You need the skills to be able to do your job. FACT. From the least techincal job to being a brain surgeon or rocket scientist, there is no getting away from it, you aren’t going to last long if you do things the wrong way.

Call it training, call it personal development. Whichever way, look on training as an opportunity to change your look on life and your approach to it – and therefore to change your life to something that you want it to be. As with Time Management, you need a list of goals, so that you can set your training requirements accordingly.

I’m going to say that there are two type of training. The first is how-to-training. The nuts and bolts of your chosen business. If you’re a plumber, you need to know how to bend pipes and to join them together and so on. But then you’ve also got softer skills to learn – lets call this personal-development-training. E.g. improve your confidence, improve your conversational skills, and win more customers.

Magic Wand

Remember there is no such thing as a magic wand. Many personal development books and courses make very similar, highfalutin claims. These are not entirely untrue. However, no book in the world will make you do the things that they claim, unless you do something too.

When I was an -employed person, we’d get sent on many such courses. I’d go along to the workshops, join in all the fun, really throw myself into learning the techniques. I’d learn stuff like ‘how to get my boss to do what I want him to with him knowing’ then go back to the office and attempt the techniques in the work place… deathly silence… tumble weed blows across the office…

The course notes would sit there and gather dust. I’d always have excuses. ‘Yeah, but it’s all right doing it in the workshop, that’s only a bit of fun,’ and so on. FACT, these were free courses that my employer had sent me on. If nothing else, it was my duty to take on board what was said and put it into practice.

Used To Wonder

I used to wonder why the people who run such courses can manage to convince big companies into paying them extremely large sums of money for taking their employees out of the office for a couple of days at a time, whilst neglecting the important business of carrying out the company’s core tasks. Now, having been self-employed for a while, I’ve realised that what these consultants teach is worth so much more that whatever pittance they get paid.

This article, written by me, has previously been published on my former on-line incarnation, www.thesimonlewis.co.uk.