What are the top skills that should be taught to every man, woman, and child who enters our education system? Here are a few that aren’t taught at all:

1. How to Make People Like You and Network

For a skill that affects every area of your life (from dating, to family, to work), its amazing how little people know about this. There is great power in knowing you can reach out to your network whenever you have a problem to solve, to be able to reach key influencers at conferences and meetings, to make an impression on audiences, to project confidence and trustworthiness, and to make friends with other successful people.

Required reading: How to Win Friends and Influence People and How to Talk to Anyone: 92 Little Tricks for Big Success in Relationships.

2. How to Speed Read and the Power of Audio Books

Speed reading and speed comprehension is real. The nominal investment of time it takes to learn pays off in spades for the rest of your life. The same goes with audio books. If you spend an hour per day in the car learning instead of cursing at other drivers, you will have attended the equivalent of an entire semester course.

Required reading: The Psychology of Achievement by Brian Tracey

3. How to Set Goals and Manage Time

Want to know how to get anything done in life? Our school system doesn’t feel that this is worth teaching. If you have ever found yourself being busy all day only to wonder what you accomplished at the end of it, then you need to learn this.

Required reading: Getting Things Done, Eat That Frog, No B.S. Time Management For Entrepreneurs

4. How to Read a Financial Statement

Robert Kiyosaki is fond of saying that the rich teach their children how to read financial statements and the poor do not. Schools have never been very good at teaching people how to get rich, probably in no small part because professors are generally poor and wouldn’t know how to teach it.

Required reading: Cash Flow Quadrant, or this blog article

5. How to Negotiate and Use Contracts

If you want to accomplish anything of significance you’re going to have to work with other people. There is a certain art to structuring good contracts and measuring results. School teaches you none of this and most people have to learn it from the school of hard knocks.

Required reading: Donald Trump’s The Art Of The Deal

6. How to Save and Invest

People are never taught how to build wealth, which is why the nation is in credit card debt. Moreover, people are never taught the power of passive income streams and how to really break free from the rat race of working 9-to-5. There is a whole body of literature on this topic which is never even touched upon in traditional education.

Required reading: The Richest Man In Babylon, The Millionaire Next Door, or Ben Franklin’s The Way To Wealth

7. How to be Successful in Life

Some people have devoted a lifetime to understanding what makes people happy and successful. There are the big three: health, wealth, and relationships. People need to find what they really want to do with their life. There is a lot to learn here!

Required reading: What To Say When You Talk To Yourself, When I Say No I Feel Guilty, Think and Grow Rich, The Way Of The Superior Man

8. How to Spread an Idea and Basic Marketing

The basics of marketing are something everyone should understand. Even if you don’t think you’re in marketing, you’re in marketing. If you have an idea at work, or want to get a raise, or want to convince your kids to go see a movie, then there is something applicable from the marketing world.

Required reading: Dan Kennedy’s The Ultimate Sales Letter, CopyBlogger, The Psychology of Influence

Here is a story that reminds us to remain focused and conscious as we pursue growth, change and our dreams in 2009.

In 1846, a young Austrian-Hungarian doctor named Igaz Semmelweis investigated a notorious maternity ward in which nearly all of the inpatients contracted a fatal case of childbed fever. In the course of his investigations, he noticed that women who came into the ward after giving birth seldom became ill.

When a professor who cut his finger in the middle of an autopsy in that same hospital died of symptoms identical to those of these unfortunate mothers, Semmelweis reasoned that the students doing the autopsies were somehow transferring the fever to the women in the maternity ward.

Semmelweis began requiring that his students disinfect their hands before delivering babies, and the number of childbed fever cases dropped. Here is where “change” became difficult.

Semmelweis was labeled insane by his colleagues for having the audacity to suggest that they should wash their hands between deliveries, and they fired him. He tried to continue his research but was ostracized by the medical community. His own mental health eventually deteriorated, leading to his death in an insane asylum.

One final event leading to the general acceptance of germs occurred in 1860. A famed doctor was scheduled to speak at a conference where he intended to thoroughly denounce Semmelweis’s ideas. Before the speech began, he was interrupted by a man who proceeded to tell the audience that he had discovered the bacterium responsible for childbed fever. That man was Louis Pasteur, and the rest is history.

Lack of proper hand washing continues to be the primary reason why MRSA and other superbugs are spread in hospitals today. In my work with healthcare leaders, I continue to be amazed that some physicians and clinicians still do not consider it essential to wash their hands.

But change is hard, as we all know, and even when we are faced with indisputable evidence that should direct our actions, we still sometimes find “the old ways” easier.

So as we enter the New Year, let us reflect on the challenge of change at the same time as we look into our futures with optimism and hope, knowing that keeping our resolve, staying focused on our dreams, and refusing to be swayed by naysayers and doom-spreaders is essential if we wish to build something greater and more inspiring.

May your 2009 be filled with hope, achievement and many blessings.

