When you’re in school, everyone, including yourself, focuses on knowledge. How much do you know and about what? Can you prove it on this or that test? If you can, you will be tagged with all sorts of postive markers like ‘gifted’ or ‘talented.’
If you can’t, you are set apart in a negative way: ‘remedial’ is one word that can haunt you like a shadow.
Such labeling is a process that begins very young and squeezes out the joy of learning. We now understand IQ has several different layers: it can be kinesthetic (using your body to convey emotions) or a range of emotional intelligence skills like motivation and self regulation.
While they don’t test these in school, life will test your saviness with empathy or social skills. Which is why it’s a shame we can’t learn this equally important knowledge in a formal way. Most of adult life seems this way once you’re past college. When were the courses on filing your taxes? Or figuring out a good mortagage versus a bad one? This group is now commonly referred to as “adulting” and can include even more mundane tasks like ironing.
Theories go that in the past these crucial life skills were taught in the home by parents. With the changing fabric of modern society, where gender roles are sliding, and there aren’t such clear cut ways of understading who does what, parents are also changing how and what they transfer to children.
Some parents have become ‘helicopters‘ or hover around their children constantly, in the fear that something will happen for which they need help.
Others are so busy with their own considerations that their children are left to bloom where they’re planted.
Which teaches more resilence? Probably the second. Which feels good at the time? Probably the first.
When it come to business, however, we don’t have to leave things to chance or be limited by traditional paradigms. Growing your customer platform, for example, is easily done if you have a customer onboarding company that is knowledgable in how to guage your users’ needs. User IQ allows you guage your customers’ needs and increase user engagement via contextualized data.
Let’s hope the field of education continues to open up and offer us the softer skills that come to make a difference in our lives. In the meantime, we can always task ourselves with lifelong learning.