Uberskills
Stephen
Timperley and Barry Shepherd
Copyright © 2012 by Stephen
Timperley and Barry Shepherd
ISBN 978-0-473-20583-6
Smashwords edition Published by
Uberskills Limited
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“Cover image courtesy of Elxeneize & Dreamstime.com Cover by Joleene Naylor”
Table of Contents
1. The Uberskills
Program
2. Foundation - Getting Started
3. Focus
4.
Integrity
5. Simplicity
6. Focus – Concentration
7.
Integrity - Personal Presentation
8. Simplicity – Logic
9.
STIR
10. Final Note
Uberskills! This book will give you the tools to master your talents and achieve your goals in life by guiding you through some exciting and stimulating exercises, scenarios and topics. You’ll be surprised when you find in the first couple of chapters that you already had a lot more latent skills than you realized! Our job is to show you how to apply them to you, personally. We show you how to develop skills that you will use time and again - at work, at leisure and with family and friends.
Everyone can benefit immediately from following the program, and of course the more effort you put in the more you will gain. Just try a couple of exercises and we’re sure you will be excited about how quickly you can apply you latent talents!
We define the three uberskills as focus, integrity and simplicity and the book is build round developing your understanding of these. We’ve given them these handy logos so you can recognize where you are in the book, and hopefully in day to day life these pictures will pop into your mind when you need them.
Ensure success by defining goals and objectives that are well identified, real, honest and realistic.
Gain respect by being consistent, reliable, and honest with ourselves and others.
Reduce the stress of clutter and release creativity by identifying and analyzing what's important.
Uberskills will give you the ability to look at complex problems and see the important issues, to understand how other people work, to relax, and understand what you really want from life. This program helps you achieve your goals and ambitions. Realize your potential!
How this book is organized
There are seven main chapters. There’s Getting Started, followed by a key chapter on each of the uberskills - Focus, Integrity and Simplicity. Then there are a further three chapters to build your skills in each area. Finally we‘ve included an extra - an insight into a special way of setting and attaining your goals.
How does it work?
Each chapter leads you to an understanding of Uberskills concepts by addressesing a topic that relates to a particular uberskill and explaining it in easy to understand but intelligent language. You are free to follow your own path and select the topics you want but we recommend that you do the key chapter for each uberskill before the second in each skill group. Within these chapters we set exercises. They are not difficult but they are demanding. Your commitment will ensure that you get the most out of chapters and understand the topic at your own pace. In addition there are some stand-alone hints and exercises that provide high quality tools to build you skillbase.
Chapters are all laid out in a similar way so that you will become familiar with the sections. We start with an introduction then give you some background, discussion and thoughts on the topic. Exercises are included to aid your understanding and help you to put into practice what you’ve learned.
These exercises will demand your full attention and, like most enterprises, a committed effort brings rewards. As you move through the chapters, you’ll find a common approach to exercises. Some contain scenarios. These describe a set of circumstances to give your exercises a more realistic context, or illustrate the meaning of a previous section.
Please follow the instructions closely. In particular, we often ask you to write something down or carry out an activity every day. Don’t just make lists in your head or promise yourself to start next week. Write things down and start now! These notes will build up into a practical resource that is tailored to yourself, and you will get excellent value in the future by reviewing them. You’ll want to refer back to your notes easily, so find an electronic device, notebook or folder to keep everything together. Jot down any useful thoughts and ideas. If you create a particularly effective exercise or concept, we’d like to hear about it.
We encourage you to build on our suggestions and create your own exercises. There are important concepts necessary to understand the Uberskills process. These will become apparent as you progress.
How do I start?
Start with Getting Started! This will give you plenty to think about and get you into the idea of exercises and scenarios. The book contains plenty of these and they become personal to you and your own experience. Don’t rush for the next chapter but sit back and think about what you’ve learned. Some people do the chapter again because the next time round you’ll get something extra out of it.
The next chapter in the book is about Focus but you can choose any of the key chapters (Focus, Integrity and Simplicity). If you feel like doing Integrity before Focus, go ahead.
The following three chapters extend your knowledge of each of the three Uberskills. You’ll be getting a really good feel for how your understanding is being developed by now. And finally we’ve added a special Focus topic called STIR. We’ll leave you to find out what STIR is about.
