How to Gain Effective People Skills…

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Written by Jimmie Burroughs Email this article to a friend

Merely reading people skills books and articles or attending training classes about people skills has little or no impact on acquiring the people skills you need. It is like stretching a rubber band; you can stretch it out but as soon as you let go it returns to its original shape. The same tendency applies to people who have deep seated patterns of behavior that have already been established and reinforced since childhood. They can be indoctrinated on new and highly effective behavior patterns, but the introduction alone is not enough to create the desired change. Deeply ingrained behavioral patterns must be uprooted and new ones established; this is where the difficulty lies.

Hard skills and soft skills:

Hard skills are those skills that are new to the brain and have no reference point in the brain that needs to be changed. For example, if you take a job that requires you to learn a new skill on how to operate a machine that you are unfamiliar with; that will be fairly easy because there are no patterns of behavior in the brain that has to be changed. Progress of newly learned hard skills is easily monitored. Another example of a hard skill is learning to play a musical instrument. There are no set patterns, so progress is easily monitored and learning is routine.

Soft skills, which are called people skills, are quite different and are much harder to change or to monitor. People skills are crucial for everyday survival in personal life as well as at work. They are how people relate with one another through conversation, listening, resolving problems and conflicts and generally contributing to any relational experience where two or more people are involved.

The problem to be overcome in adopting better and more effective people skills is replacing skills that are already embedded behavior patterns that have been adopted by the brain as the norm. The behaviors were learned from childhood up from various sources: from family, the street and from many other sources of contact. People therefore have their own set of unique people skills, the skills that have worked for them. These skills have been reinforced for decades until they are firmly grounded and have become a part of the personality. These are the comfort zone behaviors even though they may not be desirable and may need to be replaced by more effective skills.

Hard wired skills:

Common people skills have become so called hard wired into the brain. Technically, they have become the neuronal pathways of the cerebral cortex. Wow! I hate technical terms, but necessary sometimes to understand a point. What this means is the behavior was repeated over and over and therefore neurons grew dendrites that extended out to other neurons to make the connections needed to make behavior patterns automatic. These cells are coated with what is called a myelin sheath; it is like the insulation on electric wire. This makes an extremely efficient connection. As a result, the behavior patterns feel comfortable, natural, and second nature and become very hard to dislodge.

The bottom line:

To introduce a new interpersonal skill becomes extremely difficult, because the old skill now has to be replaced. It is easy on our computer to just delete programs that we no longer want, but the brain doesn’t work that way. Patterns of behavior have become solidly established in on the brain cell level. Learning any new behavior, regardless of how effective it is, or desired will seem foreign and awkward and create resistance and a tendency to fall back to that which is familiar and comfortable.

There is therefore a procedure that must be followed in order to establish new behavioral patterns. First, the new pattern has to prove itself to get better results than the old pattern. Secondly, There has to be a given time period for the new pattern to become an established behavior pattern. Thirdly, there has to be reinforcement of the new behavior for an extended period of time until it is well set in the brain. It has been proven that new habits can generally be formed with 21 days of repeating the new behavior over and over. In some cases it may take longer.

The new pathway of behavior over time becomes the familiar path and old paths of behavior fade into the background.

Ongoing success:

The only way to ensure a continued success of the new learned behavior is by continually using the behavior and reinforcing it. This is like using the same pathway across a grassy meadow. In time the pathway becomes well defined. Sadly, in most cases however this is not what happens with establishing new behavioral patterns; in time people will fall back into old familiar, comfortable patterns of behavior, and the same old dysfunctional behaviors return to the fore place. That is why most diets don’t work.

Continued reinforcement:

Continued reinforcement is the secret to acquiring new people skills; without it, all effort will be in vain. This must be on a long term basis. This is why personal development as a whole is so difficult. It requires repeated action that is hard for a lot of people to displace themselves to continue. That is why information like the above is so important. It is an outline on the right way to change behavioral patterns and establish new effective ones even though the whole process is anything bur easy.

How to get started:

The best way to get started is by an objective evaluation of your weak areas, and then focusing on those areas first; unless a person is a self motivated, progress can be tough. This is where a coach really comes in handy to apply continued reinforcement and motivation as well as encouragement.

It all boils down to your why. Is your “why” strong enough to bring about the desired changes? There are no short cuts or magic wands. It is like desiring better health, you have to change your behavior patterns, quit bad habits, eat better and exercise more; otherwise it is impossible to reach the desired results. If you want to make changes that will turn your life around 360 degrees, then you must be willing to pay the price.

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Jimmie Burroughs is the author of JimmieBurroughs.com ; get more tips on personal development: www.JimmieBurroughs.com

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