Hello, and welcome to lesson one, category one seeing the big picture. Now before we begin, I hope you remember to print out the PDF worksheet entitled my soft skills profile. Keep this worksheet closed because you'll want to fill it out as we move through each lesson, keeping track of the soft skills that you already possess. At the end of the course, you'll craft sentences around your soft skills, essentially creating your own personalized, soft skills profile to be used for work or for personal reasons. Remember to also keep track of the soft skills that you want to develop on your worksheet. Okay, so let's begin.

Category one seeing the big picture. Now the person who has this soft skill has the ability to look at a situation again effectively with a bird's eye view, and to analyze and organize the various pieces of that situation with success and without feeling overwhelmed. A real life example of this soft skill would be writing reports and proposals. Other specific skills included within this category are and I'll just go through this list once and then I'll go back and unpack the finer details contained within each of these soft skills. So we have here planning, time management, organizing, research, intercultural competence and in brackets here international diversity awareness in brackets National Business Ethics, providing training to others and entrepreneurs. thinking, Okay.

All right. So let's go back and unpack these specific skill sets here. Now the first three skills on this list planning, time management and organizing, we can cluster together. They are about the ability to prioritize and coordinate. So if you are someone who has the ability to keep track of a lot of moving parts within a project, whether you're planning an event, or you're planning travel for other people or for yourself, then you definitely want to think about adding either one or all three of these soft skills on your profile sheet. Okay.

Good. Next, we have our Research now research together with writing reports and proposals from our previous slide. These two can be clustered, because they're about gathering information and synthesizing it for others. So you're seeing the big picture, and your research activities, and your report writing and your proposal writing and you're able to gather all of that information and all of that data together into one place, synthesize the information and redistribute it to others fantastic soft skill to have. Now the next for intercultural competence, diversity, awareness with business ethics and providing training to others. These four are about choosing what's right over choosing what's convenient.

In other words, I'm choosing honesty and fairness and that comes through especially clearly for example in business ethics and providing training to others and business ethics, the person with this soft skill prioritizes fair business practices. For example, the person who is skilled in providing training for others exercises patience, and is careful to add in support of another's learning. Okay, so that's part of the big picture to broaden one's perspective with regards to others role and relationship and a partnership in community. Now, intercultural competence. I have here in brackets International, in order to differentiate it from diversity awareness where international is here in brackets. intercultural competence can be applied to situations where we're dealing With traveling outside of one's home country, or where we're hosting others, from another country, at home or in our own home country, so being aware of traditions and values and customs of those people from different places around the world, either while we're in those places, ourselves, or those people come to us, okay, so that's seeing the big picture not expecting everyone to conform to a certain way of being.

And the same applies for diversity awareness, national, because this applies to even within one country, where people of many different backgrounds live together. Recognizing that each of those individuals have, although in the public sphere, in the public arena, similar values, traditions and customs In the private sphere, there are differences to be respected. Okay. All right. So now we'll move down here to entrepreneurial thinking, our final bullet point, within the soft skill of seeing the big picture. Now entrepreneurial thinking is about seeing your role within a group, clearly.

Okay, it's about single handedly recognizing your strengths and your abilities to contribute to a group and making those contributions, seeing where there is gap and taking on the personal responsibility of filling it with your skills and talents. Okay, so again, seeing the big picture and recognizing your role within it. Okay, all right. Fantastic. So, which of these soft skills do you feel you possess? Which do you feel you would like to develop?

Jot that down on your worksheet. And I'll see you over in lesson two