So start at the beginning with Getting Started then pick an uberskill in any order. Remember to write down your exercises (on paper or electronically) and any special ideas that occur to you. As part of the program you can send comments to us at feedback@uberskills.com. We want to know how you get on and will try to respond to all comments.
Off you go!
2. Foundation - Getting Started
What this chapter covers
Starting the journey
We’ve outlined the concepts associated with Uberskills. The aim of the program is to lead you to an understanding of uberskills so that you can gain and apply skills and techniques to help you reach your goals, whatever they are. The program is a journey of discovery - you are already under way.
Uberskills are Focus, Simplicity and Integrity. Knowing this, however, is just a start. We need to gain a real understanding of the concepts behind uberskills to earn their benefits and apply them to our every-day life, whether at work, home or play. Uberskills are inherent in us all, but we don’t always know how and when to apply them. We are about to rediscover these skills.
In this chapter, Getting Started, we introduce Uberskills concepts by giving you the basic techniques for analyzing where you stand in relation to your skills. In particular, we teach you about specific and general skills which build into uberskills. You use specific skills and techniques, like working a computer, and general skills, like dealing with people, all the time at work and at home. It’s important for you to understand the difference between these skill types and you can only do this with examples from your own experience. This is where we will lead you.
Let’s go!
So - here you are. Congratulations on making a start! We will get going by analyzing your current skills, and taking a look at how you perceive your skills. This is not a competitive exercise - everyone has an individual set of skills and different objectives for which they are used. We don’t want you to rate yourself against others, just assess which skills you have, how well they are developed, what additional skills you need to achieve your personal goals, and ensure that you really do want to do what you think you want to do!
First, let’s make some lists of your skills. Don’t worry if it all seems rather obvious at first. As you work through this chapter, you’ll need to have a good set of examples from your own experience to work with. You’ll see how these can be divided into specific and general skills. This is one of the foundations for understanding uberskills.
Now, let’s move straight in to the first exercise.
Exercise GS1
The first exercise is not too difficult. Over the next day or two note down all the skills you can think of that you and people around you have. Think mainly about your skills but include any that your friends, co-workers or family have that are useful or admirable in some way. Don’t list lots of technical and work oriented skills that are not related to you or your immediate group. We’re not looking for a long jobs list!
To get you thinking, here are some examples:
• doing spreadsheets in Excel
• planning meals for the week
• getting the kids to do their homework
• fixing electrical stuff
• persuading people to work together
• writing poems
• being a good driver
• putting at golf
• talking to groups of people
• home decorating
When you’ve run out of ideas - and it doesn’t matter if it takes a few days - read on. You’ll be prepared for the next exercise.
Doing this exercise helps you realize how many skills you already have.
General and specific skills
Now think about the skills you’ve just listed in a slightly different way.
You have written down examples of two types of skill - specific and general. You have learned by experience, education or formal on-the-job training a lot of specific skills and techniques to do with the way you handle day-to-day work. These might include accounting methods, report writing, web design or programming, auto maintenance, company knowledge and any number of job related skills. If you were to go for another job today, in the same field, these are the skills you would list in your resume, right at the front.
Then there’s a second list you might make of more general skills that help you in your work, and outside work as well. You might have written down time management, presentation techniques, interviewing skills, manual dexterity, selling techniques, and rapid reading in this list. These are particularly valuable attributes when you change jobs because these skills help across a range of activities, not just one role in one organization. Some of these would be in your resume as well.
Now use these ideas in the next exercise.
Exercise GS2
Take your skills list and for each entry mark whether you think it’s a specific skill or a general skill. Use an S for specific and a G for general. Don’t think for too long about each one; put down what seems right at first.
To show you what we mean, here are the examples with our idea of whether they are S or G:
• doing spreadsheets in Excel (S)
• planning meals for the week (G)
• getting the kids to do their homework (S)
• fixing electrical stuff (S)
• persuading people to work together (G)
• writing poems (S)
• being a good driver (S)
• putting at golf (S)
• talking to groups of people (G)
• home decorating (S)
Go back over your list. How many of each have you marked? Make a note of each total.
The purpose of this exercise is to start you thinking about skills in different categories. If we are asked what we do well, chances are that our response (put in a suitably modest way, of course) would be around specific skills. You might be good at repairing furniture, being accurate at financial work or reading a map. You probably would not mention things like being good at organizing people or being able to imagine how a house would look from just a floor-plan.
