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Skills, Super Skills, and Ultra Skills
10 Plays3 years ago
As we begin a new year with the podcast, I have decided to depart from our customary guest format and usual clinical topics to focus on personal growth and mastery. I am a firm believer that mastery (learning new skills) is the key to an engaged and joyful clinical career. In this episode of the podcast, we will discuss Skills, Super Skills, and Ultra Skills. We will discuss this new framework for understanding and developing skills relevant to our professional and personal growth. Please reach out with comment on Twitter (@sergio_zanotti) or LinkedIn.
Books and Podcasts Mentioned in this Episode:
The Fearless ICU – Critical Matters Podcast with Amy Edmondson: http://bit.ly/3I7rq3o
The Infinite Game. By Simon Sinek: https://bit.ly/3XhMgBe
Drive. By Daniel Pink: https://bit.ly/3XlhFCS
Deep Work. By Cal Newport: https://bit.ly/3YyXD99
Switch. By Chip Heath & Dan Heath: https://amzn.to/3IaXQdc
Mindset. By Carol Dweck: https://bit.ly/3XhXS7l
Leonardo Da Vinci. By Walter Isaacson: https://bit.ly/40AmwmJ
Range. By David Epstein: https://bit.ly/3jGZ1ro
Essentialism. By Greg McKeown: https://bit.ly/3xruX6B
Mastery. By Robert Greene: https://bit.ly/3RKjicc
Linchpin. By Seth Godin: https://bit.ly/3jKBu8U
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Critical Matters Podcast
00:00:06
Speaker
Welcome to Critical Matters, a sound podcast covering a broad range of topics related to the practice of intensive care medicine.
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Sound provides comprehensive critical care programs to hospitals across the country.
00:00:19
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To learn more about our programs and career opportunities, visit www.soundphysicians.com.
00:00:26
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And now your host, Dr. Sergio Zanotti.
New Year, New Format
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Welcome to Critical Matters.
00:00:35
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After a short break, we are back on track to start a new year.
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Wishing everybody a great 2023.
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I would like to start by thanking our listeners for following us, for reaching out to me with comments, with suggestions, and
00:00:55
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and for building really a community around critical care with the idea of discussing topics that are relevant to the practice of critical care today.
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So to kick off the new year, I will do something a little bit different than our usual format.
The Importance of Skills in the ICU
00:01:18
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Instead of having a guest, I will
00:01:21
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Take the opportunity to share some thoughts on a topic that I find extremely relevant and universal to everybody who would listen to this podcast.
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And it's related to skills, super skills, and ultra skills.
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I'm a big believer that we are engaged through our work, through purpose, through autonomy, and through mastery.
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And that that personal growth that relates to our work in the ICU, but also through
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in other areas is ultimately what motivates us to keep coming back and to keep developing new skills that allow us to impact the life of our patients and also improve the life of those who work with us.
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So it will be only me.
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I'll go solo today.
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And like I said, the topic will be skills, super skills and ultra skills.
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What I want to do in the next 30-40 minutes is talk a little bit about the game that we're playing today as knowledge workers, as a way of introduction.
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Then I want to share with you a current framework for skills, but propose a better way of looking at skills and why I believe this is a better framework.
ICU Clinicians as Knowledge Workers
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And finally,
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share with you a checklist that would help you move into action and as one of your goals for 2023 to develop new skills, super skills, and ultra skills.
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So what game are we really playing in healthcare?
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I think we should start by looking at the history of work.
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We started thousands of years ago as a society, as a species, really as hunters and gatherers, and work was revolved around obtaining food for the day.
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We slowly moved to an agriculture-centered society that led to the development of cities.
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And a lot of the work would start now centering around optimizing our crops so that we could store food for the future, but also produce food that we could trade for other goods.
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And that eventually led into the industrial age, which still, I think, has a big impact on how we think of work and how older generations think of work.
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where the goal was really to conglomerate people and factories and to efficiently produce goods and the greatest numbers possible per unit per day.
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We had now moved in the
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last several decades towards a knowledge economy.
