When your business is about getting people to spend time on developing themselves, you often hear, “I just don’t have the time!” We get it. Professional development (aka “building your soft-skills”) can seem daunting and time-consuming. It’s sometimes hard to see where you could possibly find time to build skills that are going to fundamentally change the trajectory of your career, your success and how you feel at an activity (your job) that you spend at least 2/3 of your day doing and likely 50 years of your life engaged in. You’re busy. We’re all busy.
But are we really?
Right now, at this very moment, you will read this and either scoff at it or share it with a friend, check Twitter and Facebook and take a quick glance at your email. Total time spent: 10 minutes. What if you took that same 10 minutes and dedicated it to building skills that will help you, ask for a raise, get a promotion, be a better manager or, heck, even be a better person? Would you be happier, more productive and engaged at work? I am going to posit that there is a better than 50/50 chance that the answer is: yes.
Professional development isn’t about locking yourself away for a gross amount of time, poring through an encyclopedia of material and magically emerging as a new and improved professional. Professional development takes 10 minutes a day.
If you want to continue to believe you don’t have ten minutes a day to invest in you – stop reading and move on. For those of you who aren’t afraid of the truth, take a look at how the “average” Americans spends their day and ask yourself again: am I really that busy?
Lydia Loizides is serial entrepreneur, technology provocateur and relentless challenger of the status quo. She spends her days as Founder & CEO of Talentedly, a technology company on a mission to help people grow from good to great at work (technology + people = amazing results). The rest of her waking moments are spent running, reading, learning, and trying to prove that the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything is 42. You can follow Lydia @lydiaNYC @GetTalentedly, on LinkedIn and the Huffington Post.