Competency lessons for Woman’s Month taken from:

Educated by Tara Westover

Developing your skills

There is an immense confidence that grows from becoming skilful. Using your innate ability to grow yourself in a deliberate and defined manner makes you professional and competent.

What is interesting is that skills breed skills – so the more you can do, the easier new things are. Once you’ve started yourself on your journey of advancement, you learn more than you realise as so many skills overlap and interlink with each other.

When you consider women who you see as being skilful, you will start to notice that they do not only have a specific range of skills. They also have both the skills necessary to support their area of specialisation, as well as a general set of skills, such as communication and interpersonal skills, which make them able to use their special skills more easily.

The enormous range of skills available for you to develop can aid and limit your development path because it can be overwhelming to choose what to focus on first. However, since you know that there are things that you just do well naturally, you are able to become more dexterous faster and enjoy those quick wins.

Tara Westover gives a beautiful message in how learning new skills develops over time when she said:

“The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.”