I don’t know about you, but I am noticing a slight dip in my usual level of energy now that the temperature drops, the rain falls and the pandemic has a global resurgence.

We had a long sunny summer in Europe; it helped warm our hearts, soothe our souls and rest our minds from the constant worries about health, work, the worldwide growth of economic inequalities, or even the global warming.

Now, at the start of a rainy Fall, I am reminding myself that we cannot only rely on the sun, we need to refocus on our physical and mental health.

I know that the best overall strategy to regain energy is to feed our mind (not with junk, but with selected good-quality learning challenges!), which is essential to support all the other choices we make in our daily life: a well-fed mind is energised and optimistic; an optimistic mind supports our best efforts to design a healthy lifestyle.

It also seems imperative that we take a hard look at the future of work. The pandemic has accelerated a process of digitisation that will make it impossible to “return to normal”. According to McKinsey: “to emerge successfully from the current crisis, organisations will need to nurture their employees’ digital, cognitive, social and emotional, and adaptability and resilience skill sets”.

These requirements are challenging. It is quite obvious that the future of work will require increased digital skills, yet these skills can be relatively easily trained with acquisition of knowledge and practice. The real challenge is in the other three key skills, that require in-depth personal transformation, integrating knowledge with enhanced emotional intelligence:

We will need enhanced cognitive skills in order to open our mind, confidently deal with change, redesign, innovate and tackle new problems without solely relying on reapplying what we know from the past. We know that this is hard. Our brains are programmed to fear the new and unknown, and we are instinctively drawn to judging based on our pre-constructed assumptions. However, recent scientific advances have indicated that we can retrain our brain to be more agile, less reactive and able to overcome our instinctive biases. You can find out more about overcoming our biases on this page.
We will need enhanced social and emotional intelligence skills to effectively collaborate in an increasingly decentralised and largely remote context. Find some more information here.
We will need to stay agile and adaptable, able to build resilience while holding our intentional course. This is tough navigation and we need to expand both our ability to process rationally as well as harnessing the strength and power of our associative processes of intuition. This is what today is called “Vertical Development”.

Which brings me to what we are we doing in these areas for our Clients: after the August program on Effective Virtual Meetings and the September program on Courageous Conversations, we are now launching the October online program on Social Skills for Innovation Crowdsourcing.

This training program, articulated around the main concepts described above, provides a simple introduction, practical examples and exercises to help you transform the the you look at decentralised collaborations and co-creation.

I am very excited about this program and want to offer a substantial encouragement discount to all readers of my Newsletter.
So when you register, you can use this code NEWSLETTER for a 60% off the tuition fee.

I look forward to welcoming you to my next online training Social Skills for Innovation Crowdsourcing.

LEAD WITH A SMILE!

Laura
Managing Partner
Grooa AS

www.grooa.com