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And really when you think about what we do as clinicians in the ICU, but also the teams that support us and the people that work with us, we're all knowledge workers.
Healthcare as an Infinite Game
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We produce ideas, we share knowledge, we apply that knowledge, and that is how we create value for society.
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That's how we create value for our customers, which are our patients, could be the hospitals we work at or partner with, the other physicians and clinicians who come to the ICU with their patients.
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But really, it's through the development of ideas, of processes, and the application of knowledge.
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And when you think of this from a perspective of game theory, some people have proposed that there are finite games and infinite games.
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So finite games are examples would be baseball or football, where the players are all known.
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There's fixed rules.
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There's agreed upon objectives that ultimately determine a winner or a loser.
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And we play to beat those on the other team.
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And the joy comes from comparison.
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So if we win, we share that joy.
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And we see this over and over again in sports and many other types of games.
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Healthcare, however, is a different type of game.
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There are really no winners and losers on a daily day in the ICU.
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We definitely have victories and defeats the way we look at it.
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But in terms of the ultimate game, it's an infinite game.
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And infinite games are characterized by having known and unknown players.
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The rules change constantly.
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That is something that we have definitely been acutely aware during the pandemic, but also just in terms of regulatory rules, there's always new rules that we need to apply to the way we play the game in health care.
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And the objective is to keep the game in place, so to keep coming back to play again.
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Examples of infinite games are obviously healthcare and other businesses, but we really play to be better today than we were yesterday.
Rethinking Skills Frameworks
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And joy comes from advancement.
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So if we understand that we're knowledge workers and that we are truly in an infinite game, I think that it is quite obvious that the greatest way to grow and develop joy is by learning new skills and improving the skills that we have.
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So that pursuit of mastery.
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Along those lines, I talked about what really motivates clinicians, and that includes purpose, autonomy, and mastery, which is really the focus of today's discussion.
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Mastery is important because it's an asymptote, right?
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So it means that there's a very steep curve at the beginning when we're learning a new skill, but ultimately we never reach perfection.
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So it's always a journey.
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There's always room for us to understand more.
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And I think that that should be a guiding principle for all of us at the bedside in the ICU.
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So now I want to take a little bit of time to talk about skills and propose a framework for thinking about skills.
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So how do we define skills?
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It's the ability to do something well.
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It's expertise.
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Similar words include ability, prowess, mastery, competence, competency, art, artistry, aptitude, professionalism, talent.
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These are all words that are related to skill.
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The opposite of skill is incompetence.
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And I am pretty sure that nobody who listens to this podcast would want to be thought of as incompetent.
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So clearly, we believe that developing skills and mastering these skills is important for us as clinicians in the ICU, but also important for us as
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and professionals who are in the knowledge economy in terms of our personal growth and the impact that we can have on the life of other human beings.
00:08:06
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Historically, a lot of people have talked about hard skills and soft skills, and that has been a very commonly proposed or shared framework to think about skills.
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So hard skills refer to teachable skills or job-specific abilities that can be quantified or measured.
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And soft skills traditionally have referred to an individual's social ability and how they relate to and interact with other people.
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Now, I have my doubts that this is a very effective framework.
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First of all, I think that by calling social abilities or what we know as emotional intelligent type of skills, soft skills, soft skills,
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I think we are undervaluing their importance.
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I believe that, quote unquote, soft skills are perhaps much more important for us to have an impact in the ICU and to grow in terms of what's the ceiling we can achieve.
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Definitely, we need hard skills, but I think that this nomenclature is
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It undervalues one set of skills.
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It also infers that perhaps soft skills are innate and they're not something that we can actually learn.
00:09:21
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And I believe that is also a common misconception that extends to the understanding people have of leadership.
00:09:27
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right we don't teach this usually in med school or in nursing school and these are the types of skills that ultimately make a difference in the real world where we work on teams and we've talked about team dynamics psychological safety how to build super teams in previous episodes of the podcast which will definitely link in the show notes so
00:09:51
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So I'm not a big fan of using the traditional framework of hard skills and soft skills.
