Give Yourself the Gift of Growth: 8 Ways to Level Up During the Holidays

This holiday season, give yourself a gift that keeps on giving: the gift of knowledge. In this episode of C-Suite Sidekick, we dive into 8 practical, wallet-friendly ways to upskill during the holiday slowdown. Whether you're a business owner, a senior leader, or an aspiring executive, this mini-guide will help you maximize your downtime without sacrificing fun with family or friends. 

These strategies are designed to fit into your busy life and help you stay ahead of the curve in 2025. Don’t let ChatGPT or changing buyer behaviors leave you behind. Tune in and start your year-end learning journey today! 

Companion content:

• 6 Things Future-Focused Business Owners Will Master in 2025 
• AI Upskilling Done Right
• When B2B Selling is Slow, 4 People You Can Call
• Maybe You Need a Break Too
• Harvard Business Review on Strategy
• McKinsey Podcast
• The Insightful Leader

Show notes:

• Connect with Summer on LinkedIn
• Visit Rise of Us for more information about Summer's services
• Episode recorded and edited using Descript
• Repurposed content, such as this description created using CastMagic

Transcript

0:00

Hello, and welcome back to C-suite sidekick. I'm your host summer polity. And today we are revisiting. One of my episodes, because I know it's going to be slow this week. If you didn't catch it the first time around. This one is all about learning. It's about to be a slow couple of weeks. And I know a lot of you are like me and you still work most of the time one of the things that you can do. When a lot of your prospects or partners or clients are taking time off is you can give yourself the gift. Have some knowledge. So here are a few ways where you can up your game. And take advantage of this slower season and just enjoy it for what it is.

