When I accepted the 30-day blog challenge back in late December of 2014, I asked my friends to suggest some topics they thought might be interesting. Barbara Shuck (CMO at Wilson & Company, Inc.) sent me a long list of suggestions. This is the seventh of Barbara's suggested topics.
I think there are three skills more important than any others I have learned.
Although Barbara specified "in my career," I'm going to ignore that phrase so I can include one of the most effective skills I ever learned, and one I use every day in my work.
TYPING
I went to a grade school with a super-enriched program, and started typing in second grade. A lot of the early lessons involved learning and memorizing the keyboard and mastering what (in the 1950s) they called "touch typing."
To this day, I don't need to look at the keyboard to type accurately—in fact, I still use the numbers in the line above "q-w-e-r-t-y-u-I-o-p" and below the function keys, and I don't have to look at the keyboard to use them either.
This skill has stood me in good stead for almost six decades!
LISTENING
Growing up in New York City and having to take state-wide Regents exams for most high school subjects taught me to pay attention because if you didn't follow instructions you could lose half or all credit for an answer, or even discover that you didn't have to answer that group of questions.
But paying attention is not all there is to listening.
Then, in the mid-2000s, I actually got to take a class in listening. Freese and Nichols, Inc., my best client at the time, allowed me to attend the Freese and Nichols University class. The instructor was very good. He taught us the differences between active and passive listening, the benefits of active listening and a variety of behaviors that would confirm to a client that real listening was taking place.
The things I learned in that class had immediate positive impacts on my relationships with Freese and Nichols marketing and technical staff, and have continued to benefit all my professional relationships.
WRITING
In my first college English course, I spent an entire term learning about every possible mistake (what the instructor called "fatal errors") or example of bad style one never wanted to write. I learned to write run-on sentences, dangling participles, misplaced modifiers, split infinitives, and total overuse of stylistic tools such as irony and parallel construction.
Thank God for my high school English teachers. They had taught me the rules of writing as a group of things to do. By the time I got to college, no instructor could tear down or even damage the solid framework they had given me.
Today, because of the way I was taught and the frequency and volume of my writing, I can generally complete an 800-word article, polished and ready to email to my editor, in 60 to 90 minutes!
By the way, if you're interested in my results on the 30-day blog challenge, check out the January 2015 archive, where you will find all the posts.