The Metaskills You Need to Thrive in the 21st Century - Thrive Global

A meta-skill is a high order skill that allows you to engage with functional expertise more effectively. 

It magnifies and activates other skills and is a catalyst for learning and building new skills faster. 

Skills are temporary; meta-skills are permanent.

Learning a second language gives you a skill, a learned ability. A meta-skill, on the other hand, is your ability to learn new languages. Developing that meta-skill, makes it easier to learn a third or a fourth tongue.

We live in an era of fast change. Recognizing that the work market is not easily predictable and developing our ability to understand and adapt to continuous change is critical to succeed in the 21st Century.

Adaptability requires understanding reality, adapting our mindset and adopting new ways of working.

Adaptability is a competitive advantage — it increases your chances to thrive in change. Research shows that adaptive teams procrastinate less, are more productive, creative and faster.

1. Self-awareness: to know oneself and to understand reality and others.
2. Creativity: to develop new ideas, improvise and solve complex problems.
3. Resilience: ability to face adversity and recover from failure  or discover new solutions.

It means having an accurate view of our capabilities and shortcomings and of how others see us. This is critical to develop self-acceptance, what drives self-esteem, thus alleviating conflicts with others.

Self-awareness encourages us to lead ourselves with authenticity and integrity — and in turn, better lead others. Teams with high self-awareness make better decisions, interact better with each other and manage tensions and conflicts more effectively.

90% of people believe they are self-aware but only 15% of them actually are. That’s an indicative that most people rather than accepting what’s going on, act on denial.

Resisting reality leaves us stuck, while accepting it leads to action. We can't always change what’s happening in the world, but we can change how we react. Accepting reality is focusing our attention on what happened rather than on what we wish should have occurred.

Organizations with a deficit on empathy have inferior collaboration and teamwork. 

Being unable to step out of what’s happening to oneself, diminishes our ability to listen and understand other’s point of views. Empathy is vital to embrace diversity of thinking and thrive in change.

Creativity is about exploring new ways of solving problems. As our reality changes at an accelerated pace, creativity becomes a more widespread requirement in the workplace. 

Formal or corporate education must begin to encourage, and train, creativity.

• Improvisation: finding an unusual solution to a problem.
• Problem-solving: expanding your thinking to consider anything that could work as a solution.
• Innovation: to adopt a new mindset in order to create an alternative — to embrace experimentation over perfection, empathy over egos and doing over planning. 

• Level 1 Thinkers: those who refuse to consider other viewpoints, thought processes, or arguments.
• Deep-Thinkers: those who take a slow, deliberate, focused and reflective approach to solving complex problems.

To be resilient is to have the mental strength to live under constant uncertainty and keep trying after failures. 

Resilience is a meta-skill that can be developed and it requires experimentation, learning and overcoming failures. 

Our brains are wired for certainty, in its absence we speculate to fill the gaps. Preparing your team to embrace uncertainty requires rewiring their brains.

Support and coaching are critical to developing resilience — reverse mentoring can help your team members support each other.