3 Aspects to Raise Awareness

I have been teaching soft skills for many years and I have witnessed many stories of inner transformations and growth. It always started with self-awareness and willingness to learn and adapt to a world in a constant change and shift of paradigms.

According to the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report, 50% of all employees will need reskilling by 2025. The new emerging skills are skills in active learning, resilience, stress tolerance, leadership, and flexibility in addition to many others.

When we look at the same report submitted in 2016, the trends were almost the same, except for more emphasis on the cognitive flexibility, which is likely to rise in importance?in the coming years. ?

You can read my articles for more details on this subject. Here another article published recently by Brandi Fowler, LinkedIn news reporter, with whom I chatted few weeks ago on this subject.

• The list of soft skills is not limited to the above lists but can include many other qualities needed to thrive at the personal and professional level like: Empathy, Curiosity, Positive attitude, Assertiveness, Motivation, Persistence, Etiquette and good manners, Work ethics, Focus, Optimism, Networking and a lot more

The answer is no as you need to improve the skills based on your goals, your field of activity and what you thrive to become. You don't need to master everything, you just need to master what will get you from where you are to where you would like to be.

I believe that there is a pre-requisite to all these skills that we often don’t talk about, which is the importance of self-awareness which. Here why:

?You cannot develop the skills of leadership if you don’t have clarity about who you are and what is important to you. How can you take big decisions if you don’t know about your priorities?

You cannot create trust around you if you don’t know how to handle your emotions and stress.

You cannot build confidence if you ignore what you really want and where you would like to be.

When you are more self-aware, you perform better as a Human and as a Leader.

• ?You will have clarity of who you are and what you stand for.
• You will make better decisions in line with your own values.
• You will have better control over your emotions and stress
• ?People will trust you as trust is the core of every single relationship. ?
• ?Your credibility will improve, and your performance will improve as well.
• Instead of searching for opportunities, the opportunities will be searching for you.?

The journey of self-awareness starts from within you and aims to tun the unconscious into conscious.?

When you turn the unconscious into conscious and awaken things meaningful to you, you will no longer be the same person.

• You will start having control over your choices and you will move into a state of awareness where you know exactly what you want and where you would like to be.
• You will start taking decisions based on who you are and not what others expect from you.
• You will shift from reacting, blaming others for your failures and criticizing anything to responding appropriately and taking responsibility for whatever situation you encounter.

Three ways to raise this awareness:

1. Spend some time reflecting about who you are and your future orientation. Here the major components of self-awareness that I will talk about in the coming articles and newsletters.

1. Ask for feedback from at least three people that you trust who are willing to give you an honest evaluation of your skills and performance.
2. Take personality tests. There are a lot of free tests on the web and here one of them.

All the above are skills you can acquire and develop. They are not innate skills as most people think.

If I managed to build my confidence from scratch when my life was falling apart, so you can.

It took me my whole life to recognize this, so don’t waste yours and let the journey begin. ?

?You don’t need even to be motivated. You just need a plan and take the aligned actions and you will get the motivation.

?If you do nothing now about your soft skills, you will have to invest a lot in the future. Save your time and start your own journey.

Please leave in the comments any subject related to soft skills that you would like me to write about in the coming articles.

What will be your next step?