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I think it makes some of the skills a little bit mushy and people tend to undervalue their importance.
Introducing the C-Skills Framework
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It is also quite notable that I do have an opportunity to speak with many young clinicians and advanced practice providers who are
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leaving training and looking for their first jobs.
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And usually their concerns are with clinical skills, will they be capable of dealing with the sick patients in the ICU?
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Yet what I've observed over and over again is that other types of skills in terms of how they
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interact with other individuals, how they become team members and help other team members work and how they deal with conflict at the workplace are much more valuable skills and ultimately are much more predictive of not only a successful career in terms of making a difference
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and an impact on those around you, but also a joyful career.
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I think that these are two very important things that I think we would all agree we would want for our careers.
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So I would propose that we think of skills a little bit different.
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This is what I call the C-Skills framework.
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And there's three categories, skills, super skills, and mega skills.
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Skills are job-focused.
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They're the skills required to be a critical care clinician in our discussion or the skills required to do any job.
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And these are the skills that ultimately open the door for people to enter a career or a specific job.
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And they're the skills that determine the floor, right?
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So without these skills, you wouldn't be able to be a critical care physician or APP.
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And once you have the skills, you can cross that line and enter into that into that domain.
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If you move up a notch, there's super skills.
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Super skills are self-focused.
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So they're focused on the individual.
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And these are the skills that are required to foster your professional and personal growth.
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So people who start at the same time with similar skills will quickly differentiate each other
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If one of them can develop super skills that are focused on their personal growth and they start learning and producing at a much higher level because they develop these super skills that actually are the ones that promote your growth as an individual.
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And finally, the third category is mega skills or ultra skills.
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Ultra skills are other focused and they really are skills required to make others perform at their highest level.
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So it's how do you enhance the performance of those around you?
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And a lot of people believe that that is the sole responsibility of a leader.
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But or a manager.
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But the reality is that leaders come in different flavors.
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Leaders don't always have an assigned position and people can lead from any seat in the team.
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So no matter what your role is in a critical care team, you through the acquisition and development of all of.
00:13:07
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of ultra skills can help your team perform at a higher level and you can help others improve substantially in terms of their performance.
00:13:18
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So this is a framework that I think is more valuable because it classifies skills based on their value from
00:13:28
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skills to super skills to ultra skills it also um classifies skills based on who is the primary beneficiary of that skill being performed at a high level so the job the self the individual or other focused
00:13:48
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And finally, I think it also gives us a way of thinking about different skills in different categories and understanding that a lot of what people have called soft skills would fall in the category of ultra skills and super skills.
00:14:03
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And they probably are much more relevant in determining your ceilings.
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and your growth and your impact.
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So I would submit to you that these are skills worth pursuing and there are skills worth thinking about.
00:14:21
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So let's dive into this a little bit deeper and skills.
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And we're going to talk in the context, obviously, of critical care.
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So this is a critical care podcast, and I'm going to speak through the lens of a physician.
00:14:35
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But skills for critical care are all the things we learned during training.
00:14:39
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How do we resuscitate a patient?
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How do we manage septic shock?
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Procedures such as intubation,
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getting a central line access, putting chest tubes, how do we conduct end-of-life care, safety and management of an ICU, professionalism.
00:14:58
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Now, obviously, as we evolve in our ability to care for sick patients,
00:15:03
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There are skills that relate to life support such as ECMO and other life-sustaining or extracorporeal devices.
00:15:11
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Ultrasound has become an important skill in critical care, and we see that that continues to evolve to more developed mastery.
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in not only thoracic ultrasonography, but also transesophageal ultrasonography.
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So that's another important skill that people develop through training or they continue to evolve once they've left training, if they trained in an area before this was very common, like in my case.
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And there might be other skills that you develop that are part of your job.
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If you are a...
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very involved with research obviously a understanding of biostatistics is going to be important the skills to utilize certain platforms for data analysis would also be along those skills that you require for your job if you have a manager position
00:16:02
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You might be required to look at P&Ls and other budget sheets.
