Video: 3 Surprisingly-Learnable Skills
Over the past year or so I have read a lot of career, business, and self-help books, with the goal of continuously improving my own performance as someone who is active in Production on Vancouver’s world-renowned animation scene.If I’ve learned anything in reading these books, it is that there are a lot of skills that we think are innate when they’re actually not. You probably think that you’re born organized or especially empathic, or you’re not.
According to my readings, this isn’t remotely true. There are a ton of surprisingly-learnable skills that you can legitimately learn and embrace— if you are a disorganized person now, you can learn to be organized. I’m not saying it’s easy — like most skills, if you want to change, it’s gonna take work and an investment of time on your behalf.
In this video, I’d like to focus on three skills or aspects of personality that seem like they can’t be learned, but in fact are highly learnable. These are: organization, self-awareness, and empathy.
ORGANIZATION
First, let’s talk about Organization. I have two things I would like to offer for this - one is a real-life anecdote and the other is from an extremely well-known self-help book.
Before I was in animation, I had the opportunity to work with an incredible boss who remains a very dear friend and close advisor to me today. She has told me many times over the years that she really struggled to be organized in her work and personal life, and that she had to really push herself to learn how to be organized. At the time, I didn’t think much of this. I myself was organized and disciplined, wasn’t it the case that you are either organized or not?
Of course, the brilliance of my friend has come to resonate over the years - here is a person I deeply respect, who has proved to me that you can be ‘born’ disorganized, and then learn to be organized if you wish. She taught me little things, like creating email categories to sort your emails, and the importance of a rehearsal or run-through of what you think might be the most fireproof presentation in the world.
 |
| Image above is Habit 3: Put First Things First from 7 Habits! Image found here. |
Being organized is so central to our success and well-being that it’s even one of the key habits of Stephen R. Covey’s internationally renowned The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The Habit is Habit 3, Put First Things First. Through the chapter focusing on this Habit, Covey literally walks readers through how to make a daily and weekly schedule, and the underpinning philosophy of WHY this is important in the first place.
SELF-AWARENESS
Next up we have the skill of self-awareness. Why does this matter? Tasha Eurich says it all in the subtitle of her book Insight: The Surprising Truth about how Others See Us, How We See Ourselves, and why the Answers Matter More than We Think. In a nutshell, here’s why Eurich suggests self-awareness is such a critical skill:
“ […] being overconfident about our abilities isn’t the only way that low self-awareness can play out. Sometimes we lack clarity about our values and goals, causing us to perpetually make choices that aren’t in our best interests. Other times, we fail to grasp the impact we’re having on the people around us, alienating our colleagues, friends, and families without even knowing it.”
- from Insight: The Surprising Truth about How Others See Us, How We See Ourselves, and Why the Answers Matter More Than We Think by Tasha Eurich
In her book and research, Eurich identifies two main categories of self-awareness, “internal self-awareness” and “external self-awareness.” If you’re hearing this and sweating that you underestimated the importance of self-awareness, and are starting to question if you even have this skill in the first place, don’t worry, Eurich comes to your rescue. She says,
“The bottom line is that to become truly self-aware, you have to understand yourself and how others see you—and what’s more, the path to get there is very, very different than what most people believe. But if this sounds intimidating or untenable, there is good news. My research has shown that self-awareness is a surprisingly developable skill.”
- from Insight: The Surprising Truth about How Others See Us, How We See Ourselves, and Why the Answers Matter More Than We Think by Tasha Eurich
EMPATHY
The last surprisingly-learnable skill I want to talk about in this video is empathy, which is different from compassion and sympathy—a difference which I will encourage you to research on your own. For this section I’ll be referring to Karla McLaren’s book The Art of Empathy: A Complete Guide to Life’s Most Essential Skill*. McLaren notes:
“Empathy is also a major topic of interest in your personal and professional life, where it helps you understand others well enough to successfully communicate and work with them […] Empathy helps you connect with others, feel alongside them, understand them, work with them, meet their needs, love them, and be loved by them.”
- from The Art of Empathy: A Complete Guide to Life’s Most Essential Skill by Karla McLaren
She goes on to remind us,
“Empathy is a vital skill that we all possess to varying degrees, and the good news is that it can be worked with and develop throughout our lives […] Your empathic capacity is actually fluid and malleable through your life span.”
- from The Art of Empathy: A Complete Guide to Life’s Most Essential Skill by Karla McLaren
CONCLUSION
When you’re in Production, you learn a lot of things on the fly. What is this vs. that rendering engine, how to manage animation quotas, and create complex Shotgun tracking pages, among many other things. What underpins all of these technical skills are the skills you use to learn and disseminate the necessary information to keep your show running with your team.
Organization, self-awareness, and empathy are among these key skills. Without these three things in Production, you aren’t necessarily hooped, but you’re probably not going to be that good at your job, either. The good news is that if you’re beating yourself up thinking these skills are beyond you, that you were born without them, it’s okay- you CAN learn them, there are many surprisingly-learnable, critical soft skills you can pick up-- if you choose to.
RESOURCES
It’s 2020 & I’m a Feminist: Do The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Hold Up?
Just Listen: Three Different Career Books on One Key Skill
"Many people believe that their intellectual ability is hardwired from birth, and that failure to meet a learning challenge is an indictment of their native ability. But every time you learn something new, you change the brain--the residue of your experiences is stored. It's true that we start life with the gift of our genes, but it's also true that we become capable through the learning and development of mental models that enable us to reason, solve, and create. In other words, the elements that shape your intellectual abilities lie to a surprising extent within your own control."- from Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter C. Brown, Dr. Henry L. Roediger 3, and Dr. Mark A. McDaniel
**This post was updated April 2022 to include an additional Resource about your own intellectual abilities.
