Steps to complete: PLEASE DO AS A PODCAST EXAMPLE BELOW

Scenario: A local business leader is looking for ways to promote change around personal and professional growth and learning for all members of the community. They have asked you to present your philosophy of change to the community—through a recorded presentation (or live, if in the classroom) or through a podcast they will air this month—to help demonstrate the value of employable skills and opportunities for positive change. The goal is to use examples from your personal experience to help listeners understand how they could begin to think about their own philosophy of change and how they navigate change in different contexts.

STEP 1: Introduce yourself to the audience and identify the goal of your presentation or podcast in a clear, concise manner. Your goal should be centered around how some or all of the 10 Skills and a philosophy of change have helped you—and can help others—exercise their problem solving skill (approximately 1 minute or less).

STEP 2: Since your audience will be unfamiliar with the 10 Skills and your philosophy of change, you should provide an overview (approximately 1–3 minutes total) that addresses the following:

• What are the 10 Skills and why are      they important in your personal and professional life? (Note: You do not need to list and define each      skill, but you can speak of them broadly.)
• What is a philosophy of change and      why is it important? How can it help you think about and solve problems in      your life?

STEP 3: Discuss your experience with the 10 Skills and your personal philosophy of change (approximately 3–5 minutes). Note: You may choose to talk about all 10 Skills or to focus on only a few.

You can discuss any or all of the options below:

• How some or all of the 10 Skills      have informed your philosophy of change.
• How some or all of the 10 Skills      can support you living out your personal philosophy of change.
• How your personal philosophy of      change can support your continued development of some or all of the 10      Skills.

Remember, your audience will likely be unfamiliar with the 10 Skills and your philosophy of change. Your grade is based on how well you communicate the connection between this information in a way your audience will understand.

Your visual or audio presentation should be approximately 6–8 minutes long. Format for the presentation will vary (depending on selection), but overall the focus should be on speed of overall presentation, tempo of sections, volume (loud versus soft; distractions in certain parts), use of filler words or phrases, inclusion of an introduction and a conclusion, and sounds practiced versus read. Refer to Chapters 8 and 9 in your webtext to review professional presentation skills and tips on how to successfully communicate to a diverse audience. If you choose to do a podcast, refer to the examples in your webtext (Page 9.7) as a reference for formatting and style.

Example for Assignment – Script (Based on “Podcast Example A”)

OPENING 

My name is Ed Buchanan and I have traveled many different roads in nearly 40 years. From working in the professional world to working toward a degree, my experience points to one specific idea. INTRODUCTION

Today I will share my philosophy of change and how it is reinforced through experience working with employable skills. 

OVERVIEW – FIRST POINT 

“The way up and the way down are one and the same. Living and dead, waking and sleeping, young and old, are the same.” —Heraclitus, Life Is Flux, about 500 BC All of these comparisons have one thing in common: change. They are the same because they all involve a degree of change. If you do not look deeply, you may argue that there is no change happening in people who sleep or are dead, but that is not correct. Sleeping people breathe, cells heal, the brain functions and continues to work through the day’s problems. Even in death, we change. Some body functions may continue well after our deaths. We are not the same physical beings at the time of death as we are months or years afterward. Heraclitus believed that “the only constant is change” and that idea still drives people forward today. If we settle on this idea that change is the only constant, we can use this as the motivation to move forward. I can remember working at a major company in my 20s. It was a good job where I worked on electronics equipment. Translation: I played with broken stereos, TVs, cameras, and camcorders, and did my best to make sure they were working when I shipped them back to the customers. I was paid well—even though I had no real background in electronics repair—but I dedicated myself to learning. When a piece of equipment came in that I had never seen before, I sat down next to our senior technicians and watched as they took it apart, identified the problems, and corrected them. I was smart enough to recognize what I did not know and self-aware. The only way to improve was to find people who could show me the way and soak up everything I could. I did well. In fact, I did this so well that within a few short years I worked my way to the highest technician level and was moved around the shop to work wherever there was a heavy PHI201 © 2020 Strayer University. All Rights Reserved. This document contains Strayer University Confidential and Proprietary information and may not be copied, further distributed, or otherwise disclosed in whole or in part, without the expressed written permission of Strayer University. Page 4 of 5 workload. My agility made me a key team member and helped me pay my increasing school bills. I wouldn’t be where I am today if I had not used my skills and interacted with the change all around me. Going from unskilled to top tech level in a few short years is a good way to showcase how to address the changing world, but it’s not the only story. Dealing with change was at the heart of each moment in that journey. I had to change my knowledge level. I had to change my outlook and recognize where I needed to learn and who could teach me. I had to change the way my manager viewed me (beginning as unknowledgeable and becoming the go-to guy). Change, change, change. 

OVERVIEW – SECOND POINT 

What we will do now is talk about how each of you interacts with change. I have shared my outlook, mostly leaning on what Heraclitus said a long, long time ago. What do you know about change? How do you deal with it? More importantly, how will you deal with change next time you encounter it? [4:02] These are the basic questions I used to help think of the role change plays in my life. They conveniently will help you do the same. When I think through these questions, my mind goes right to recent experience with the 10 skills taught in Strayer gen ed courses—skills that employers are looking for because people that have these skills succeed. Communication. Problem solving. Agility. Self and social awareness. Technology. Initiative. Productivity. Results driven. Relationship building. Innovation. Like many people, I had different experience levels with different skills. Some of these skills, I came in with a really strong idea of what it meant. Other skills, I didn’t have quite the same grasp. What I did learn is that each of these skills developed over time. Stepping back, I realize that these all revolve around the same thing: change. 

KEY EXAMPLE

Agility is how well you can adapt to an ever-changing world. Innovation is looking at new ways to address barriers or ways of doing things. Problem solving is changing a situation to fix something that is going wrong. We started with an ancient philosopher, journeyed to the recent past and experience with the 10 skills, and now we move to the final part of my philosophy of change. PHI201 © 2020 Strayer University. All Rights Reserved. This document contains Strayer University Confidential and Proprietary information and may not be copied, further distributed, or otherwise disclosed in whole or in part, without the expressed written permission of Strayer University. Page 5 of 5 For most of us, change is not a light switch. We don’t just flip it and something inside of ourselves magically changes the world around us. The last part of my philosophy of change comes courtesy of Margaret Atwood. Many people will know her for the Hulu series The Handmaid’s Tale and this quote comes from her book of the same name: “Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.” When the world around us gets more dangerous, we often do not recognize it. When the signs surround us that change is coming, we may not pay enough attention. What I encourage everyone to do, though, is to have a plan, or at least an idea, of how they want to respond to change and the person they need to be when change pops up in your life. 

CLOSING

Change surrounds each of us—at home, at work, at school, sometimes just driving home after a long day. If we have a philosophy about how we deal with change, it can take a little of the sting out of change and make change something you actually look for in your life. I cannot tell you what change is coming. What I can say is you have two options: be ready or ignore it. Only one of these options will pay off.