00:16:08
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So these are all the skills that you acquire either through training or after training throughout the years that allow you to do the job, right?
00:16:15
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So they establish the entry to the critical care realm as a physician or as an APP or as another practitioner within the ICU.
00:16:24
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And
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They're not static.
00:16:27
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You don't learn everything you need during training.
00:16:30
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You obviously need to continue to evolve your practice.
00:16:33
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And there's many skills that are related to the job that you might need to acquire as you change jobs to different types of ICUs or just as practice changes over time.
00:16:45
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So these are skills.
00:16:46
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And I think a lot of what we cover in this podcast relates to skills.
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Every time we talk about a clinical topic, caring for a patient, post-cardic arrest, that's a skill.
00:16:57
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And we try to give you information that would help you improve that skill.
00:17:04
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The second category of super skills, as we said before, are the skills that are focused on the individual.
00:17:12
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And they're the skills that as you develop them will allow you to continue to grow, not only at a faster pace, but also to perform at a higher level.
Ultra Skills and Their Impact
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And just to give you some examples of what I would consider super skills that can all be developed and can all be improved.
00:17:31
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An example of a super skill would be the ability to focus on a specific task.
00:17:36
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We live in a world of distraction.
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There are so many distractors taking our attention all the time.
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Younger generations believe that multitasking is possible.
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Science would argue that you cannot multitask, right?
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You cannot hold two deep thoughts at the same time in your brain.
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You cannot multitask effectively.
00:18:01
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The way to become hyperproductive is to be a relentless monotasker.
00:18:07
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And that ability to focus on a task and do what we call deep work, which is work
00:18:13
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that requires a certain level of skills that not anybody can do and that produces real value is what we're talking about.
00:18:23
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So that is something that you can train yourself to do better and better, but the ability to focus on a task, whether it be an airway, be rounds, be a research proposal or a new program is a skill that I believe in critical care, but in the knowledge world economy as a whole,
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is essential.
00:18:44
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And the more we work on developing that type of skill, the better off we will be as individuals.
00:18:51
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Another example of a super skill would be lateral thinking or creativity.
00:18:56
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We are all born with a certain degree of creativity.
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I think education, unfortunately, kind of takes that away from kids.
00:19:04
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But the ability to think outside of the box, to look at a problem and
00:19:09
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And instead of having a very narrow approach to solutions to broaden the portfolio of solutions is a very valuable skill that you can work and can help you not only solve your own problems, but to advance issues and solve problems for your patients and for your teams.
00:19:30
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So the ability to be creative, to think laterally, to think out of the box is one that we definitely need to develop and ultimately makes you grow as an individual more than anybody else.
00:19:42
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Along those same lines,
00:19:44
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Communicating ideas clearly is another example of a super skill.
00:19:49
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Whether you have the ability to write a 500-word abstract on a topic, to write a concise paper, to develop a podcast, a talk, to communicate to your team a therapeutic plan,
00:20:05
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If you work on being a clear communicator, definitely you will help others understand what you're trying to communicate.
00:20:13
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But ultimately, the greatest beneficiary will be yourself because writing, preparing a podcast, doing a presentation, if anything, forces you to think clearly and allows you to understand a topic much better.
00:20:31
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So I believe that communication of ideas is a super skill that, again, we don't get taught about this, but there are certain things that you can do to improve.
00:20:41
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And we'll talk about general approaches to improving all skills at the end of this podcast.
00:20:48
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But again, I would encourage you to be more deliberate and intentional about developing this skill.
00:20:54
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And finally, a last example for a super skill is the ability to say no.
00:21:00
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Every time you say yes to something, you're saying no to something that might be more important.
00:21:05
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So saying no is really about establishing priorities.
00:21:08
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Are you clear when you are rounding on a patient what is the single most important task to be accomplished for that patient?
00:21:15
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Are you clear every day at work that you know what is the single most important task that you need to accomplish that day?
00:21:22
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And this really falls into the idea of living by design and not by default and being very intentional and deliberate of making sure that we have very clear priorities and that we actually go after those priorities and make sure that we are spending our time
00:21:40
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where it will have the greatest impact on our life, on the life of others.
