Mark Herschberg on "The Career Toolkit Book: Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You"

Welcome back to the Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast for episode #153 with Mark Herschberg[i], the author of The Career Toolkit: Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You. Watch this interview on YouTube here. https://youtu.be/ifPsPNT36WE Learn more about Mark Herschberg and his Career Toolkit Book here https://www.thecareertoolkitbook.com/  See past episodes here https://www.achieveit360.com/episodes/  I'm Andrea Samadi, author, and educator from Toronto, Canada, now in Arizona, and like many of our listeners, have been fascinated with learning and understanding the science behind high performance strategies in our schools, sports, and the workplace with ideas that we can all use, understand and implement immediately. Our guest for this week, Mark Herschberg, who has spent his career identifying and studying the skill gap that exists for what he calls firm skills, including networking, negotiating, communicating, leading, and career planning. We tend to think of many of these as situational skills, but Herschberg says they are really life skills — none of which are formally taught in school. We have been talking about these skills since the launch of this podcast 2 years ago. We call them social and emotional skills as they are known in our schools emotional intelligence skills in the workplace. I’m extremely interested in speaking to Mark about the gaps that he sees with these skills since a recent survey that I saw and mention often showed that 58% of employers say college graduates aren’t adequately prepared for today’s workforce, and those employers noted a particular gap in social and emotional skills. Students who learn to master these important skills will get ahead faster with less effort and frustration than those who lack these skills. We have spoken a lot about the social and interpersonal skills, emotional and cognitive skills where there is a clear gap on this podcast. These skills do translate into the workplace to help students prepare for life after high school, into college, career and beyond. Just to recap, there are five distinct components of Emotional Intelligence that are important in the workplace: Self-awareness: This is important in the workplace because you need to know yourself first before you can help others with your product or service. Self-regulation: There will be many times in the day where you will be tested and to be able to manage your emotions under pressure is very important. Internal (or intrinsic) motivation: What is motivating you to get up and serve each day? Empathy: is an important skill to have to connect with others. You must be able to see the world through someone else’s eyes. Social skills: are important from ordering your lunch in a restaurant, to picking up your rental car and dealing with the front desk employees in the hotel you are staying at. If students do not learn these skills at an early age, they will struggle with their life and future career. Whatever model or SEL competency a school uses, whether it’s the Casel 5 competencies[ii] that we have modelled our work after, or something similar that Renee Adams explained in EPISODE #151[iii] with the Goleman Emotional Intelligence Training Model, the idea is that we prepare our next generation of students to thrive in this ever-changing world and that we as adults are modelling these skills. Before we meet Mark, I want to share a bit more about the work he has been doing the past few decades, as there is always so much more to someone than meets the eye with the books they write, or their career path. Mark is the author of The Career Toolkit, Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You. Educated at MIT, Mark has spent his career launching and fixing new ventures at startups, Fortune 500s, and academia. He’s developed new software languages, online marketplaces, new authentication systems, and tracked criminals and terrorists on the dark web. I must ask him something