I am a big fan of the notion and mindset of Continuous Learning and Continuous Improvement. It’s important to me to grow as a person in my personal life as well as in my professional life.

I have found that challenging myself more on my soft skills is helping me doing my job by being a better trusted technical advisor or a mentor.

I have been meeting with different individuals in my life who have showed me how sharing is complementary and related to learning and could be very powerful for others and for myself too.

Few months ago I did a 15min-presentation sharing is caring, I started by saying that other titles of this presentation could have been:

  • learn/share it all vs. know/keep it all​
  • sharing is learning
  • sharing is growing​
  • sharing is scaling​
  • sharing is making more impact​
  • sharing is being more inclusive and diverse

Then I took as my main reference, that quote coming from Satya Nadella, CEO at Microsoft, calling out an important concept of growth mindset:

Every day I ask myself if I am approaching my work with a growth mindset and more importantly recognizing all the fixed mindset moments that I can learn from.

Here are few resources I took the opportunity to refer in this presentation:

Why sharing?

You learned something from someone, so that’s the concept of giving back while you are sharing. Another way to see this is that it’s a technic of communication and collaboration, the more you share the more you get visibility and credibility. Finally, sharing is also part of the learning journey because you got feedback from others and you could build connections with people focused on the same areas. Those people could bring different values on the table, take this as an opportunity to feed you to get better next time.

What could be shared?

Anything you just learned. Someone will learn it from you. You could just forward or re-post or re-tweet an information to give it more visibility. Now, even better, you could add your own interpretation, highlight or point of view on top of it, it will accelerate the adoption by others and the collaboration with others. Furthermore, few people are able to share “failures”, but if you think about it, if you read tips and tricks from someone who thinks she or he failed, don’t you think it’s an acceleration process for learning? I recently read an article from someone who shared his story about “how he failed his startup”, really great example of courage and the power of sharing some lessons learned.

How to share?

By writing or speaking. Writing lasts in time and could be updated. Live conversations could get direct feedback and interaction. 1:1 meetings could get you different and complementary type of feedback than 1:M. Presentation could be recorded.

Where to share?

Any media that works best for you and you think it will be leveraged by others. LinkedIn, Twitter, Blog, 1:1 meeting, team meeting, presentation, meetups, GitHub project, etc.

When to share?

As often as you can and when you think you have enough content to share. I often start sharing at the beginning of my initial works to get as many inputs as I can get to eventually shared something more precise and concise. Is it better to share on Friday before leaving for the weekend or do you think people will be more engaged on Monday while starting their week of work? What about the timezone of your readers? Different insights you need to gather about your audience.

Any lessons learned about sharing?

By sharing, you will be vulnerable, exposed and at risk with the content you are focused on or even with the point of view you could have on it. But that’s ok, that’s the goal. Be open minded and curious about what others are saying about it. I also found that being strategic and focused on a specific area is driving consistency and allow to go deeper and deeper as opposed to try to talk about everything in surface. Be yourself and add your own style and flavours, don’t try to copy/paste someone else. You could quote or call out someone’s else work, and that’s ok too to recognize others by giving them visibility, credit and kudos. That’s how communities are made by being groups of people sharing same points of interest and completing each others. Something I learned and I’m trying to be better is to be concised when I write an email, a post on LinkedIn or blog article. For example, I’m focusing on what could have benefit and could be reusable by others. Be short and sweet by trying to summarize and highlight few items depending on the audience. For example, since recently I’m trying to use the concept of “tl;dr”. Final tips, just have fun and don’t overthink it, just do it, start small and adjust as you are growing by sharing.

Hope you enjoyed reading through this one, there is few references that I encourage you to leverage and adapt to your own personality, style and path to grow as a person, parent, partner, friend, worker, etc.

Cheers! ;)