In last week’s Staff Notices, staff were encouraged to get into the holiday spirit with LinkedIn Learning’s 12 Days of Learning and watch a short video each day to invest in our professional development.
As someone who prefers more technical skills training rather than professional development, I thought I’d give it a shot and end the busy year with this relatively easy challenge. Although the challenge officially runs from 3-18 December, I decided to get a head start. You can see what’s scheduled for each day of the challenge through the 12 Days of Linkedin Learning Calendar (PDF, 446KB).
Day 1: What is Emotional Intelligence?
Emotional intelligence is about being aware of and understanding your emotions, empathy, social awareness, and managing and developing relationships. It’s important because it has a direct impact on performance, personal achievements and connecting with others.
Day 2: Use Virtual Meetings Productively
You can shut distracting windows in the background such as emails to have more focus, remove visual distractions behind you for your colleague’s focus, do a technical check in advance to prevent delays, and even pause virus protection temporarily since it might try to sync during the meeting.
Day 3: Handling Nervousness
Body language leakage can indicate nervousness. If you’re fidgety and moving around, stand with your feet shoulder-width apart to keep you grounded. If you’re stiff and awkward during presentations but relax during Q&A at the end, incorporate questions during the presentation.
Day 4: Embrace the Mindset of Strategic Thinking
To cultivate a strategic mindset, we need to question current practices to uncover new ideas and efficiencies, observe others and the big picture to get unique insights, and reflect on our experiences to clear our mental space and foster creativity.
Day 5: Understanding We’re All Biased
Using an objective test to measure bias such as Harvard University’s Project Implicit and reflecting on our actions, we can become more aware of our unconscious thoughts that might affect others.
Day 6: Affirmations as Commitments
After affirming a goal you’re committed to, remind yourself why it’s meaningful for you, and affirm what activities you’re committed to doing to ensure your success (get into very specific details and know when you’ll implement them).
Day 7: When You’re Caught Off Guard
If you’re caught off guard by a request, buy time and acknowledge the situation so you can understand the request. Use the response formula – what I do know, what I don’t know and how I will find out – to focus your thoughts and convey transparency and credibility.
Day 8: How to Keep Yourself From Interrupting
Taking notes can help you focus better and distract yourself from interrupting others. Another strategy is to pretend that you’re filming an interview. Let the other person finish their full answer otherwise it would ‘ruin the footage’, then follow-up with questions or comments.
Day 9: LinkedIn Tips for Personal Branding
Give industry insights and your perspectives on trending news by publishing articles to make your profile look more legitimate. Join industry-related groups to monitor your ‘market’ and your ‘competitors’ to inspire your own content.
Day 10: How Resilient Are You?
To identify your resilience level, you have to consider stress and coping skills. It’s important to build resilience skills to prepare for stressful situations and ultimately become stronger as a result through endurance.
Day 11: The Basics of a Good Practice
Good practice involves having good posture, patience, and practice. Good posture helps you be relaxed, alert, and focused. If you’re impatient, you can be discouraged by judging thoughts and become stressed. Even with 5 minutes of daily practice, you get the benefits of mindfulness.
Day 12: List your biggest takeaways from the Linkedin Learning Challenge
- It’s the little things that we have to be aware of first before we can make any changes to improve our work performance and personal development.
- By embracing new ideas and perspectives and reflecting on them, we can see how our previous actions affected others and start building the skills needed to better ourselves.
Feature image by Element5 Digital.