The Key to Mastering Any Skill (Including Advocacy Skills) - Episode 26

You're listening to the nonprofit power podcast. In today's episode. We share the key to mastering any skill, including advocacy skills. So stay tuned. If you want to have real and powerful influence over the money and policy decisions that impact your organization and the people you serve, then you're in the right place. I'm Cath Patrick, and I've helped dozens of progressive non profit leaders take their organizations to new and higher levels of impact and success by building powerful influence with the decision makers that matter. It is possible to get a critical mass of the money and policy decision makers in your world to be as invested in your success as you are, to have them seeking you out as an equal partner, and to have them Bringing opportunities and resources to you. This podcast will help you do just that. Welcome to the non profit power podcast. Hey everybody. Kath Patrick here. Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of the nonprofit power podcast. I'm so glad you're here for today's episode. We all have at least one skill we'd like to get better at. And there are all sorts of people offering to teach you just about anything. But so much of skill development is an inside job. And that's what will make or break your efforts to master a skill? Over many years as both a teacher and a learner, I've discovered that there are a few universal keys to mastering any skill. in today's episode, we share those keys along with how to avoid the most common things that can sabotage your skill development. Mhm. Hey there folks. Welcome to the nonprofit power podcast. I'm your host, Cathy Patrick. When you set out to develop or strengthen any skill. There are two main things at play. There's the learning of the skill. And then there's the set of forces that work against that learning. We have to be aware of both if we want to successfully increase our skills. I'm going to talk first about how we learn skills. And then we'll take a look at what gets in the way. Learning a skill is fundamentally about developing neural pathways. Each time we repeat an action involved in a skill, that neural pathway gets a little bit stronger until eventually it becomes automatic. The simplest example of this is tying your shoes. When you first learned this as a child, it felt complicated. I know you can't remember that, but it did at the time. And you had a master several action steps to develop the complete skill of tying a shoe. After enough repetitions, you stopped perceiving each individual step and began to see it as one complete action. And then that action became so well-ingrained in a neural pathway that you're able to do it without thinking. And probably without even looking. I think one of the greatest causes of frustration for people wanting to develop a skill is that we forget that this is how skills are created. We see someone highly skilled doing something with ease and we mischaracterize it as natural talent. And from there, it's a short hop to saying, well, I can't do that because I don't have that natural talent. A person who's highly skilled at anything is doing many things without even knowing about them. They have established such solid neural pathways for multiple elements of the skill that they're no longer conscious actions. Or to say that a little bit differently, you may be consciously aware of them happening but you're not having to think about them. You just do it. This is true for physical skills like basketball or skiing or jujitsu or playing a musical instrument. It's also true for all of the skills that are involved in advocacy. Skills like active listening, adapting your messaging on the fly based on the input you're receiving, knowing just what to say in that moment to move the person you're talking with closer to yes. When a highly skilled person is practicing that art, it looks effortless. And it's easy for us to observe that person and say, oh, well, they're just naturally talented at that. They always know what to do and what to say. And good for them, but that's not me. To make that assumption is a huge disservice to yourself. And it's disrespectful to the person you're observing. What in fact your witnessing is the result of much time spent practicing that skill to get it to the point where it is automated. And therefore appears effortless. You can become highly skilled at anything you wish. That doesn't mean you'll be the best that ever lived. But you can, with the right approach and enough practice become very highly skilled and highly effective. But practice alone is not sufficient. Plenty of people practice a thing, a bunch without getting much better at it. And those are the people who don't know about the key to skill development. There is a universal key to all skill development. And if you don't do this, you will struggle to advance your skills. But if you do do it, the sky's the limit. It's essentially a four-step process. First you visualize the result. And that result might be visualized in extreme detail or just a very rough sketch at the beginning. Then you take an action. You do something. This might be something someone showed you how to do or that you read about or something you just decided to try. And then this is the critical piece. You get information back almost instantly. You take an action and something happens. And the thing that happens either moves you closer to the result you want or it moves you further away. You receive that information and you integrate that information as a new learning. And then you base your next action on what you just learned. All of this can happen very rapidly. It can happen in the span of a second or two, or it can happen over a period of minutes, depending on what you're doing. But you're getting information back. If you don't take that information, process it, integrate it and then shift your next action to respond to that new information, you will not advance your skill level. You'll