There are two reasons for this. First, people expect a concrete response and might be surprised if you talked about more general skills. Second, few of us explicitly identify the general skills we have without prompting. One objective of this chapter is to make you more aware of these general skills, and to start identifying those you have, and those that would be useful.
Exercise GS3
Now rewrite your skills as two lists - an S list and a G list. As you go, try to group similar skills together. How you do this is up to you. You might put manual skills together, or skills you use with the kids, or thinking skills. It doesn’t matter what method you use as long as it’s yours.
Now think. Add to each list. Depending on how many you started with you should aim to double each list. You may have found that the S list is bigger than the G list, but aim to end up with a substantial set of G’s. Try to use your own experience - what have you done today? Or draw on the examples from this chapter. Take time, sleep on it, have another day’s experience!
You should end up with an S and a G list each containing a number of grouped skills.
At this point we won’t attempt to link your skills with uberskills, but these exercises are taking you in that direction. Exercise GS4 will let you try linking your own skills to uberskills. Uberskills are combinations of the sort of things that you’ve listed, particularly in the G set, and they develop throughout your lifetime. We can accelerate this process by showing you tools and techniques to really achieve your aims.
While general skills are not uberskills, before moving on we need to understand that general skills build to uberskills.
Achievements
We hope that you have odd moments when you feel deeply satisfied with a particular achievement or, more rarely, just one of those moments when everything falls into place. Let’s look at the achievements first.
Exercising and testing our skills is satisfying. Think of completing a piece of writing, finishing something you’ve made with your hands, or concluding a discussion on an important issue. These use specific skills, such as use of grammar, writing style and analysis; perhaps woodworking or pottery skills; and debating techniques. These examples make demands on some general skills like creativity in writing; design and planning; and a whole set of speaking and general knowledge practices. Doing these, and any number of other demanding activities well, creates a good feeling. Further, you learn more as you practice these skills and will do even better next time. Naturally there are setbacks and not every application of skill is successful, but this is essential to learning and gives you a better chance of your future successes being that much more satisfying.
Think about those moments when the world seems to be treating you especially well. For a start, it’s not the world creating that feeling, but something much more under your control. It’s most likely to have been a combination of achievements, an absence of negative intrusions, and a sense of something even better in the future. Let’s take a look at this.
People like to plan. Even disorganized people plan. Human nature is such that we go through life developing a series of plans, carrying them out, relaxing for a moment if they succeed, then making more plans. Big plans include buying a house, furnishing it, developing long-term relationships, following a course of study, and career development. Smaller plans range from getting to work in the morning, having friends to dinner, and putting up shelves, to organizing a week’s vacation. Many of these seem mundane, but we do get satisfaction from planning and executing our plans. The special moments we mentioned are usually derived from a number of these plans coming to fruition with the prospect of more real achievements in view.
Uberskills
Where do uberskills come in? Right here. Think of each uberskill - Focus, Integrity and Simplicity - as a skill-above-skills. They make up a set of master-skills, if you like. We’re going to look at two scenarios in which you can identify a number of general skills that make up each uberskill. The last exercise lets you apply this technique to your own list of skills.
Scenario GS1
You have a frustrating meeting with colleagues at work. You need to get on with a project and obstacles just keep appearing. No one else is particularly concerned to help clear the way. Worse, a couple of colleagues are bickering among themselves and have no focus on carrying out work vital to your project. And so on. You will have used a number of your general skills like negotiation, objective setting, motivation and applied technical knowledge to shift the problem. Maybe these are enough, but you may end up feeling frustrated and drained.
Consider how you have put these general skills together in an effective way that lets you relax and manage the transaction without stress, and leaves you satisfied at the end that you have made progress. You will certainly have used Focus to emphasize the objectives, and Integrity to negotiate and motivate people. Applying technical knowledge if often less about the detail but seeing how things fit together – Simplicity.
Scenario GS2
Let’s take another example to help you consolidate what you have found out about defining uberskills. You’re going out for the day with your family. You’ve all decided where to go and want to pack the station wagon with food for lunch and some sports gear as you’re aiming to get out to some open space. Perhaps a child is taking time over choosing which ball to take and wants advice. The other child has decided he doesn’t want to go without his friend, who’s presumably at home with his parents. Your partner is more concerned with washing the windshield than anything to do with packing, and just agrees with any suggestion you make. In short there are conflicting demands and little help. Being human, you will probably shout at someone, but chances are that the wagon will get packed, the children will have the right ball and Frisbee, and lunch will work out well. Think about the skills you used to achieve this.
