Posh as Cushions, Hard as Nails

Soft skills are something everyone wants but not everyone is gifted with. They make up our entire lives and can be helpful in so many different ways. A person can be born naturally good at soft skills or better at the hard skills. Hard skills are things like logical thinking, actually doing the work that needs to get done. Soft skills on the other hand are helpful when a person needs to communicate with another person. The following video does a good job of explaining the two.

People say that being more proficient in hard skills is the way to get an interview but soft skills are the way to really get a job. Even for more technical jobs, soft skills are very important. If you can’t even talk with your manager or your coworkers, there is likely a problem. While maybe sometimes hard skills can outweigh soft skills, your hard skills have to be far better than your soft skills to actually keep a job. for instance, you could be an absolutely horrible person, but if you are the last person on earth who can code on COBOL, then they’ve got to keep you! Thing is though that they won’t like you and the moment they get a chance, you’ll probably get fired.

In my life, I have been really working on my soft skills. I was homeschooled all throughout my life. I had friends, sure, but we were all homeschooled and we just got along because we liked the same stuff not because we had personalities that worked well together. We didn’t talk about anything other than the stuff we liked. Which was mainly just Pokémon. I’ve had to really work in my college years to get to know people and learn how to communicate. I was always a quiet kid so I have always been a good listener but in the end, that’s only half the battle. I have been working really hard to watch the people around me and hear how they do things.

This is one of the things that I wish I had learned more about as a kid. Communication is a very important skill to learn but as I was really only with my brother and my mom and dad, they understood me fine without me having to put forth a lot of effort. Now I have to make sure that everything I say makes sense to the people I am talking to an that I am saying it in a way that isn’t demeaning, or rude, or any way other than how I want to say it.

Unlike some people believe, I think that soft skills are a learned skill. I took singing lessons for a year. Before that year, I believed that I just couldn’t sing. I wasn’t born with the ability too so I just couldn’t, right? That’s how most people believe singing works. The truth is that it’s just like an instrument. You can learn how to sing, it’s just some people lucked out one day and accidentally taught themselves! Others didn’t get so lucky and still go around just saying they are bad even though if they really just learned how to sing, they could be great! I believe that this is much the same way soft skills work. Some people just either understand them better than others or they had more experience with that set of skills so they got better. It just takes time to learn and develop them!

Soft skills in general can be difficult for some people to understand. Especially awkward homeschoolers like me! But there is hope for us all! I believe that if we just work on them, we can get better!