The Five Skills

No magic in five, just the smallest number needed to work together and remind us how to create success. My goal is to help people focus on simplicity. Complexity occurs on its own. Our lives are all too complicated as it is.

Stumbling into these skills as most people do, I made a key decision that started the ball rolling early. While in school I decided I must overcome shyness and turned, of course, to books for answers. (Where else would a shy kid look?) I also began to learn by doing – joining clubs, sports and choir, just hanging on the sidelines to get used to being around people. Ultimately I came to pursue 8 interesting careers that included a ton of public speaking, union debates and other activities a shy person ordinarily wouldn’t relish.

Through the years I actually learned to enjoy changing. Along the way I found “common sense” made it all easy. Finding common sense balance takes its place as the central, fifth skill that pulls the full five together – something I now see ties ancient leadership skills and philosophies such as Zen together with the latest thinking in our most modern theory of all – the new science of Complexity.

Books turned up lots of useful hints. Over the years I must have studied more than a thousand on leadership, personal development and self-help – more than enough to show they all point to the same five basics. After 14 years heading Human Resources for Hudson’s Bay Company and its 70,000 people I could see even more clearly how these work in all sorts of practical situations. Seeing them so clearly makes them easy to explain – something I haven’t found in any of the books. I believe this can be helpful to many people.

Whatever you call them (and you’ll see below there are many words to describe each), the five remain essentially simple actions we already know how to do. Each builds on the others if we carry them out together:

1. Positive attitude – also called hope, faith, belief, confidence, courage, commitment, extroversion, energy, etc. – all feelings of motivation – the stuff motivational speakers prize and promote. Though we don’t always admit it or work consistently at it, we know very well how to act positively and that if we do so, we’ll end up feeling more positively ourselves and add to our success.

2. Honesty – especially honesty about feedback – also called truth, integrity, being in touch with reality, down-to-earth, connected, listening, accepting feedback, agreeableness, etc. These are all things that some people class as too “negative” to be thought about too much – roadblocks or challenges to be overcome – stuff we’re often told not to dwell on, but which will rise up to bite us if we don’t. We are perfectly capable of being honest, facing feedback and putting it into perspective – all stuff that’s not really negative at all, but tremendously valuable and rather difficult to actually get.

Feedback helps us move forward and improve. Honesty helps us build and maintain relationships not destroy them, but only if it’s handled positively. The five skills must work together. Again we know how to be honest, but we often aren’t. We’re dishonest mostly in small ways – because it’s easier to say nothing or make stuff up… or because we don’t think it’s important. If we fail to take the trouble to look for ways to get closer to true all-round, to be in touch with reality and concrete facts, yet also positive at the same time, admittedly a touch challenge, we fail to practice useful skills that could help in many situations.

3. Creative Thinking – also called contrarian or paradoxical thinking, creativity, vision, openness, asking hard questions, etc. This is stuff many people think they’re not good at, but every human being can develop effectively with a particular type of simple practice. Everyone automatically thinks creatively when they confront both honest facts and at the same time positive wishes or goals. The contradictions, apparent puzzles or “paradoxes” that emerge between these opposites, cause our human brains to dream up varied answers. Some will work, some won’t. The way to find out is to test them – mentally or in actual practice. This leads from thinking up solutions to the next skill – better action. All the skills only function effectively when working together in balance to create a total result. Just as working to be positive balances against the challenging honest facts we face, great ideas balance against our practical abilities to try them. Practice makes us good at new skills that are required.

4. Building Improved Habits – also called developing skills, changing behavior, persistence, conscientiousness, consistency, hard work etc. This process produces the only actual action elements among the five – the stuff we know we should be doing, but think we’re too lazy to work on. We’re NOT at all – not when we see why action is needed and choose to do it for ourselves. We know from hundreds of books that simply struggling through 20 to 30 repetitions of any behavior makes habit start to flow smoothly and automatically. We can also note the practical fact that when behavior becomes habit through repetition, it soon feels comfortable, so qualms about avoiding uncomfortable change disappear if we simply convince ourselves to persist. I can tell you that after 20 or 30 speeches to union members, school boards and public meetings I was no longer shy about that challenge. In fact, I’ve even chosen public speaking as my next career. We enjoy overcoming past limitations and we get good at it.

5. Sustaining Balance – The final skill is to maintain all 5 in balance while heading as quickly as conveniently possible toward our goals. This last skill is unique as it includes making sure the others are all functioning. When they are, we say we are “in the zone,” in balance. Things seem to happen as if by magic. They feel great, easy and fast. This is also called coordinating, focusing, driving toward goals, building momentum, using common sense, keeping things in perspective, not sweating the small stuff, keeping one’s balance while moving forward.

I generally refer to this as “dynamic, active or flexible balance,” not being “off balance,” and it includes a sense of something greater, a deep spiritual sense, being in tune with the universe, seeing the oneness or how things fit together, etc. It feels mystical, magical, but is very well known. It only takes coming together of all five skills in one workable stream that propels us to success. It results simply from doing the other four simultaneously, practicing often enough to be good at it. Practice and persistence over time makes this occur and when it feels right it truly is magical.

In many presentations I use the simple skill of juggling three objects to illustrate these five skills and how they come together in balance. It even makes the fifth skill “visible” to some extent. People can imagine that you don’t “know” how you make the leap from simply practicing with the three objects to suddenly finding that you can keep them in the air simultaneously. It just happens… after considerable steady practice. It’s no wonder we sometimes imagine this is magic, but we “make luck happen…” when steady preparation using the five skills meets the opportunities that always exist to create new results.

In my presentations I encourage people to test this simple approach to analyse their own examples as well as those I offer. I try for examples that will illustrate how easily they work for individuals, teams and major organizations. Modern complexity and chaos theory explain how it is that the same principles generally work at every level. Anyone can now read about those, but why it works is not nearly as important as learning to make it happen for yourself.

With practice, using the five to coordinate effective balance becomes easy and it also becomes easy to see these skills at work in everything we do. Examples from books and motivational speeches start to connect with examples in one’s own life where focusing on these simple basics makes more things effective. Examples help, but actually using the skills in one’s own life is even better. I can attest to the success this can bring. This is in fact what all those motivational books lining store shelves have to say – different stories, same principles.

So why do people want to hear about this? Because we all need motivation and examples of success to measure our own challenges against from time to time. I’m able to fit examples into nearly every type of work and many life situations since I’ve worked through so many over the years myself, from volunteer organizations and boards, to big companies and corporate environments plus a good many life experiences that all can be seen to contain the same basics and improve with the use of these skills.

The great thing is these ideas are ultimately free and can be amazingly helpful in explaining all that we see. One can use them to figure out what to do next. The best part is it’s so simple. There’s no hocus-pocus. You see it work and understand why. My goal is simplify, to make it easier for people to succeed, to cut out the complexity so they can see results and learn that things are easier than they appear.

If everyone could excel at legitimate means to get what they want, using just a bit of practice with these fundamental skills, there’d be no need for crime or war. A grand thought, but perhaps not out-of-reach as it first might seem. I encourage everyone to try and to spread these ideas for maximum impact on many more groups.

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The Five Skills

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