Great Tips to Pick Up New Skills

Wanting to improve yourself and learn new and useful skills is an admirable goal and one that most people share. However, it can often be hard to find time to work on your new skills, especially when you only have a vague desire to start learning these skills rather than a concrete plan of how and when. This article aims to guide you through the process of learning a new skill in a direct and achievable manner.

Set Yourself Goals

The very first thing you are going to want to do when trying to learn a new skill is to set yourself goals. You want to identify what skills you are going to be learning and how you want to go about learning them. Set aside time, draft a schedule, whatever you need to set in your mind exactly what you are going to be learning and how.

Be Realistic

It is important that when you are deciding what you are learning that you are realistic. You are never going to be able to spend an hour on five different skills every day while still leading a productive life outside of skill-building. Even if you could, you would burn out far too quickly for the effort to be useful. Instead, settle on two or three skills as a maximum and work out a reasonable work schedule for them.

Look into Your Options for Learning

Once you know what you’re going to learn, start looking into the resources and courses that you could be using to help your learning. What are the pros of remote eLearning? Does your local library have any useful resources that you could take out to aid your learning? Anything that you know of that could help you on your skill-building journey, be sure to utilise it. Give yourself every opportunity to succeed.

Accept That You’re Probably Going to Suck

Something that a lot of people struggle with is the concept of being bad at something. For most people, the idea of trying something and failing is terrifying, and that fear of failure often pushes people to give up on their goals. It is entirely normal to struggle with this, but it is important that you accept that you aren’t going to be amazing at every skill right away and that to improve, you have to start at the bottom.

Remind Yourself That Progress Takes Time

In combination with this, it can be hard to deal with the idea of making slow progress. People are accustomed to instant gratification, and the idea of having to take a long time to reap a reward is a difficult one at the best of times. However, if you can stick with it, you are sure to reach your goals sooner than you think. It is hard to see progress when all you remember is the last step you took.

Learn From Your Mistakes

Finally, the most important thing you can do when trying to pick up a new skill is to learn from your mistakes. There is no such thing as a wasted effort, and often in failing, you can learn so much more than you can from success, so be sure to make the effort to learn from every failure.