You know somebody who seems to have a natural tendency in some area of their life, whether it’s music or art or athletics. I know we saw that as well. My daughter, Reese, she made the varsity team for lacrosse as a freshman, and people assumed she’d probably been playing lacrosse her whole life, and we’re like, no, she picked up a stick a few months before tryouts.
But, we saw that she had some natural athletic ability from when she was a little girl. She just tended to run faster than the other kids and climb poles quicker than all the other kids on the playground. We all know somebody who’s got that. Now, one of the mistakes then is people think that when it comes to communication, that you have to be a naturally good communicator. And that’s not true.
Just like athletics or music or art or any other skill, yes, there are some people who have these natural abilities to already be good – but others who don’t have those natural abilities can still become good and great, even outpace or outperform people who have those natural abilities.
We see this all the time. We’ll see people in sports in high school or college who were better than their teammates, but the teammate went on to become a professional. It’s not because they were necessarily naturally better; it’s because they outperformed them. They out-rehearsed, they out-practiced, they out-trained, and it is the same thing with communication. Even really good, naturally talented communicators can only hold that or become great if they work on that skill.
So, have you been working on this skill? Or are you sitting around saying, “I’m not naturally good at communication, I’m just never going to get it. In fact, thank goodness AI is here, because I’m just going to type that in and ask them to create the communication for me.” Oh goodness gracious, no! We should be working on that. Now, I’m not knocking AI, please use it as a foundation.
But you should be up-leveling your communication skills. So what does that look like for you? Is that the written word, is that your presentation skills? What are you doing? Because AI being here today, your ability to take communication to the next level, above and beyond what AI can produce, is going to be a key differentiator for you. If you can out-communicate others in your field and outperform AI when it comes to communication in the whole communication package, you are going to be winning, you are going to be at the top.
I’ve been sharing this with my kids since they were little. Those communicators are going to be the ones that stand out and reach the levels that they want to. So, what are you doing today? Instead of saying, ah, it’s just not a natural skill for me, what are you doing to go up-level that skill intentionally?