summer: 0:48

Maybe you work a corporate job, maybe you own a business. Either way, you don't have a lot of free time between work and home. I have been there. You're busy learning your company's new offerings and handling client or employee issues. You technically have some free time if business is slow or if you're taking a vacation, imagine yourself learning some new skills instead of spending time complaining to your colleague about no one returning your emails I've got eight things that are wallet and clock friendly for you. And of course, you can start today. Number one, get a library card. They're not just for students. I use mine all the time. They're great for classic business books. They also have audio and ebooks. You can learn while you commute, exercise, or do chores with those audio books. The library cards are free as long as you return things timely. And if you're afraid of a huge fine from high school, I hear that all the time, put on your adult pants and go down there. It's either been erased, or with your executive job, I imagine you can afford it. Number two. Get an Audible subscription starting at 7. 95 a month. It's an affordable way to access more current books. The drawback for me is that I consume more content than I can get with the subscription, so I supplement it with the library card. But it's my job to learn and it might be fine for you. Number three, along with the theme of books again, used bookstores. Not everyone hoards their business books like I do, and you can find some pretty new releases for a fraction of the price. Thrift books and Abe books are reliable sources that I use all the time. The quality is good. Prices are cheap. Shipping's fast. Highly recommend. Number four, listen to podcasts, not the murder ones. Although I consume those too. I mean, I'm a middle aged mom. So of course I do. Anyway, back to business at Tand. Look for half hour range if it's learning a new topic or 15 minute range if it's some quick action items like my mini pods. I find that podcasts, unlike books, can give you current, like, in the moment insights. I write mine the week I publish, and I know most other people do as well. Whereas books can take a couple of years to develop, edit, and publish. They also give you bite sized tidbits, and they don't overwhelm a busy exec. The learning doesn't matter much if you don't implement it, of course. Number five, online courses. These will of course take more time and education, but are great if you want to obtain a new skill that will help you advance your career, or to switch careers. edX is my go to. Coursera and Udemy are good as well. The courses on edX are free, but to give yourself an incentive to finish, consider opting for the certificate. It's amazing how much that extra little money you spent will motivate you to finish it instead of ignore it because you're too busy and it was free anyway. Pay attention to how current the information is. In rapidly evolving fields like marketing, I don't always see courses keeping up. That's why I got my DemandGen certificate from DemandBase instead of taking a marketing course from edX. And courses are very popular right now. Monetizing a skill is a trend, so buyer beware, do some research before you pay for it, read reviews, make sure the person actually knows what they're talking about and that the course looks worth your money. Number six, speaking of courses, LinkedIn Learning is a great resource for free or low cost education. And if you're anything like most Americans, you're on LinkedIn fairly regularly anyway. While you're on there scrolling and networking, you can also do some learning as well. And number seven, community college. Now, this is going to sound a little bit weird, especially to those of you who have degrees, but it is a great way to add a skill, pretty cheap, like business management or accounting, communications. If there's something that you didn't go to school for that will help you advance a certificate program from a community college can be a good cost effective way to do that. Little asterisk, again, not so great for marketing. That field is moving so fast, I find that academia is having a really hard time keeping up. And number eight, last but certainly not the least, sales training or coaching. It's not taught in schools. Most companies don't invest in it. But trust me, it is worth the investment. My former company invested in sales training and it did wonders for our revenue. And my own career, frankly, that's why I do this as part of my full time work now. One or two day seminars don't work. I've tried those. People take a couple of nuggets from them and that's really all they remember. So it ends up not having as much ROI as a training program. What you want to look for is a program that focuses on one skill at a time, ideally one per week, and includes practice and reviewing of game footage such as recorded sales calls. Sales professionals and business owners can make a lot of money. So think of yourselves as corporate athletes. What you get out of your craft is directly related to the work that you put in. Sales training also isn't as expensive as it used to be. Businesses like mine can operate remotely with a low cost of operation, and that has caused some of those savings to be passed on to clients. Whew. Okay. You might be asking how you can possibly fit this into your already busy life. I got you. You pick one or two that appeal to you. Set a goal or objective related to the learning, add it to your personal success plan, and then block time in your perfect week. Now if you don't have a personal success plan and or perfect week yet, we need to chat. Those practices helped me become a high achiever without sacrificing what was most important to me. Time with my family and time to focus on my own health and well being. And remember I'm learning while I'm exercising, so that was one of my hacks. You can steal it. Before we wrap up, let's talk about implementing. All the learning in the world does not matter if you don't apply it. Feel free to let your mind wander a little bit while you're learning. Get your creative juices flowing. If you're thinking of what you could do to put it in action, you are on the right course. If your mind is thinking about that to do list that you're ignoring, you need to pick different learning material because it's not striking a chord with you and you're wasting your time. Write down your ideas or use voice memos. I do this even when I'm outside of the house. So if you ever see a blonde lady on the trail talking to herself about sales strategy, do me a favor, smile, nod, move on. I'm not crazy, I swear. Now, this is also key. Don't overwhelm yourself. Getting too many ideas can be detrimental to your overall success plan because you risk not None of them being implemented. We don't want to get into something where we're chasing a lot of different shiny objects and we have a lot of great plans but nothing ever gets finished. When you have your idea, write it down, stop learning for the day, and then sketch out ways to implement it. And if you're working with a coach, make them earn their keep. I used to subtly remind my coach what he was there for by keeping him on the phone until I had a new insight that I could use. I swear, sometimes I'm such a pain. Okay, I got my action item. You can go now. He thinks it's funny, so I guess it's fine. Okay, let's wrap it up. Gen AI alone is creating a need to upskill not only the current workforce, but most school aged kids. If you think you don't have enough time or money to, invest, it's also time to rethink that. Now get out there and stay ahead of ChatGPT.

9:46

Whether you have it. If you've ever read anything or listen to anything that I produced this year. I would appreciate the holiday gift of. Uh, reveal so that I can expand my reach next year, or maybe a share with someone else who might find some insights or some inspiration in what I put out there. I appreciate the listen. And I'm going to see you. Next year. Yeah, have a great one. Happy holidays.