simply just keep doing what you were doing and not get a better result. This is hugely important. I see people do this in all different kinds of arenas, but especially in advocacy. Where they tell me, well, I've been working on this. I've been practicing it. And I still just am really struggling. And almost always when we get into a conversation about what they've been working on, it the thing they've been missing is they have not been, for a variety of reasons which we'll get to in a little bit, because those are the things that are in the way. But for a variety of reasons, they have not been taking in the information, the feedback they're getting from their action. Analyzing it. Learning from it. And then applying that to the next iteration of that action. And without that you just get repetition without growth. It's also really important to understand that this happens repeatedly over time. You don't just do it once or twice. You don't just put your skis on the snow, process one piece of feedback, and then now you're done and you know how to ski perfectly. There's all different kinds of snow. There's all different kinds of conditions that affect the snow. You can be on the same trail or slope in the course of a few hours and have the interaction between your skis and the snow changed dramatically during that time. Same hill, same trail, but shifting conditions. And how your skis interact with the snow will change during that time. So it's not one and done. And the exact same thing is true. It doesn't matter what the skill is. I grabbed skiing out of the air, because the snow is almost here. But it's true in advocacy skills. It's very true in messaging uh, skills and engaging decision-maker skills. There are so many different variables and over time you want to develop the ability to interpret all of those variables without having to think consciously about each one of them. And so what you're doing is you're assembling a library in your head. And continuing with the ski example, you're assembling a library in your head of when the snow is like this and the temperatures like this, my skis do that. You're building a library or a catalog of conditions, environments, circumstances. And what particular action gets, what kind of result in those circumstances. And all you're seeing when you see a highly skilled person, whether they're skiing down a hill or whether they're engaging a decision maker. You're seeing them pull from their library, their knowledge of what to do next to move closer to the result that they want. One of the critical things to understand about advanced skills in any area is that it's not one skill. It's a hundred micro skills. But the core skill at the root of it all is being able to constantly receive, integrate and apply feedback that you're getting to move yourself closer to your desired result. When you do this repeatedly over time, you're creating and establishing neural pathways. And the more repetitions on a particular thing, the stronger that neural pathway becomes. Once it's fully laid down that micro skill becomes either semi-automated or fully automated. You'll be able to deploy it with minimal conscious thought. And the more micro skills that you're able to automate, and the more knowledge you embed along the way, the higher, your overall skill level becomes. And the more effortless it looks when you are using those skills. So when we apply this to advocacy skills, Here's how it looks. Let's take strategic messaging as an example, which is a skillset that I spend a lot of time helping clients get stronger at. There are a lot of different skills involved in that broad skill area. So I'm going to focus in on one that tends to give people some of the most trouble, which is adapting your message in real time when you're actually in an encounter with a decision maker. And thAt involves two other skills, which are active listening, including nonverbal cues. And rapid revision and reframing. So to work on this skill, you would begin by visualizing your desired result. Which is an engaged decision-maker who's leaning in and wanting to know more. That's the external result of you adapting smoothly and easily to always keep them leaning in. So there's two pieces to this visualization. So it goes without saying that we're isolating a skill here. But for this to work, You would have of course done your research, prepared your core messaging, figured out the messaging framework that you want to use to guide your conversation with this decision maker. All of that. So now you start taking an action. You start talking with the decision maker. And almost each time you open your mouth. With every component of your messaging, there's going to be some kind of reaction. You're going to be getting verbal and nonverbal cues from the decision maker that tell you whether it's resonating or not. Whether they're leaning in or they're leaning away. There's lots of information coming back at you. Now, depending where you are on your skill development journey, that will determine how many pieces of information you're able to take in and act on in the moment. as you get more skilled at this, you will be able to take in more pieces of information and incorporate them quickly and act on them in the moment. If you're relatively early in your skill development journey with respect to strategic messaging and engaging decision makers, you may not be able to process as many pieces of input in the moment. That is okay. Don't sweat that. You will process as many as you can, at your current skill level. What's important though is that you take every piece you're able to absorb. And do you adjust your messaging based on that. If they're leaning in, keep doing more of what you're doing. If they're leaning away, then shift. Try another angle, pick something else. And be filing away mentally as you go. Okay, this resonates, that doesn't. Ooh, that got a great reaction. Oops, yikes. That clearly irritated them. Oh, don't go there. You'll be getting all