00:21:45
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So establishing priorities is something that, again, is a skill.
00:21:49
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It's a muscle that we can develop.
00:21:51
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And I think it's very important for all of us for many reasons.
00:21:55
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Finally...
00:21:58
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We have the idea of the ultra skills and the ultra skills are the highest level of skills and they're the ones that are focused on others.
Developing Skills: A Five-Point Checklist
00:22:08
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And what do I mean by focused on others?
00:22:10
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They're focused on making others better and helping others grow, others perform at their highest level.
00:22:16
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And it's really about how do you impact those that work around you?
00:22:21
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Nobody in the knowledge economy, but nobody in the ICU for sure, works by themselves.
00:22:28
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You are part of a fabric of teams.
00:22:32
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Some teams are more constant than others.
00:22:34
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We talked about this in a previous podcast, this concept of teaming.
00:22:38
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You might...
00:22:40
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be part of a team that's new every day.
00:22:42
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If you go to cardiac arrest, if you respond to help in the ED.
00:22:46
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So your ability to very quickly read the room and help others perform at the highest level is a mega skill, an ultra skill, sorry.
00:22:56
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So with these ultra skills,
00:22:58
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What we talk about is examples include team building, the ability to build a high performing team goes beyond just choosing smart people.
00:23:07
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It's about how that team communicates, how that team feels from a psychological safety standpoint.
00:23:13
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Do people in your team feel safe to take risk, to share their opinions?
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Do they feel they belong?
00:23:20
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And even if you're not the team leader, you can, with your ultra skills, develop a better team and help people feel more part of that team.
00:23:30
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And as you develop this skill, I would imagine that very quickly you would become the team leader.
00:23:35
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Another very important ultra skill relates to developing others.
00:23:40
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Those that follow you, that come to the team later, that are younger, newer generations, are you really having an impact on their careers by helping them grow, by showing them better ways of doing things, and by showing them the path forward?
00:23:55
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So the ability to make other people perform at their highest level is an ultra skill that not only creates a tremendous amount of value, but also will help move your career forward, but also...
00:24:10
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produces tremendous amount of joy.
00:24:12
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And I think it's a very important skill that we should all develop.
00:24:16
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Setting and sharing a vision.
00:24:18
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So obviously a lot of leaders do that.
00:24:22
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They see a better way of doing things.
00:24:24
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They set that vision.
00:24:26
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They share that vision.
00:24:27
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And they help people move from point A to point B. That is also an ultra skill that is quite important.
00:24:34
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And finally...
00:24:36
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Change management is the fourth example that I want to use as an ultra skill.
00:24:40
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Obviously, there's more.
00:24:41
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But change management is something that is very common in healthcare.
00:24:48
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If there's anything that we know for sure is that change is coming.
00:24:52
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The ability to rally a team around a better way of doing things, the ability to show people that we don't have to do things because that's the way they were done before.
00:25:01
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There might be a better way.
00:25:03
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That ability to move the needle forward is very, very important in terms of an ultra skill and making teams or ICUs continue to grow.
00:25:17
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So these are examples of what we called ultra skills, which are skills that are focused on the performance of others that enhance the performance of those around you.
00:25:27
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And that I would believe ultimately will define your ceiling.
00:25:31
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So no matter how skilled you are clinically, it's these super skills that allow you to continue to grow and these ultra skills that
00:25:40
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that we're allowed you to have an impact that goes beyond the people right in front of you.
00:25:45
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So it will increase your maximal point of impact.
00:25:48
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And it's what leadership is made of.
00:25:50
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And I believe that everybody has access to that as long as they're willing to be deliberate and intentional on working on these ultra skills.
00:26:01
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So the final portion of our podcast today really is about moving to action.
00:26:07
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What are some things that we can do as a checklist to really work on any skill?
00:26:12
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And these are, I believe, things that are useful regardless of we're working on a specific clinical skill, whether we're working on some super skill, such as improving the ability we have to communicate ideas, or whether we're working on
00:26:31
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these ultra skills that are trying to build super teams or help others grow or even create change in the environment that we are in.
