How to change your life - learn power skills | Dr Alex Young | TEDxUniversityofBristol

so how can you change your life right now what skills and habits can you start focusing on improving today that are going to have the biggest impact on your life and your career in the future my name is alex i'm a surgeon with a degree in education and the founder of a few ed tech companies and the massive learning nerd and these are some of the questions i obsess over on an almost daily basis i'm so obsessed with these questions in fact that a few years ago i made a huge decision that changed my life

forever now i studied for six years at medical school right here in fact and then studied for another seven years to become a trauma and orthopedic surgeon a job that i absolutely loved and then i decided to give up my career in medicine to build a tech company to help people learn some of the most impactful skills on the planet now when i told my friends about this they thought i was slightly insane and they couldn't understand why i was giving up 13 years of medical career but what the but the most important conversation i

had to have was with my parents who just couldn't understand who this why their son who was a doctor and a surgeon and they were very proud of was making such a huge career decision well luckily for me having difficult conversations and explaining things is an almost daily occurrence for any doctor whether you're consenting someone for an operation breaking bad news about a diagnosis or de-escalating an angry relative and these were all experiences i needed to draw upon when i explained things to my mum especially de-escalating an angry relative and what you might not know

is these soft skills or human skills or power skills as i call them that are some of the most important skills that we can possibly learn because they don't just impact our work life they also impact how we communicate with our families how we make friends how we build and develop relationships how we navigate ourselves through difficult circumstances and how we have difficult decisions and career choices now i'm a massive fan of using immersion for learning because how do you learn a language well you don't just learn the principles you immerse yourself in it and

then you commit to deliberate practice and you get better and better until you've mastered it but unfortunately i don't have the time to immerse you all in all the soft skills that i know today plus time management is itself a power skill so i'm going to be efficient and focus on teaching you why power skills are so important and then i'm going to give you a system to help you learn any power skill that you can put into practice straight away and i'm going to particularly focus on empathy as something that i learned from my

time as a surgeon so to try and immerse you a little bit i'm going to start off with a story and that story is about the first time that my power skills were truly tested under pressure and that was the first time that i stepped onto a surgical ward as a new doctor now i was pretty excited i had my shiny stethoscope my new name badge said doctor on it and i'd been to medical school so i was feeling pretty confident three hours into that first day an emergency call went out because a patient had

arrested on one of the surgical wards the surgical team immediately attended that patient and started chest compressions to try and bring them back now we all knew the technical skills but despite my six years at medical school i definitely didn't feel prepared for the stress and emotion of having to resuscitate an unwell patient the team leader led the team effectively and communicated with them but unfortunately the patient didn't make it the team leader then had the difficult decision to stop chest compressions in the best interest of that patient he then had to debrief the surgical

team and explain to the doctors and nurses what had happened so that they could process things and weren't too stressed more than that he turned this pretty terrible experience into a potential learning opportunity so that those same doctors and nurses could get better in their careers and then he had to manage his own emotions and go and speak with the grieving wife and family of that same patient all while remaining positive and resilient so pretty easy first day right day two got a little bit better but not by much but what did i take from

this experience well it wasn't the technical skills that mattered it was the power skills like empathy and leadership and being able to turn a negative experience into a positive learning opportunity that was so impactful to everybody involved and often we forget just how powerful our soft skills can be because we use them every single day and perhaps we don't really appreciate how impactful they are to those around us now power skills aren't just used by doctors and nurses they need to be learned by everybody because we use them all the time in our work life

and our personal lives while my friends thought that i would never use the skills that i learned as a doctor again when i left to start a tech company it was in fact those power skills that were critical to help me scale that company they allowed me to grow the company to over 50 employees all working remotely spread out across the world they allowed me to close sales they allowed me to build a diverse and inclusive culture and they allowed me to lead that organization empathetically through a time of great change and uncertainty during the

