skills vs traits
DATE OF ENTRY: 3-2-25
This is a big one for me!
After so many years of personal reskilling and facilitating the reskilling of thousands of other people over the years…and that still not properly preparing u for navigating genuine change….I stepped away from the inertia of “Reskill for the future of work!” messaging over on that other platform and began to apply some Beginner’s Mindset to it.
We are bombarded with constant messaging about the need for reskilling since everything is changing “so much and so fast.”
Yet, in my own experience, all of the reskilling I did among thousands of others did not move us toward any new future version of the work. The core of the approach to the work was the same 15 - 20 years later…and still mostly promoting the idea of reskilling to keep up!
I realized that there must be a deeper element toward making the shift.
It comes down to how we innately or intrinsically approach the work that lies in front of us from the get-go.
That’s not skills. Skills are externally applied to processes and tasks at the surface of the work.
It’s traits…the core elements of character or thinking patterns we bring to what we believe about the work and how we think about getting it done from a more foundational level.
Everyday, we observe how certain people demonstrate rather consistently how they believe, view, and approach things. They are pessimistic or optomistic. They ask questions or they accept everything at face value. They turn toward their experience vs consider the perspectives of others. Some follow the rules, norms and conventions as a general rule. Some always try to challenge them.
We all have a core set of traits that we bring to our day and these traits have a lot more to do with how we approach something at the surface of life or work or if we attempt to change how we approach these challenges.
To use a photographic example…
Traditionally, when we start out learning how to take photographs, I imagine that most of us want to become very technically proficient at the use of a camera and producing tack-sharp, representational images.
In fact, I started out this way myself because those are the skills of traditional photography.
But this “skilled” approach wasn’t sitting well with me. There were traits in the back of my mind that were not being honored or expressed in the process. That was keeping me from discovering my art.
It was turning toward those traits that started connecting wit photography on a deeper level. Now these traits serve as the guide rails for my art.
If there is some new outcome I hope to achieve based on my core set of traits that I use to guide my art, then I can work on learning and adopting that skill but doing so does not change my underlying system for creating my art.
It’s been the core underlying traits that guided the outcome of my art in a completely new direction.
If I wanted to change my art at some point, then I would first work on adopting the traits that would serve as the guide for that style of art and then I would go learn whatever skills I need to produce the desired outcomes.
Reskilling is great for when we need to keep up with the iterations of the current thing we are doing.
Traits are what lead to a fundamental change to what we do or produce.
END OF ENTRY