00:26:48
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So finally, in terms of the checklist,
00:26:52
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I would say that there is five things that, again, as a composite are a skill or a super skill.
00:27:01
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And really, you can take that to a meta level, I guess.
00:27:05
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But there's five things that I believe will help you develop and grow a skill, a super skill or an ultra skill, no matter what they were.
00:27:14
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So number one is to develop a growth mindset.
00:27:17
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Number two is to take the time to pause and reflect.
00:27:21
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Number three is to identify your scales and practice them.
00:27:25
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Number four is to seek coaching and mentorship.
00:27:29
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And number five is to expand your horizons.
00:27:31
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So I will talk about each one of these briefly.
00:27:36
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Number one, develop a growth mindset.
00:27:39
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This is a concept that I believe is extremely powerful.
00:27:42
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It was a pioneer by research done by Carol Dweck at Stanford.
00:27:47
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And what she realized is that many, many people, especially kids who are praised for being intelligent, for being beautiful, for being athletic, from an early age, develop what's called a fixed mindset.
00:27:59
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They really believe that their talents are innate and that they're fixed and that they can either do something or they can't.
00:28:06
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They don't like to fail.
00:28:08
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They don't like to be challenged because of this.
00:28:11
Speaker
And they usually will stick to what they know because they really believe that their potential is predetermined.
00:28:17
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Now, this is a very dangerous mindset because when you fail, when you're frustrated, you're going to give up.
00:28:25
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And really, you see a lot of people in health care with fixed mindsets because they were very successful early on in school, then in college and in med school or nursing school.
00:28:35
Speaker
And then they come to real life and they find some real challenges and some failures.
00:28:40
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And they really believe that they're not good enough.
00:28:41
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They don't have a mindset that allows them to grow.
00:28:46
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The opposite and what we really want to look for is a growth mindset, right?
00:28:51
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Where people really value is effort.
00:28:54
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So if you want to raise a kid with a growth mindset, you praise their effort, not their accomplishments.
00:29:01
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And kids who develop a growth mindset understand that failure is an opportunity to grow.
00:29:08
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So they embrace failure.
00:29:09
Speaker
They're willing to push beyond their comfort zone and fail because they ultimately understand that if they fail today with the right work, they will succeed.
00:29:19
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They believe that they can learn to do anything they want.
Coaching vs. Mentorship in Skill Development
00:29:22
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Challenges help them grow.
00:29:24
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They want that feedback.
00:29:26
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And their effort and attitudes are ultimately what determine their abilities.
00:29:31
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They like to try new things.
00:29:33
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So how do you develop skills, super skills and ultra skills?
00:29:37
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You have to start with the growth mindset.
00:29:40
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There's no other way of developing a new skill than having that beginner's mentality and understanding that if you work hard at it, you will get better.
00:29:48
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And you need to be able to embrace failure and learn from failure.
00:29:53
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Number two is to take time to reflect.
00:29:56
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So pause and reflect.
00:29:58
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I think that a lot of times we don't do this on a regular basis and we just keep running on the treadmill, which I think will ultimately hinder our growth and our learning opportunities.
00:30:11
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So if you do something new, you can start with pausing and thinking what you did, describe what happened,
00:30:19
Speaker
outline timeline ask yourself so what why is this important outline the impact or meaning your new activity your new skill has for you and then think about now what describe the impact of what you have done or learned will have on your future work outline what you will do to continue to learn and a lot of times people think about what should i keep doing
00:30:45
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What should I stop doing?
00:30:47
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And what should I do that I haven't done yet?
00:30:50
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Right?
00:30:50
Speaker
What I need to do new?
00:30:52
Speaker
And if you really do this on a regular basis, either at the end of every day, at the end of every week, what you'll find is that you will start growing at a much faster pace.
00:31:01
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If we don't take the time to reflect on what we're developing in terms of skills, super skills or ultra skills, what we've done at the hospital, how we interact with the family,
00:31:14
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member, how we interacted with a colleague, we're really never going to get better.
