume.

??Reassure the interviewer why it won't be happening again.

??Most importantly, Share the value you picked up along the way in those times.

???? Keep your explanation short. and do have a finish line or clear take-away, So that you don’t land into awkward silence.

Conversation:

Post 4

The Mistake I made in Communication early on.

When I started my career I had certain assumptions about communication and those assumptions caused so many issues and affected communication to a great extent?

I had assumed that

??? Everyone communicates the same way

?? Everyone thinks the same way

?? It's easy to understand each other's point of view

I wasn't aware of the fact that the ability to effectively communicate an idea is a competitive advantage. I learnt this over a period of time and after making a lot of mistakes, which happened because of poor communication.

Effective communication is as important as the idea itself and has 4 essential pillars:

??Clarity - Effective communication is clear communication. Clear communication happens when the message you share is received as the message you intended. One of the biggest reason why you don’t communicate effectively is because you aren’t fully sure of what you are trying to say.

?? Understanding - As an effective communicator, your foremost job is to communicate in a way that people understand. Your communication will always generate a response, but if you fail to speak in a way that seeks to be understood, the response you receive will not be the response you desire.

?Environment - The environment of the message plays a big role in effective communication. The words, approach, person, place, & time; everything has to be right for effective?communication. Just one of them being off can completely dilute your message.

?Questions - Weak communicators are ignorant to questions and objections, but effective communicators see questions and objections clearly before they have taken place. Effective communicators think about questions and follow-up questions their audience may have.

Thanks to?technology?and?innovation, the youngsters these days are far better equipped in terms of access to information in order to learn from others. That’s what makes it even more vital to learn and not make such mistakes.

Conversation:

Post 5

Reduce, Reuse and Recycle ??

We have got ourselves in a situation where a decision to ban plastic items is non-negotiable, as finding an alternative to plastic is not easy,

But it is necessary to find solutions.

Although it is very unfortunate that?jobs?of many working in this industry is at stake because of this ban. The better planning about other products to manufacture in order to employ this workforce would have been a relief.

There have been plastic bans in the past as well. As many as 25 States in?India?had banned plastic previously with some form of state notification within their own jurisdictions. But all these bans had a very limited impact on ground.

This single-use-plastic ban list covers a lot of waste streams.

Basically, this notification means that there is a?law?which will prohibit certain items for production, sale and consumptions. The enforcement of the ban is the responsibility of local authorities and municipal bodies.

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Hopefully, there would be necessary steps to employ the workforce in other?manufacturing?units.

Post 6

The future of learning??

You are not supposed to agree with everything you consume through a book, article, talk, quote or the content on?social media

In fact, agreeing with everything doesn’t serve the purpose. It’s actually the perspectives that challenge our thought process, are the ones that offer the learning?opportunity.

The idea of?learning?is not to confirm or reinforce your beliefs, It's to grow beyond beliefs.

The?future?of learning lies in fostering?creativity. And the?creativity?isn't about repeating what you know and presenting your beliefs through your work or your words.

The learning and creativity is in the unknown and the key is to explore the following even if that makes you uncomfortable.

• unexplored content
• unfamiliar people
• untraveled places
• unexplored terrains in your mind

It's all about challenging your faculties of thinking in order to push the boundaries.

Hope you enjoyed the journey. Until next week, many thanks!