19.0 How to Improve Your Skills?

19.1 What is "How to Improve Your Skills?"?

It is by nature that everyone has strengths and weaknesses. The question is: How do you differentiate yourself to others? It is by building your skills and gaining your personalized core competencies. In this article, we will discuss on the methodology to building your strengths, overcoming your weaknesses, and building your core competencies.

19.2 The Four Steps in Skills Improvement

19.2.1 Step I: Identify and Harness Strengths

The first step is to identify your strengths. What are your strengths? Being knowledgeable of what you are capable of will enable you to put those strengths into good use at the right occasion. For example, in a situation of calming a person from anxiety, one should use his/ her EQ (emotional quality) skills rather than IQ (intelligence quality) skills. Once you have identified your skills, you need to harness them. The way to harness them as quoted by Mohammed Faris is through "Practice, practice, and practice".

19.2.2 Step II: Identify Weaknesses and Develop

The second step is to identify your weaknesses. The purpose of being mindful of them is for counter measurements. How can you turn it around from a weakness into a better form? For example, intimidation and pushover. Intimidation in a negative perspective implies to pressure independent people while in a positive perspective implies to gain dominance over dependant people, and pushover in a negative perspective implies to make yourself vulnerable while in a positive perspective implies to gain trust.

19.2.3 Step III: Identify Possibilities of Core Competencies

Next, the exercise of identifying core competencies is through putting two or more skills you have developed into exercise. Let's take the combined skills of intimidation and project management from the eye of a manager. The manager having exercised the two skills are more likely to deliver timely result due to his/ her projecting a sense of dominance while relaying information on stages of the project for its completion to the subordinates.

19.2.4 Step IV: Strengthen Core Competencies

It is at this stage that you will differentiate yourself to others. Once you have found the core competencies that you see fitting, exercise them and do not stop practising. Through constant practise, only then you will achieve greatness in your core competencies.

In putting this article to a closure, did we know that we can assess our leadership styles through various tests that are available online?

I hope this topic benefits you as much as it has benefited myself, wa la hawla wa la kuwatta ila billah. Insha'Allah, the next topic will be posted in the near future.