Jack of All Trades, Master of None (part 2)

One of the dangers of being a preacher is that you need to be very good at several disparate skills. It can be overwhelming and dissuade people from wanting to do it. I covered a few strategies to deal with this in a previous blog post. Basically you should let the experts be the experts, add new things slowly, and learn from the experts.

Now I want to talk about some learning strategies. Again, this can be overwhelming to consider. Not only do you need to study to prepare your sermon for next Sunday, but not you're supposed to learn a new skill set too. It hardly seems possible. But learning new skills isn't accomplished like a snake eating - we can't unhinge the jaw of our mind and swallow things whole. Our brains work more like a chipmunk that nibbles a bit at a time.

Break the skill you want to learn down into bite-sized chunks and tackle each one of those separately. Now's a good time to look at a New Year's resolution. Maybe by the end of the year you want to be proficient at using PowerPoint. Look at one small part of that next week. For example practice your image searching skills for one hour. Just one hour.

At the end of the year you'll have mastered 52 new skills. How do you plan to learn new things?