You must have a detailed plan of things to do, even if only in your head. You would have used negotiation skills and summed up everyone’s mood from a variety of clues, like body language, tone of voice, and just knowing then well. You multi-tasked by talking about sports equipment while mentally estimating food needs. Relate each of these general skills to one of the uberskills.
Now on to the last exercise which gets you to use you own skill list and identify the make-up your personal uberskill profile.
Exercise GS4
First, review your S and G labels. Are there any skills that you want to move to the other group? Do it.
Go over the lists you made in the first three exercises link each of your general skills to one of the uberskills. In our scenario with the special moments we will find a number of uberskills in play – can you begin to see how they fit?
Uberskills are Focus, Integrity and Simplicity.
Review
Confused? It’s not possible to explain uberskills in a sound bite - understanding needs time and work. If you had trouble identifying general skills, or in linking them with uberskills, have another attempt. Use examples from your own experience similar to those set out in the scenarios.
It’s not easy to pick up these ideas first time, so don’t despair if you aren’t satisfied with the result, or still feel uncertain. Our final advice is to relax and, over the next few days, observe general skills in action and try to link them with one of the uberskills. It’s not too difficult if you think in spare moments about how people around you are acting (look for the smiling ones), and capture the better moments in your days. Carry a notebook and write down thoughts about uberskills. They won’t arrive fully formed, but will develop. Good luck!
What have you learned?
You’ve taken big steps towards identifying and understanding uberskills. It won’t happen without effort, and you should practice observing and thinking along the lines we have suggested. If you’ve done the exercises thoroughly you will have thought of a lot of skills (particularly in the G list) that you might not have been able to articulate before.
You can now:
• identify skills in your day to day life
• see the difference between specific and general skills
• pick out general skills that you might not have noticed before
• see how applying skills leads to achievement
• start to understand the uberskills concepts
• link any general skill with one of the three uberskills Focus, Integrity and Simplicity
• move on to applying techniques in the Uberskill program
Expect it to take some time and thought to reach a real understanding of uberskills. Remember, uberskills are the skills-above-skills!
What Next?
Most people need to complete Getting Started and at least two more chapters before they become familiar enough to recognize how uberskills work.
Practice some more and keep your lists and notes. Have you enjoyed doing the exercises? They’re designed to get you thinking and be able to grasp the uberskill concepts. When you’ve become more confident with the concept of uberskills, pick the key chapter from one of the uberskill groups – Focus, Integrity or Simplicity.
What this chapter covers
This is the key chapter in the Uberskills Focus group and provides a practical introduction to identifying and setting objectives. It will enable you to understand your objective ladder and help you to distinguish between priority and importance so that you can focus on what you really want to achieve.
We assume that you have completed the Foundation Uberskills topic, Getting Started. If you haven’t, carry on with Focus, but you should go back and do Getting Started to get the most out of your uberskills program.
In our usual chapter format we start with an introduction, give you some background, discussion and objectives for the topic, and include some exercises to help you to put into practice what you’ve learned.
As usual, please make notes and keep them for future reference. This not only reinforces your understanding and learning but builds a valuable reference resource. It will also enable you to measure your progress over time.
Lets go!
Focus - defining your end-point
This chapter helps you develop techniques to enable you to be clear about what you are aiming to achieve. These can be applied to both small and large objectives. Simply getting to work in the morning involves planning and decision-making. Bigger objectives relate to your career, your personal relationships and all those things that constitute parts of your overall way of life.
It’s important to set an objective before you embark on any course of action, but don’t let this get in the way of spontaneous acts! Don’t plan to buy a flower for your soul mate - just do it. Don’t consider reasons for all those pleasant social moments and activities - enjoy them.
Live your life, but realize that there is a time and place for planning.
When there is a longer-term decision to be made, be clear about the objective. An objective is an end-point, or state of affairs. Many people confuse objectives with activities. For example, a friend might describe a plan to buy a car as an objective. Perhaps her aim is really to make it easier to get to the gym at weekends and visit her family in the next town. Buying a car might be a good way to do this. But if she is clear about her real objective, she might conclude that it would be cheaper to take a bus to her family and a cab to the gym for the cost of parking her car during the week. Of course, the convenience of having a car might outweigh the costs.
To help you see this difference here’s the first exercise.