What is a skill?
At Lectica, we think of a skill as “anything that develops through practice.”
We’re a bit obsessed with skills because our mission involves supporting optimal mental development, which simply can’t happen without lots of real-world practice. Practice is always about skills, so it makes sense to define a skill as anything that develops through practice.
Defining skills in this way has a bunch of interesting implications. First, you may notice that we use the word “anything.” This word has been chosen because it is domain and value-neutral. Just about anything we do while we’re awake involves skill, and skills can have effects that are positive, negative, or anywhere in between.
For example, during the last 20 minutes, I finished the first paragraph of this article, brushed my teeth, prepared a cup of tea, loaded the washing machine, read a difficult email, and sipped my tea without burning myself. All of these activities involved skills—a wide variety of skills—from basic motor skills to self-regulation, self-care, reasoning, and reading & writing skills. I can’t think of anything I did that did not require skill except, perhaps, for instinctive behaviors like breathing and swallowing.
When I claim that our definition of skill is value-neutral, I mean that a skill is a skill regardless of its effects. Some skills are essentially harmful, such as skills for rumination, self-harm, or verbal abuse, while others are essentially positive such as skills for learning, adaptation, and self-regulation. But the effects of many—maybe even most—skills can be anywhere on the beneficial/harmful spectrum, depending on how and where they are practiced.
The point is, our definition of skill is intentionally neutral. A skill is anything that develops through practice.
Skills are not…
The word, skill, is often used to denote things that my colleagues and I would not think of as skills. For example, skills are not facts. Memorizing facts is a skill and working with facts to solve problems involves many skills, but facts themselves are not skills. We don’t develop a fact through practice. Similarly, “understanding” is not a skill. We can’t develop understanding by practicing understanding, but our understanding develops as we gain insights through practice.
The word skill is also often applied to traits or dispositions like introversion, extroversion, courage, or charisma. Traits often influence which skills we choose to practice, but traits are not skills in themselves, because they do not develop with direct practice. We would not say, “I’m going to practice my charisma skills,” or I’m going to practice introversion.” However, an introverted person might say, “I need to get to know my co-workers better, so despite my introversion, I’m going to practice conversation skills like active listening.”
Skills are not emotional states. Complex emotions like compassion, empathy, sympathy, care, and love can be cultivated, but they can’t be developed through direct practice. We can’t practice empathy, but we can cultivate it by creating the conditions in which it is likely to develop. For example, we can increase our ability to feel compassion by practicing perspective-seeking skills like asking clarifying questions or by practicing skills for noticing when we tend to make snap judgments about others.
Values are a little more complicated. Some values, like honesty are almost skills, but it’s a bit more precise to say that we are practicing telling the truth than it is to say we are practicing honesty. Many values, like integrity or honor, are more like traits or dispositions. Values can have a huge influence on which skills we choose to cultivate, and we can put values into practice more or less skillfully, but they are not, in and of themselves, things that develop with direct practice. However, we can cultivate such values by practicing related (or what we call component) skills. We would not say, “I’m practicing honor today,” or “I’m practicing courage today. But we might say, “I’m practicing applying my values today.” The skill here is in the “applying.”
Finally, a talent is not a skill. The appropriate talent can make it easier to learn a skill, but it is not a skill in itself. We would not say, “I’m going to practice my talent for sports.” We would say, “I’m going to practice throwing curve balls.”
What’s so special about skills?
Because our minds are designed to develop through practice, learning through practice is the most pleasurable and efficient way to grow our minds. What do we practice? Skills. It’s as simple as that.
Skills for building skills
Building skills for leveraging the brain’s learning architecture increases the efficiency and quality of mental development while gifting the learner with a growing sense of earned competence, personal agency, and hope. At Lectica (the nonprofit that owns me), we help people build skills for building skills (ViP) and help educators, coaches, and consultants build skills for helping others build skills (LAP-1).
More about learning & skills
- If we want students to grow faster, we should stop trying to speed up learning
- VCoL in action: How to use micro-VCoLs to learn optimally on the fly
- VCoL in action: The many benefits of micro-VCoLing
- VCoL in action: The micro-VCoL starter set
- VCoL in action: The active observer
- Clarity skills unpacked
- VCoL in action: skill mapping
- VCoL in action: Take skill mapping to the next level