kinds of information. When it's a live encounter like this, you're going to do as much adjusting of your actions based on what you learn in the meeting, as you possibly can. Do not stress if you can't process all of it and change all your actions based on everything you're seeing. It may be going too fast. It may be more than you can effectively process. Don't worry about that. Just notice the things you're able to notice. And adjust your next piece of conversation based on the things you were able to notice. As you go higher in skill level with this, and have more experience and more practice, you will be able to process more, faster. But in early on that will feel slow and kind of clunky. So don't worry about that. There's no magic amount of perfect processing. So you're taking this in, you're adjusting your messaging. And what you're going to do after the fact is debrief. Because when this is happening in real time, there's a lot coming at you. It will all lodge in your brain somewhere. But only a percentage of it will be accessible to you in the moment to be able to say, okay, processing processing, here's my response. Here's what I'm going to do next. Do what you can, but then as soon as you leave the encounter, Take a few moments to debrief that encounter with yourself or with people who were with you if there was more than one of you from your team in that meeting. Just do a brain dump of everything you noticed. Everything you noticed about what resonated and what didn't, everything you noticed about when you made x or Y adjustment, what did that result in? What did that buy you or what did that cost you if it was a negative reaction. Sometimes you say one thing and it doesn't resonate and then you go somewhere else and it resonates even less. And you're like, oh, yikes. I'm really in bad territory here. And then you go somewhere else with it. Debrief, all of that. And do the debriefing every single time you meet with any kind of decision-maker. And then what you want to do cause you're doing two things at once here, which makes it feel a little more complicated. You are working on refining your message for a particular decision maker, so that over time you develop the best possible messaging to engage that decision maker. Because remember this is a relationship you're developing over time. there will be multiple encounters and each time you want your messaging to be more spot on, to resonate even better. you do that by learning from the encounters. So that's one of the things you're doing. And on another level, the other thing you're doing is developing and refining and improving your skills at active listening, at adjusting your messaging on the fly, at taking in those cues and doing something useful with them. So you debrief what worked and what didn't in terms of the messaging so we know how to do better with this decision-maker next time. And then you're also debriefing for yourself about what worked for me. What felt great? What felt uncomfortable? What freaked me out, what felt really stressful. What was like, oh my gosh, I was so in the zone with this, that was really great. Do all of that debrief as well, because all of that is massively valuable information. And the more of those personal debriefs you can do, you will begin to discover patterns, first of all. And that will give you information about how to shift your actions to move you closer to the result that you were looking for. this is a process. This goes on over time. I can't say that enough. This occurs repeatedly over time. You are building neural pathways. This will take some time. But when you are intentional and apply this process, you will find that you will get much closer to the results you want much faster. The other crucial thing I advise you to do is find the very best role models, teachers, mentors, and coaches that you can for the skills that you want to develop. Watch what they do and deconstruct it. And whenever possible, ask for their feedback and advice. this will accelerate your learning dramatically. Now I talked to the very beginning about stuff that gets in the way. And we have to deal with that too. Because there's all kinds of stuff that goes on, especially in strategic messaging, but in learning new skills in general. That we have to be alert to and deal with so that we don't allow them to sabotage our skill development. So there are several critical mistakes to avoid. The first big mistake that is really common is expecting to be great at something after only a couple of tries. And I'm not sure where this comes from, but I see it a lot. Whether it's impatience or a discomfort with not being good at something or something else. I'm not really sure what's at the root of this for people, but whatever the cause, the common mistake is to just expect to be great at something. And that really sets yourself up for frustration and disappointment. Instead. Come at this like a scientist doing an experiment. You're trying things. You're experimenting with approaches to your result. you're learning from each experiment. And each experiment's results give you more information that you can then use to refine your experiments. if you can approach this entire process with curiosity and an open mind and a desire to learn, rather than putting pressure on yourself to be good at a thing. That is the best and most effective way to become highly skilled at something. I've seen this in my advocacy clients. And I have also seen it, for many years I taught jujitsu and I saw it in some of my jujitsu students. The ones who came in with openness and a desire to learn and just experiment and play with techniques to develop that mind body awareness and connection that's required to be highly skilled in that art. Those were the students who advanced more rapidly and who advanced to higher skill levels. The ones who came in expecting to be great right away, very often were the ones who shut themselves off to all that information coming back to them from each repetition of