00:31:19
Speaker
We're just going to keep doing things by default.
00:31:22
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And without that deliberate intention of improving and that reflection, it's very hard to get that level of mastery that we all want.
00:31:30
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So take time to reflect.
00:31:34
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Number three is to identify your scales and practice them.
00:31:37
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So what do I mean by scales?
00:31:39
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Every piano player, whether it be a classical piano player or a jazz piano player, understands that scales are one of the underpinnings of all music compositions.
00:31:51
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So very accomplished piano players practice scales differently.
00:31:55
Speaker
day in and day out.
00:31:57
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And as they improve on their scales, they are able to improve their performance with the piano.
00:32:03
Speaker
So every skill, super skill or ultra skill that you have, that you're interested in, you can break down into some parts, into different steps, and you can identify probably one or two steps that are more important or are critical.
00:32:18
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And those are the steps that you need to practice.
00:32:21
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That's what's called deliberate practice.
00:32:24
Speaker
Just practicing aimlessly will not give you the same level of improvement of practicing the same amount of time or even less time in a deliberate and intentional way by identifying what would be the equivalent of scales to that skill and doing that over and over again with the ability to reflect and to pause.
00:32:43
Speaker
So understanding what are the components of a skill, a super skill or an ultra skill, and what are the key components and focusing on practicing those in a deliberate manner will, I think, advance your growth and your mastery in a much more powerful way.
00:33:00
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Number four is about seeking coaching and mentorship.
00:33:06
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Coaching and mentorship are not the same.
00:33:09
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Coaching usually has a set duration.
00:33:11
Speaker
It's task-oriented.
00:33:12
Speaker
It might be short-term.
00:33:13
Speaker
It's a formal relationship.
00:33:15
Speaker
It's driven by performance.
00:33:17
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So you might ask somebody to coach you in terms of developing new technical skills that can be ultrasound or it might be
00:33:25
Speaker
and access for ECMO or other procedures.
00:33:28
Speaker
They're very focused on specific development areas.
00:33:31
Speaker
And it really, it's more of a behavioral transformation and follow-up, right?
00:33:35
Speaker
It's the same way that athletes are coached by their coaches to improve very specific aspects of the game that they're training for.
00:33:43
Speaker
mentoring is an ongoing relationship.
00:33:46
Speaker
It's more of a relationship-oriented partnership.
00:33:50
Speaker
It's long-term.
00:33:51
Speaker
It's a little bit more informal.
00:33:53
Speaker
It's really driven to develop you, not to improve your performance immediately.
00:33:58
Speaker
And it's focused on support and guidance, focused on professional and personal success, focused on listening, and ultimately, it's about personal transformation.
00:34:08
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So we all have
00:34:09
Speaker
people who have inspired us and who have been mentors.
00:34:12
Speaker
But what I'm telling you is you need to seek these people formally for coaching, for mentorship.
00:34:18
Speaker
And obviously it's a two-way street.
00:34:20
Speaker
You can't just demand.
00:34:21
Speaker
You have to give something in return.
00:34:23
Speaker
But if you are deliberate and intentional about choosing the right mentors, it can really help you grow and develop all these skills tremendously because...
00:34:32
Speaker
It is very likely that some of these skills or super skills or ultra skills that you're interested in developing, your mentor might have a very good way of doing it or have more experience.
00:34:44
Speaker
So again, seek coaching and mentorship.
Broadening Horizons Beyond Critical Care
00:34:46
Speaker
And finally, number five is expand your horizons.
00:34:52
Speaker
Everybody says that there is no magic in our comfort zone.
00:34:55
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So by expanding our horizons, I really believe that we need to always be looking for inspiration and for learning outside of the bubble that is critical care.
00:35:07
Speaker
Of course, we need to read about critical care.
00:35:09
Speaker
And a lot of what we discuss on this podcast relates to critical care clinically.
00:35:14
Speaker
But even this type of presentation or this idea of skills, super skills, and ultra skills is really informed by me reading.
