Individual Excellence

Lesson 1

Introduction; Your Career Plan

Career planning creates a road map for your life. This lesson will show you how to develop a useful career plan. Effective career planning begins with a self-assessment, continues on to researching potential career moves, and ends with goal setting.

Goal Setting and Creativity

Your first lesson identified goal setting as an important ingredient in developing your career plan. Now that you saw a step-by-step process for creating and implementing meaningful goals, this lesson will investigate even more of the elements to effective goal setting.

Interpersonal Communication (Getting People to Listen and Listening to People Speak)

Whenever two or more people interact, communication takes place. This lesson will teach you how to become a better verbal communicator. You will develop a clear message and improve your listening and understanding of body language and other forms of nonverbal communication.

Written Communication

Now that you have a good understanding of verbal communication, it's time to discuss written communication. This lesson introduces the principles and concepts that will help you plan, organize, and write out your ideas so that you can be a master communicator.

Becoming and Staying Organized

Personal organization is a highly desirable goal, but one that many people find hard to achieve. The keys to personal organization are awareness, preparation, execution, and follow-through. The objective for this lesson is to help you use these keys to open the doors that will lead to organization skills.

Problem Solving and Decision-Making

Life is filled with opportunities, problems, and choices. This lesson examines the key elements of problem solving, present a model of decision-making, and discuss how to use numerical methods to arrive at the best solutions.

Time Management (Taking Control)

This lesson focuses on time management, which should really be called self-management. The ability to use time wisely makes it easier to accomplish tasks, improves performance, and reduces stress. By learning to manage your time better, you'll be able to increase your productivity and accomplish more of your goals.

Stress Management (Is Stress Desirable?)

Stress is an unavoidable part of life and can't be eliminated. In this lesson, you will learn what stress really is and how to identify where it comes from. You will also discover how it can affect you and which stress reduction and coping strategies work best.

Risk Management (How Much Should You Take?)

Life requires choices, and choices require risks. Taking and avoiding risks is a normal part of everyday life. This lesson will help you understand what risk is and present concepts and strategies to help you take calculated risks and make the right choices.

Conflict Management (Should It Be Avoided?)

Most people dislike conflict, but it's often unavoidable. Contrary to what many people think, conflict is not necessarily undesirable. In this lesson, you will learn where conflict comes from and examine different strategies that can help you manage it constructively.

Financial Skills (Part I)

Some people call accounting the language of business. This lesson explores the differences between bookkeeping and accounting, shows you various types of accounting methods, and walks you through the two most widely used financial statements.

Financial Skills (Part II)

Your final lesson further explores accounting and finance. You will learn about various types of costs, determine what cash flow really means, identify key differences between financial and cost accounting, and explore how to make rational investments.