pandemic so i'm a massive believer that power skills are the most important skills that you can learn today that will change your life they can improve your health your wealth your love life and your happiness and if you still don't believe me just check out linkedin or udemy's workplace learning reports which every year outline the most desirable and in demand skills from corporates across the world and they're not technical skills like coding or marketing or how to perform a knee replacement their soft skills and power skills like being resilient being creative being empathetic and being

a good leader now the problem with power skills or soft skills is that they're not soft at all they're actually really hard there are lots and lots of them and people just don't know where to start and some people don't even think they can be learned at all well on my own journey into learning power skills i've interviewed over a hundred leaders and i've researched even more cognitive psychology journals and read even more books on the topic and from all my research i can tell you there are certain commonalities across all soft and power skills

firstly all of them are skills and just like any skill they can absolutely be learned and secondly at the heart of many power skills is one particular skill and that skill is empathy now empathy is defined as our ability to put ourselves in somebody else's shoes and think and feel like they do and emotional intelligence is our ability to manage our own emotions and the emotions of others and to give you a bit of insight into just how impactful empathy can be yale university conducted a research study into over 14 000 employees of corporates across

north america and what they found was that organizations who had people and leaders who had higher levels of empathy and emotional intelligence also had better business outcomes outcomes like higher rates of employee engagement better employee retention more diverse and inclusive cultures and even higher levels of innovation and creativity and when they looked a little bit closer they found that the people who were able to manage their own emotions and the emotions of others also reported lower levels of clinical stress and better personal lives so who here would like to learn the skills that can help

you to build relationships improve your health reduce your stress and improve your career prospects well the reason i call them power skills is because it shouldn't be hard skills and soft skills it's the technical skills that we need to do our jobs every single day and then the human skills or power skills that allow us to be better human beings that give us the power to change our lives so i'm going to give you five steps right now that you can apply to any power skill from empathy to creativity to time management and i've already

given you step one because that's the most important step and step one is to first truly believe and understand that power skills can be learnt through long-term deliberate practice and if you commit to that deliberate practice they will change your life forever now to go a little deeper here if we look at the argument that people apply when they say power skills can't be learned it's the same argument they apply to things like intelligence or sporting ability or in fact any type of talent and this argument's already been disproven by the work of stanford psychology

professor carol dweck and her work on the growth mindset and this work can be summarized by the phrase hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard so while genetics and social upbringing might give people a little bit of an advantage with things like public speaking or communication or empathy if you commit to long-term deliberate practice of those same skills you'll get better really fast and you might even surpass those with innate ability if those people don't work as hard as you now the problem with practicing and learning power skills is that practicing them can

be scary by nature we humans are social animals and we don't like to be judged because we think it might impact our social capital and skills like communication are so closely linked to who we are as individuals and our own identity so step number two to learn any power skill is all about detaching who you are and your identity from the actual skills that you're learning now this can be tough so one thing that can really help you is to adopt what's called a childlike or a beginner's mind now this is a concept outlined by

author shinryu suzuki in his book zen mind beginner's mind and what he basically says is that like a child when learning something new we should be open to all possibilities and while we should reflect upon and learn from past experiences we shouldn't let them hold us back so if you've had a really bad experience of public speaking or you've been rejected when you've asked somebody out on a date you need to let it go and you need to focus on taking action to improve your power skills from where they are now and if you do

that and you commit to that action you'll start to love that journey to get better and you'll start to become indifferent to what other people think now to give you a very personal example of this myself last year i challenged myself to get better at speaking directly to a camera and explaining complex topics in simple terms now to do this i didn't want to do it privately instead i chose to start a public youtube channel and commit to upload one video on learning every single week now at first i absolutely did not want to do

this i was stuck in my head i was worried about being judged and how people would perceive me and i didn't want to be a youtuber but i held my beginner's mind i committed to deliberate practice and action and i persevered uploading one video a week for an entire year and you know what happened well the first handful of videos absolutely sucked they were really terrible but week by week video by video i gradually got better and then after that year my confidence has improved so much at being able to speak to camera and explain

