Benefits Of A Liberal Arts Education

Understanding Who You Are is the beginning of learning what your talents are and how much you recognize just what you do well and what you don’t do so well. Hopefully discussing and documenting your education, skills, experience and strengths, as well as some of your shortcomings will help you on the road to finding the ‘four lane highways’ in your mind that make up your talents. This chapter will discuss some of what can be learned in the following reference materials; “First Break All the Rules” “Conscious Business” “Now Discover Your Strengths” “Executive EQ” “The Quiet Man”. The intention is to have you honestly begin to understand just what it is that you do well and how that is associated with your talents. The chapter is also designed

the benefits of a liberal arts education. Some believe the specific technical education will give you a better opportunity to be monetarily successful by developing knowledge and skills. Others believe this advantage may be true for the beginning of a career, but the liberal arts education will win out in the end as the individual changes jobs and gets into leadership positions. When you look at the educational backgrounds of some CEO’s of technically oriented companies this appears to be true. It is generally agreed that a good leader be proficient in the technical aspects of his/her work, but that person will also benefit greatly from a good background in the liberal arts. I like to equate the liberal arts education with the Emotional Intelligence skills learned throughout a career. Today’s leader needs to be competent in writing, speaking, listening, negotiating, and influencing, as well as leadership characteristics including honesty, energy, trust, curiosity, imagination and more. Many of these characteristics’ are not part of any typical technical or liberal arts education; they come from Emotional Intelligence and intuitive talents that will be discussed in detail

Consider the factual knowledge the alphabet and the experiential knowledge speaking the language using the alphabet you learned. Experiential knowledge “is something you must discipline yourself to pick up along the way and retain”. (6) Your list here should include your education and specific courses, especially the ones you liked, and experiences where you have used your education. You should also list the other things you have learned and experiences that may not include formal education. A good example here may be something you learned at a summer camp or in scouts, like sailing, being a life guard or earning a scout badge in recycling. All of your knowledge is important and ‘worth writing home about’. After developing a good list of your factual and experiential knowledge, see if you can discover a few areas where you have brought some structure to your experiential knowledge. This would include “formalizing all the accumulated knowledge (on a task) into a sequence of steps that if followed would lead to performance”(7) of that task. A good example of developing a skill is seen in the task of public speaking. Take the factual knowledge on the subject you are speaking on, and the experiential knowledge you have gained in speaking, develop a sequence of