People will remember you for two things — your skills, and more importantly, how you used those skills to enrich the lives of others.
In today’s world, you can learn almost anything at the click of a button, if you care enough.
There are innumerable online courses and sites, many of which are free, where you can learn design, selling, writing, entrepreneurship, code, cooking and countless other things. A couple of days back, I chanced upon this really cool storytelling course by Pixar and have been spending some time on that. What was previously thought of of to be out of bounds is now a click away. It’s a different matter than most of us choose to endlessly scroll our social media feeds instead of making conversation and learning but that’s a different story.
What about soft-skills, are they learnable?
Can you learn patience?
What about empathy, decency, courtesy, fairness?
What we often encounter in the real world is a lack of soft-skills.
If someone is petrified of presentations (me), they can learn to present better by practicing and making more presentations.
But if someone is a boor, rude, arrogant or vile, can they train themselves to be the opposite? Is there any course for that?
One thing is for sure. You maybe able to learn how to write better by doing a course but you can’t learn empathy, decency and leadership from a course. You can learn the tenets of those qualities through a course but you can’t say ‘I did a weekend course on kindness and am never going to lose my cool ever again’.
People will remember you for two things — your skills, and more importantly, how you used those skills to enrich the lives of others.
Fabulous presenter but bully at work? Pointless.
Great strategist but lack integrity? What a waste.
We have all worked with people who were good at their work, or in other words, very skilled, but with whom we will never work again because of how they treated us and made us feel.
We can learn to get better at anything, and that includes soft skills.
What traits do you admire in others?
What don’t you like?
Why do some people get along better with others while few others always seem to have problems?
All of these are start points that will enable you to improve your soft-skill set.
And a lot of these come through observation, something no course can teach you.
The truth is, you can learn to become more patient, learn to be a better leader, a helpful co-worker, a supportive team-mate. Many of us lack in some of these aspects and there is no perfect to strive for.
All skills are learnable. Just that they all need to be learned and imbibed in different ways.