Our “energy crisis” is a prime example of how fear metastasizes. We are becoming acclimatized (forgive the pun!) to $150-per-barrel oil prices and pundits are forecasting $200 by year end, and 2000 futures contracts have been sold for delivery of oil at $300 by the end of 2008. While this is all painful, in real terms, oil prices have remained steady – in early 1980 oil peaked at $39.50 per barrel, which is about the same as today’s price, adjusted for inflation. But since then, cars have become, on average, 35% more efficient and there is an ongoing, extraordinary effort to boost that trend? – Toyota’s next version of its successful hybrid, the Prius, will have solar panels on the roof. John Kanzius is experimenting with generating energy from salt water. Fridges use a quarter of the energy today that they did in the 1970s. The Swedes are using the body heat of the 250,000 people who rush through Stockholm Central Station each day to heat the building next door. Kenichi Horie just traveled 4,800 miles from Hawaii to Japan in a catamaran powered solely by wave power. A device has been developed that straps to the knee and can generate and store enough power from walking to power ten cell phones. Costa Rica aims to be carbon neutral by 2021, and Norway by 2050. We will overcome our energy crisis – through innovation, inspiration and hope.

Leadership and communication styles based on fear achieve the exact opposite of what we are trying to accomplish because fear builds on itself, causing an acceleration of the cycle of being frightened. One idea feeds upon another until we lose sight of the rational and the inspiring which is within everything.

Humans are inquiring, curious and innovative beings who yearn for leadership that offers hope. In our work in organizations, one of our first activities is to halt the practices and behaviors that generate fear, including our fear-based language, and replace them with hope. Generally speaking, hope is not a leadership style in which we are practiced or competent. Although we do not need to become Polyannas, we do however, need to become dealers in hope. As the Dalai Lama replied when asked why he was always happy, “It makes me feel better.”? That’s how inspiring organizations feel for those who work in them and do business with them.

Rushworth Kidder, whose thoughts and writings are always insightful, has recently completed a small pilot survey of members of the Institute for Global Ethics, of which he is the executive Director. The question: What is the most threatening global issue facing humanity today?

Is it terrorism, violence against women, CO₂ emissions, governmental corruption, mass migration, water scarcity, or slavery?

Since the questions in the survey were based on the 15 major issues catalogued in the 2007 “State of the Future” report from the United Nations-affiliated Millennium Project, Kidder’s team asked one of the report’s co-authors, Theodore J. Gordon, to join a follow-up conference call with the survey participants. Gordon conceived of the Millennium Project in the 1980s and remains one of the world’s most highly respected futurists. He’s been studying future issues and trends since well before 1971, when he founded his own consulting firm, The Futures Group. So his answer was surprising.

Of the nine topics in the survey, respondents clustered three of them near the top: terrorism, CO₂ emissions, and mass migration. They followed with a group of five more: corruption; violence against women; global slavery; disease, AIDS, and pandemics; and imbalanced wealth distribution. The ninth issue, shortage of medical professionals, came in well below the rest.

But Gordon said it’s none of the above. He said, “If you look at all of these issues,” he said “and ask what’s common to them all, its lousy decision making.”

“There used to be a time,” Gordon continued, “when I thought futures research, my field, would make its contribution by improving decision making. But I’ve abandoned that thought. We could have the best insight into what the future might be through magic techniques not yet invented and decisions would still be terrible!” Translation: It’s not the specific issues that challenge us, but the way we fail to deal with issues of every sort.

Kidder writes, “That strikes me as a remarkable admission for a man whose life has been devoted to advancing and promoting futures research. Gordon wouldn’t want me to hold him up to unfair comparisons, but if Einstein after decades of work had told us that something mattered more than physics, or if Cezanne had concluded that painting wasn’t what it was all about, or if Darwin had intimated that he was outgrowing his commitment to evolution, wouldn’t we pay attention?”

I find in the organizations that I work for that there is a general weakness in the crispness and discipline of decision making. Too often, it is a disorganized process which relies more on positional power, ego and forces that psychologists call “the shadow” the personal foibles and demons that we all possess.

It’s not that the big issues are not important, but as long as we lack the will and the training to make high quality decisions, rooted in integrity, that are in the best long-term interests of our constituents, we will lurch from one crisis to another and be forever searching for a better decision than the last one.

There is a very special place, unlike any other in North America called Hollyhock. It is a not-for-profit retreat center located on Cortes, a small island off the west coast of British Columbia. The minute you step off the ferry you know you have left the hectic world behind. This is a serene, beautiful and healing place – ideal for deep learning.

When my wife Tricia and I first visted Hollyhock in the 1980′s, we were so taken with its splendor and powerful energy that we began teaching there – the breakthrough personal results we were able to achieve in these incredible surroundings was a gift for us and our students. Hollyhock is blessed with giant redwoods, 39 feet in circumference, in old growth forest where we hold our sessions in log meeting rooms in the midst of sacred nature, and where we can rise early to breathe in the morning sunrise on the ocean, or laze with our new friends while eating fresh-caught oysters over an evening campfire on the beach. And during the week one can luxuriate with meditation or massage, take a hottub and feast on some of the finest vegetarian cooking (mostly grown on Hollyhock’s land) that I have ever tasted.

Tricia and I will be leading a retreat over five days in June which will draw from leading-edge corporate philosophy, deep personal reflection and growth as a leader, astrology, religion, wisdom teachings and energy healing and everything in between.

Hollyhock is an unparalleled centre of learning and connection that exists to inspire, nourish and support people who are making the world better. A visit to Hollyhock, Canada’s Leading Educational Retreat Centre, is the start of a journey, often a journey of a lifetime. Come and join Tricia and me for a remarkable learning experience and a journey of a lifetime.