I spent all day in a prospecting training workshop, and will spend all of tomorrow in the second part of it. This is for sellers to improve their pipeline generation, and people have travelled from across the Nordics for it. The training was provided to one group in Finnish last year, who raved about it. While the training is okay and there are some decent tips, it is also a little bit annoying, because there is essentially nothing new in any of it, because I have gone through all of this with the exact same group of people over a year ago.
But this is also what makes it interesting.
Because it highlights the situation that often, when people are "too close" to us, we are less likely to onboard the knowledge they provide. We essentially discount what people we know say to us, while inflating the value of what someone we are paying says, even if the things are identical. There is also a "skin in the game" element, even though they aren't paying for any of this themselves. The sense of a professional being paid to deliver something, increases the value of what is delivered.
The value of a training like this however, isn't about the training itself, but what is done with what is learned after the training. The best information is useless if it isn't applied, if it isn't put into practice. But there is another fallacy perhaps in this, because with so much information available at our fingertips these days, we are able to have all kinds of quality information, but very little of it will seem "good enough" to be actionable. Instead, we remain passive in the hope that better information will arrive that will make it even easier for us to act.
The moment never arises.
When I was training business English in Finland, I often met with a similar mindset, where people would have a believe if they "just knew a little more", then they would know enough to have the confidence to speak. Some had extra training, some went to overseas training sessions in England. But they failed to realize that there are confident speakers out there who don't know half as much as them, but are willing to speak and learn along the way, despite the errors.
Which gets the better result?
Perfect information (if there is such a thing) doesn't mean perfect knowledge. We can see this quite clearly with the extremely high availability of information on the internet, but people's skills aren't necessarily increasing, even when they "want" to learn. There are many reasons for this, but I think one of them is that we are spread so thin due to the bombardment of constant information streams, that we just don't have the energy (or patience) to start practicing.
In the past, we were more specialized in the workplace than we are now, in the sense that we had a narrower band of tasks we were responsible for. Now, we have to wear many minor hats, like being proficient with programs, being able to type, create presentations, calculate some spreadsheets and the like. These used to be individual roles and professions themselves. This meant that within pretty defined limits, people could improve their skills professionally.
Now, there is a lot of pressure to improve professionally, as well as improve personally, as well as consume a lot of entertainment. There might not be enough time in a day, or gas in the human tank to do all that we want, so if we want to improve, we have prioritize what we are going to work on and move resources away from competing wants. We might also have to give up on some of the other aspects too, or limit how much time we spend doing them, like being passively entertained.
There is a cost to being better.
There is also a cost to staying the same, and a cost for getting worse. Which means we have to decide what costs we are willing to pay, and where we are then going to put our resources. Time, effort, money, and any other spendable items can be reallocated to where they will make the most impact on improving our lives. Sometimes, that might be in the workplace as we build a career, or shift into a new role. Other times it might be on the personal side, where we look to improve our social interactions or take up a hobby. And yes, sometimes it can mean using our potential on activities like entertainment.
But, we should do it all with intention, including consuming. Yet, the way we have been encouraged to consume is to eat mindlessly, to satisfy our immediate desires, giving little heed to what our long-term goals are and what is required for us to do to reach them. We can keep stacking information, keep paying professionals to teach us, but no matter what we do, the only way to build skill is to apply what we know and learn through the experience.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]