The Return: A Post-Pandemic Primer

For over 35 years, we at Creative Ventures have preached ONE SINGLE OVERRIDING PRINCIPLE – SIMPLICITY.  So let me take a shot at an emerging business-driven planet as a post-pandemic primer.  Now, I’m not a futurist, in fact, I’m not big on them other than their fantastic entertainment value.  Let’s take a look at our return from this pandemic as a logicist (not a real word, but it should be!), with a foundation of simplicity.

When the post-virus work whistle blows, every company on the third rock from the sun will need to sell.  Yeah, sell.  Hotels will need to sell rooms. Airlines will need to sell seats.  Financial services companies will need to sell financial products, insurance companies will need to sell insurance, and hydraulic multi-phased train coupling producers will need to sell, well, whatever those are.

Companies will be looking to their sales force to “hit the ground running.”  They will be testing your value within the company by how you will navigate a world that will be in a very conservative spending cocoon for a long time. You know this.  Hell, everyone knows this.  I’m just wondering how many professionals are really thinking about it, personally.  They should be and they should be asking the only question that really matters:

HOW CAN I BE BETTER AT WHAT I DO WHEN I COME BACK THAN I WAS WHEN I LEFT?

Here is a little help.  Think one simple thought – SKILLS.  Can you build or add to your skill base?  When others are secretly watching cat videos, can you be grabbing an advantage in thinking and the use of your time?

Now that you have your brain wrapped around SKILLS, let me suggest that you should be thinking PRIME SKILLS or 1^St PRINCIPLE SKILLS.  Check the piece I wrote about first principles in our monthly newsletter.

These are the skills that define success and career advancement.  They fall under only two categories:  Communication Skills and Thinking Skills.

Communication Skills

Communication skills have three areas that you need to have rock-solid expertise in:

• Interpersonal Communication Skills:  These are the elements of one on one communication.  Just you and someone else.  Your knowledge of pace, modulation, vocabulary, body language, an array of pieces that fit together allowing you to be in command of the most common type of sales interaction
• Presentation Skills:  This is a CRITICAL skill.  It allows you to move an idea, a product or a service through a group of people.  This skill has three key parts:  comfort, connection, and influence.
• Written Skills:  It wouldn’t surprise you that most people can’t produce a coherent sentence.  I see this all the time.  I know the world allows a strange language consisting of an ever-changing list of abbreviations and images, but the ability to communicate with leaders does not consist of LOL and poop emoji’s.  You need to know how to communicate in our written alphabet.

Thinking Skills

Then there is thinking.  Yeah, thinking.  This is the process of using your brain to consider ideas and envision an outcome.  Though the actual biology of thinking is not really adequately understood, you can sum it up as the process that leads to a decision.  We use modulations of thinking to accomplish this.

• Critical Thinking – Defining elements in the decision process.
• Strategic Thinking – Applying the elements in the decision process.
• Creative Thinking –  Discovering multiple pathways to a decision.
• Intuitive Thinking – The gut feeling that experience builds.

These are the PRIME SKILLS.  At Creative Ventures, we have attacked these with simple, powerful and elegant teaching strategies since we first opened our doors and hundreds of our clients have engaged with our dynamic delivery and unique approach to content.

So play a game of imagination.  Think!  Get those neurons firing their chemical and electrical charges.  You only have to answer one question in your value equation:

HOW CAN I BE BETTER AT WHAT I DO WHEN I RETURN THAN I WAS WHEN I LEFT!