Leadership, entrepreneurship, and other performance-based professional practices are fundamentally social and emotional.

Traditional academics teaches you to comply, not to lead or take initiative. It teaches intellectual skills, which are perfect for the knowledge worker of the mid-twentieth century.

Those days are gone. Today’s challenges are social and emotional—how to create relationships and learn people’s problems so you can solve them.

Learning to lead, innovate, create, and solve people’s problems requires self-awareness, teamwork, empathy, and other social and emotional skills. Most graduates of traditional education learned to analyze, recall facts, and other intellectual skills, which, today, keep you from promotion.
Few people know you can learn social and emotional skills, it seems.
You can.
It requires facing and overcoming social and emotional challenges. Most people shy away from challenges at the first feeling of anxiety, fear, or other emotions they’ve learned to avoid.

Facing social and emotional challenges is different than compliance-based analysis that traditional education provides. You can’t just learn facts or regurgitate back answers.

No leader or entrepreneur became great just by knowing facts or analyzing them. They become great by thoughtful, effective action, which comes from mastering social and emotional skills.

You can’t become a leader just by reading books, watching videos, writing papers, and other intellectual exercises. Facing emotional obstacles like anxiety and fear challenges you in ways that sitting in rows or writing papers never does.

Active, experiential learning gives you direction where your choices and actions matter. People depend on you, though on small scales at first, to develop your skills.