complex topics in simple terms but more than that i'd become even more indifferent to the opinions of others so once you've completed step two which is to remove who you are and your identity and taking things personally with the skill that you're learning you can then progress to step three and step three is to actively seek out as much feedback as possible on this power skill that you're trying to learn this will help you identify your weak areas and any blind spots you might have now when i worked as a surgeon every six months we

had to do what was called a 360 appraisal and this involved our teammates and even patients feeling feeding back on our clinical ability now while we're open to accepting criticism and coaching on technical skills through things like exam schools or sales performance we're less likely to go out and seek feedback and actively ask for help on things like our empathy or our leadership or our communication style one of the most impactful things that i did as a founder and ceo of a tech company was to actively seek feedback on my leadership style from all of

my employees and initially i didn't want to acknowledge any negativity at all and i was a little bit shocked when some of the feedback about my communication style on occasion was that i could be a little bit direct and a little bit terse but i committed to feedback and understanding why this was happening and what was happening was that i was so focused on the day-to-day technical aspects of running a fast-growing business i was forgetting to act like an actual human and spend time getting to know people and giving them the time to ask me

questions and so i switched things up and guess what happened well i was able to get more ideas better creativity and better results out of everybody that i worked with and this now brings me to step four in learning how to learn power skills and step four is all about using frameworks to give you structure when you're practicing your power skills now when i learned the skill of empathy as a surgeon and a student one of the common conversation structures we used was starting every patient interaction with an open question this allowed the patient to

say in their own words what they were thinking and how they were feeling and then we'd go on to ask about their ideas their concerns and their expectations so that they felt part of the decision-making process and included with everything that we were doing as doctors now for power skills you can use the framework think feel do the next time you have an interaction with anybody or you practice any power skill start off by activating your cognitive empathetic ability and think what might this other person be thinking right now what are their needs what are

their desires what do they want to get out of this interaction and then activate your emotional empathy and think about if i was in this person's shoes how would i be feeling am i stressed am i angry am i sad but you'll get the most success and the best results when you combine both of these thinking and feeling with actually doing something and taking a positive action to offer value to that individual or group so the next time you actually have a conversation with somebody just start that off by asking them how they're doing and

how they're feeling and then take a genuine thoughtful moment to contemplate this and say something back that offers them value and this might be as simple as actively listening to them if you're a student studying a group or if you're in a business and you want to scale this you can start every single meeting or group meeting that you're in with a five-minute check-in where you go around the room and just ask how everybody is doing and how they're feeling and don't forget the impact of one-to-ones rather than speaking to somebody about an exam that's

coming up or about work why not ask them how they're doing personally and get to know them a little bit better if you haven't already done so i guarantee this will maximize your practice of power skills and this leads me on to my fifth and final step to master any power skill and that is to turn everything you do and every interaction you have into deliberate practice and this is where things get really fun and you can actually start to see the matrix if you have that one friend who's an amazing storyteller or maybe you

have someone who's just unafraid to go up and speak to strangers start looking at what they say notice what they do how do they make you feel what's their body language you can start to deconstruct this and break it down and add it into your own power skills practice the next time you have a similar interaction and to really maximize this feedback loop technology is here to help as well if you're somebody who does a lot of video conferencing or uses zoom calls a lot you can actually record these and then work with a coach

to focus on improving some of the soft skills that you're weakest at and emerging tech is out there too technology like virtual reality and artificial intelligence can now put you opposite an ai powered virtual human that allows you to have a soft skills conversation in a safe environment on demand and you also get fed back on your performance without the algorithm judging you so power skills training is looking pretty bright in the future now if i can leave you with a couple of things from today it's this firstly power skills like learning how to learn

and empathy and communication are the most impactful skills you can start learning today to change your life for the better and they absolutely can be learned and more so than that if you commit to long-term deliberate practice and master skills like empathy or some of the power skills that i learned during my surgical career you might just change someone else's life for the better too thank you [Applause] you