I Teach, Coach, and Mentor, and these are the 9 Skills Everyone Needs
Stumbling through life without the right skills is like walking blindfolded and hoping for the best.
Did you know the Uniform Code of Military Justice specifies court-martial for any officer who sends a soldier into battle without a weapon?
Similar protection should be provided for students because our young people shouldn’t venture into their post-education lives without crucial skills.
It’s also true for adults who were educated regularly and graduated with a high school diploma or a bachelor's degree but did not acquire any of the nine skills that I consider essential.
I know that people of all ages deserve and truly need at least some of the nine skills, and I can say that with total confidence because my work focuses on people struggling to cope with the realities of 21st-century life.
The people I help are of all ages, from around 16 to folk in their 60s. Their circumstances are varied, but there’s a common theme — they lack the key skills and attitudes that are essential in an uncertain world.
About twenty years ago, I began thinking about how I could help people realize their full potential.
I was partly motivated by my personal experience of the most painful rejections of my life when I understood that being over 50 made me invisible to corporate recruiters. It was ironic that at a time in my life when I knew I had more to offer than ever, I was regarded as ready for the scrapheap of working life.
That experience hurt like the sting of a wasp.
However, I knew that I needed to calmly step back, understand my predicament, and strategize how I could reinvent myself in order to be considered valuable in the business world.
I also talked to people to discover that many people I knew were having the exact same experience, or they, in turn, knew many people in the same predicament. I was shocked that people of all ages were suffering quietly, just like me.
It was a pernicious problem across at least three generations. An inter-generational profound sense of worthlessness.
The specific circumstances appeared to be different, yet when examined, it was clear that the underlying issue was that people were not equipped for the realities of life—they were not equipped with the life skills that enable a person of any age to appreciate and employ their agency.
And a related yet underlying factor was how many people enjoy success by accident, or in other words, through good fortune. They misinterpret their apparent success to be a sign of their brilliance. Sadly, there comes a time when the bright light of their assumed brilliance is dimmed or even extinguished by a changed reality.
It was during this period of my life that I was doing my best to be a good father to three teenage sons and coming to understand that their very expensive private school curriculum would be of little use when they graduated high school.
I became acutely aware of minority groups who were also invisible to corporate recruiters and who found themselves competing for “service jobs”, a euphemism for modern-day slavery, meaning they packed your groceries, cleaned your house, or maybe cleaned your elderly parent's soiled nappy in a nursing home.
The 20th-century successful-life formula of achieving a top-ten academic result in high school and a bachelor's degree from a reputable college equating to the opportunity to choose an employer was consigned to the trash-bin around the time of the dotcom crash of 2000–2001.
It was about ten years ago that I really started to question the pervasive changes in economic realities, the clear mismatch between what modern economies were asking for or demanding, and how poorly equipped most people were to deal with the mismatch.
Our economic circumstances have been upended by technology. technology that enabled globalization, and lately, by a quite inconvenient pandemic.
The common and proven mechanisms for dealing with gradual lifestyle changes were overwhelmed by the pace of change in the 21st century and found sadly wanting.
So, here we all are in 2021 and very few of us have been shown how we can develop and hone the life skills we all desperately need and that are clearly essential.
As CEO of a not-for-profit, I could see that the prevailing interventions were ineffective and generally a waste of time and money.
It’s sad that so many solutions to this pernicious and pervasive problem are pitched at people who can’t afford the time or money to participate in a program that is literally a creator of false hope and a waste of their money.
This is the backstory to how I designed and developed a skills framework that can be applied by people as young as 16 and as old as 70 and even older.
The framework has now been tested for over a year in varied settings for a range of age groups and demographics, and the results are super-exciting.
So, what does it look like, and how does it work?
It’s structured as a 3x3 matrix. Simply, there are 9 essential life skills that can be applied individually or in any of 7 themes, with each theme comprising 3 life skills. The themes are the rows and columns plus the diagonal theme of Sales Orientation, which is so important because, as you know, ‘nothing happens until somebody sells something.’
Each of the seven themes is taught as 14 hours of experiential learning over an intensive 2-day program.
The use-cases of the framework are literally endless and will benefit people of all ages and while it has so far been applied for people of 15–16 and over, there is no reason that it can’t be applied for much younger students.
At this point, I’ll fess up that I get the biggest thrill from working with young people 16–18 years and seeing the impact of the Life-Skills program.
Students shouldn’t go out into life without the ability to communicate. Success in life will be determined largely by the ability to write, the ability to persuade, and the quality of one's ideas, in that order.
By the end of each Life-Skills program, you’ll have been exposed to many ideas, some of which you’ll incorporate into your own repertoire. This will ensure that you get the maximum opportunity to have your ideas valued and accepted by the people you engage with throughout your life.
You can find out more about the Skills Framework at https://www.futureskills.studio/
About the Author:
Greg Twemlow is a Sydney-based Social Enterprise Founder | Startup Mentor | CEO | Writer | Speaker
Greg Twemlow
sharing what I’ve learned from 35 years as a citizen-of-the-world, parent, corporate executive, entrepreneur and since 2018, CEO of a registered charity.