the technique. When they would do a technique and it wouldn't work precisely the way they wanted. Or they didn't get the result that a highly skilled person would get using the same technique. They would interpret that as failure. And then they would resist the information that the experiment was giving them. They would just get all caught up in their head about, I have failed at that. That's I'm not good at that. And they would just keep pushing at the skill, rather than allowing the mind body connection to take in that valuable information that was being received. And use that to make small refinements with each repetition until the technique becomes closer and closer to the ideal. It's the same with advocacy skills, with messaging skills, with skills around engaging decision makers. If you make it mean something when you don't do something perfectly. That's when you close off the learning. And when you close off the learning, all you're getting with your imperfect attempts is frustration and a sense of not being good at something. Another closely related critical mistake is putting pressure on yourself to get it right. And I think this happens a lot with advocacy skills. That there is a lot of pressure to get it right. So one of the things it's helpful to do is to just take some of that pressure off of yourself. If you're just beginning, practice some of this stuff in a fairly low stakes environment. And you might even want to just practice with colleagues. I have a lot of clients who do this when I teach them a new messaging framework. Uh, it's just happened last week. I was working with a client and we were taking apart her messaging structure that hadn't been working. And she was really frustrated that it wasn't engaging the decision makers she was aiming at. we took the messaging apart and we analyzed it and we completely rebuilt it using a more effective framework. And the first thing she said to me was, this is a lot. This is really different than what I've been doing. I'm going to need to practice this a few times before I'm even ready to go in a room with decision makers about this. And my reaction was that is awesome. Yes. She said I think I'm going to just like, make my friends listen to me and make my coworkers listen to me until I get comfortable with this. That is an excellent way to take all the pressure off and just again play in the playground. Experiment without there being any stakes involved. this can be true for a beginner who's just learning how to do something. Or you could be far more advanced, but you're looking to try something that is new for you in the context of this skillset. And if it's new enough or different enough, like completely changing up your messaging framework. Then even though you have the broad skillset there's pressure to get it right. And you're putting that pressure on yourself. You're going to stand a better chance of getting it right when it matters if you practice it a little bit where it doesn't matter. Where all you're doing is allowing yourself that space for experimentation and learning. And the fact is that no matter your skill level, no matter how advanced you are, there's always more learning to be done. And I will say that if you're at a higher skill level, the expectation is that your reflections and your learnings are going to be deeper and more nuanced. the other thing is to just take some pressure off yourself by giving yourself permission not to be perfect. Nobody's perfect. We all mess up. Even those of us who are highly skilled at this and have been doing it for many, many years, you know, we get it wrong sometimes. What's different is that when you're operating at a high skill level, one of the micro skills that you have honed is the ability to take in a lot of pieces of information and adapt on the fly very quickly. that is a micro skill of its own, and it's a very important one. you will develop that over time, along with all the other ones that go into messaging skills. if you take some of the pressure off by giving yourself permission not to be perfect and to try new things, each time you try a new thing you treat it as an experiment you can learn from. And then you use that learning to improve the next repetition. And you might get multiple opportunities in a single encounter with a decision-maker. in fact, you'll probably get multiple opportunities. You just keep trying different angles of your messaging and see what resonates with that person. But you have to be willing to experiment. what I see happen a lot when people are afraid of experimenting, it's because they're either afraid that if they fail in quotes, that either they'll screw up the meeting and alienate the decision maker or that it will mean that they're not good at this. Both of those fears are largely unfounded. I have almost never seen anybody so thoroughly screw up a meeting with a decision maker that it couldn't be fixed. If you have basic social skills, you'll be fine. You're not going to do something or say something that's going to so irretrievably alienate that decision maker that you can never fix it. And a key piece of this is reminding yourself always that it's not one and done with these decision makers. You're going to have multiple encounters with them. You're building the relationship over time. Now granted, if it's been very difficult to get in the room with a particular decision-maker. you're just beginning to build the relationship and you've had to work really hard to get in there at all. Then it can feel like this is your only chance. But when that occurs, one of the most important things to do is to set two expectations for this encounter. Two desired results. The first goal should become that you want to build enough of a foundation with this decision maker that there can be more conversations with them. and your other goal, the one that you ultimately want the decision maker to say yes to, or take action on, that's going to move you closer to the thing you want. That goal has to make