Soft Skill & Personal Skill Development

What is Collaborate Sports?

Collaborate Sports focuses on providing personal development opportunities to practitioners who want to maximise their effectiveness in their performance environments.

Dan Howells created Collaborate Sports to provide immersive and interactive personal development opportunities for practitioners in to engage in. With over 15 years of experience in elite sports, Dan aims to use his experience to develop the practitioners of tomorrow.

Why was Collaborate Sports created?

Collaborate Sports was created to allow users to experience an interactive type of personal development alongside other practitioners, as opposed to pre-recorded courses or lecture-style learning. Problem-solving in performance settings is an exciting challenge, but the speed at which you can act on potential solutions is often limited by experience in the field being low.

So, by bringing practitioners together to discuss areas of personal development, growth occurs from discussion and sharing of experiences, in a mentorship capacity.

How do Collaborate Sports programmes and events work?

Collaborate Sports is based on interactive group learning.

Each event has the same goal in mind: Utilise as many experiences from fellow practitioners in an interactive group setting to enhance your opportunity for success in performance environments.

What Soft Skill Development Opportunities are available?

Dan realised the power of soft skills early in his career. It came from making too many mistakes with respect to human interaction with colleagues and athletes. But this was an area where he received little to no formal support and had to learn the hard way.

From that point on, he went about developing in as many soft skills as possible.

Communication, Negotiation, Influence, Feedback, Motivation, and listening skills, to name a few areas we often overlook in our personal development.

On speaking with many other successful colleagues in other roles (physio, nutrition, biomechanics, coaching etc) he was able to identify that the number one differentiator appeared to be that these successful practitioners possessed excellent soft skills.

On asking them how they developed them, so were natural in these skills, but many had to consciously task their own development in these areas.

So, the soft skills group mentorship was developed within Collaborate Sports. Dan has created a 6-month group mentorship programme to help practitioners develop a wide array of soft skills that will enhance an individual’s ability to work with those around them to higher levels of effectiveness.

The group mentorship helps guide you through key areas of soft skills as well as refining these skills through role play and practice.

Each session focuses on collaboration, discussion, and reflection, to make the development real world, and actionable tomorrow in nature! Mentees regularly share stories of failure in this area in the workplace, and these sessions create real lightbulb moments of how those situations could have been different if they had altered the soft skill delivery in those situations.

The programme starts in January and July of each year with enrolment in the 2 months prior to these start months.

The 6 monthly Programme consists of:

• 2hr monthly meetings in Key areas:
  • Month 1 - Developing Personal and Professional philosophies to guide reflection and decision making
  • Month 2 - Attention to Details in CV, Cover Letters, Networking and Interview Skills
  • Month 3 - Understanding Behaviour and Mindset Preferences (+ building rapport and buy-in)
  • Month 4 - Self Awareness and Effective Communication
  • Month 5 - Dealing with Challenging Conversations
  • Month 6 - Understanding Leadership Styles and Group Reflections
• 6 months of personal mentorship from Dan Howells
• Peer-to-peer support and collaboration with 10-20 other practitioners in your cohort
• BONUS material and support from other elite practitioners in the field of Soft Skill development, like police negotiators, recruitment agents, heads of departments and HR consultants
• Access to free resources like reflective journals and personality and mindset profiles to enhance self-awareness.

Who would this be beneficial for:

Any practitioner in any discipline will benefit from focusing on the human side of their main job responsibilities. Its not what you know, but how you apply it, and this often comes down to how you deliver what you want to achieve. This relies on communication and interaction with others. So anyone will benefit from this programme.