00:35:25
Speaker
I expand my horizons mostly by reading outside of medicine.
00:35:29
Speaker
So there's a set of books that I use to think about this, and I'll include all of these in the show notes.
00:35:37
Speaker
But that includes The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek.
00:35:40
Speaker
Includes Drive by Daniel H. Pink, Deep Work by Colin Newport, Switch by the Heath Brothers, Mindset by Carol Dweck, the Walter Isaacson biography of Leonardo da Vinci, Range by David Epstein, Essentialism by Greg McKeown,
00:35:58
Speaker
Mastery by Robert Green and Linchpin by Seth Godin.
00:36:01
Speaker
These are all phenomenal reads that will definitely help you in thinking about growth and mastery.
00:36:10
Speaker
And I think will fit very nicely into a lot of what we talked today.
00:36:15
Speaker
So to close the skills development checklist.
00:36:20
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Number one, develop a growth mindset.
00:36:23
Speaker
Number two, take the time to reflect.
00:36:25
Speaker
Number three, identify your skills and practice them.
00:36:28
Speaker
Number four, seek coaching and mentorship.
00:36:31
Speaker
And number five, expand your horizons.
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:36:34
Speaker
We talked a little bit about...
00:36:36
Speaker
healthcare, the knowledge economy, and why we are playing an infinite game, where really the goal is to keep playing the game and joy comes from being better today than we were yesterday.
00:36:47
Speaker
We saw how that plays into the idea of skills and we moved from an old paradigm of hard and soft skills to a framework that I believe allows us to think about skills in a more rigorous way, thinking of super skills as job-focused skills
00:37:07
Speaker
Sorry, thinking of skills as job focused, super skills as skills that are focused on the individual and improving ourselves and our growth.
00:37:16
Speaker
And finally, ultra skills, which are focused on others and allow us to help or move people in the right direction to perform at the highest of their abilities.
00:37:27
Speaker
So we can think of...
00:37:29
Speaker
a whole set of skills and classify them in these three categories.
00:37:34
Speaker
I would encourage you to think about a couple of skills, a couple of super skills, and a couple of ultra skills that you might be interested in developing or improving during 2023.
00:37:46
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You can use the skills development checklist as a starting point.
00:37:50
Speaker
But ultimately, I wanted to talk about this topic as a little bit of a
00:37:57
Speaker
fresh take on something that is 100% relevant to our practice, but is not a purely clinical topic.
00:38:04
Speaker
And also, I believe that the evidence would suggest that new years and new beginnings are always better times to start some change.
00:38:13
Speaker
So this might be something that aligns well with your 2023 new year resolutions of learning new skills, new super skills, and ultra skills.
00:38:25
Speaker
So with that, I definitely want to hear from comments, reach out to me through Twitter or other venues.
00:38:34
Speaker
I'll put some of my handles in the show notes.
00:38:38
Speaker
Again, I want to thank all our listeners for sticking with us for the last several years.
00:38:44
Speaker
for helping us create a community of critical care clinicians interested in improving the practice of critical care.
00:38:51
Speaker
I want to hear from you.
00:38:53
Speaker
If you think the podcast is valuable, please share it with others.
00:38:56
Speaker
It's open access and remain open access.
00:38:59
Speaker
because ultimately it's about sharing knowledge and ideas.
00:39:02
Speaker
And finally, if you have time and find this useful, you can definitely put a review in whatever platform you utilize for your podcast, which always helps us reach more people.
00:39:16
Speaker
So with that, I look forward to seeing you in a couple of weeks and talking with you about new clinical topics related to the practice of critical care.
00:39:26
Speaker
Thank you very much.
00:39:28
Speaker
Thank you for listening to Critical Matters, a sound podcast.
00:39:32
Speaker
Make sure to subscribe to Critical Matters on Apple or Google Podcasts and share with your network.
00:39:38
Speaker
Sound's transforming the way critical care is provided in hospitals across the country.
00:39:43
Speaker
To learn more, visit www.soundphysicians.com.