room for the foundation building goal. And that leads me to the third mistake that is specific to messaging. And that is the mistake of structuring your messaging and your approach to the encounter as if this is your one and only chance to engage the decision maker and to get them to, yes. When you go in with that belief, first of all, it creates an air of desperation around you which isn't good. it also creates a lot of stress. It puts a lot of pressure on you, which pretty much automatically means that you're going to be less free flowing in the encounter. You're going to be less real. And you're going to shut off or greatly reduce your ability to receive feedback. Once the stress levels spike, and the anxiety kicks in, that really mucks up the part of our brain that is trying to take in information and process it and act on it in real time. So you have to stick with a messaging structure that you know Is going to work to achieve engagement, that foundation building goal. Because if you don't engage them On that first encounter, there probably won't be a second encounter or it'll be a lot harder to get. Whereas, if you succeed in engaging them in the first encounter and you've got them leaning in, then that increases the chance that you get to have another conversation. And share more of your ultimate messaging and what you really want them to be doing with you. ApproachinG this as if it's only one chance leads tnem to mistake number four. Which is trying to cram absolutely everything into this one encounter. And that causes us to break most of the rules of effective messaging. you wind up talking too much, not listening enough. You wind up prioritizing getting all your points in over listening and taking in feedback. it disrupts your ability to go where the conversation takes you because you're too focused on, but wait, I have these five other points that I got to do, so. Let go of that. Let go of that. You must stay focused on the most important thing, which is building the relationship, getting them engaged. If they're engaged you'll get more opportunities. But you have to trust that. So this also raises important point, which came up when I was working with this client last week. we had taken apart their messaging framework and were coming at it from a really different direction than they had been. And we were working on a couple of totally new skills for this person. And the reality is that learning a new skill can be kind of confronting, especially when it runs counter to what you've been trained to do. a classic example of that is how to structure messaging to engage a decision maker. we've been trained over time in these encounters to lead with, here's who we are. This is what we do, how many people were served, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all the background. and then we do the problem statement and then we do all of this. And that's okay for a grant proposal where there is a specified format that they want you to follow, but it is not a good formula for engaging someone. And we talked about this in detail in some previous episodes. About how you structure your messaging to engage a decision maker. But learning that and changing what you've been doing and coming at this a totally new way, That can really bring some stuff up and feel difficult. partly it's because it feels counterintuitive and it goes against the way we've always done things. And it's going to feel awkward and clunky the first few times you do it. don't let that discourage you. expect that it's going to feel clunky. Because you're changing how you're doing things. You're learning a new way. It takes time for that new way to feel comfortable and easy. That's building neural pathways. But remember that once you build them, You get to put that skill on autopilot and let it serve you without having to work so hard at it. So the bottom line with all of this is don't make it mean anything about you when you set about experimenting. If you try something and it doesn't work the way you wanted it to, take that apart and learn from it. Instead of trying something and it doesn't work and then you start to make it mean all sorts of things about you. I'm no good at this. I'll never learn how to do this. Some people are just naturally great at this, but obviously I'm not. All that stuff, not helpful. the minute you start telling yourself that kind of stuff and you start making your experiments mean something about you, that's when you start sabotaging your own skill development. So please don't do that. if you want to develop a skill, the first thing you do is adopt a mindset of a scientist conducting a series of experiments. There are no value judgements. if you try something and it works great or if you try something and it works really poorly. Either way it doesn't mean anything about you. It's just information coming back to you about what's working. And what's not. And as you integrate that and shift your next experiment To reflect what you've now learned, now you can conduct a better experiment. Rinse and repeat. Each set of results. Is no reflection on you as a person. It's not a reflection on you as an advocate. It has nothing to do with whether you're good at something or not. It's simply a learning process. And I'm hammering on this because I see so many people self sabotaging as they work to develop and strengthen their advocacy skills in general and their messaging skills in particular. I want you to be awesome at messaging. I want you to feel comfortable and at ease and operating from a very high skill level. And I'm pretty sure you want that too. To get there, it's going to require some things of you that you may not have thought about. And that's really the point of today's episode. Is to shift your approach to skill development and specifically advocacy skill development, to set yourself up for continuous growth, an incremental success on your journey to becoming highly skilled. Thanks for listening. And I'll see you in the next episode.