The 1-2-3 Of Mastering Soft Skills!

At the start of 2020, I decided to take a break from acquiring certifications (Hard Skills) and instead chose to improve my communications and coaching skills (Soft Skills). What I found out was that there were distinct differences in passing an online certification exam versus enhancing my ability to have excellent communications skills. I somehow had mistakenly assumed that the same approaches would help me gain the same level of success.

I had the opportunity to experience two different training courses on storytelling, and the level of mastery I have gained from the two different courses was vastly different. The first training was the regular full-day sessions, where 80% of the time, we were told what the theory behind effective storytelling was. The 2nd was a 4-week daily course with sessions lasting 10-15 min long, and participants were required to post a 1-2 min video displaying the different skills taught; students were encouraged to give feedback to a minimum to 3 people. Based on these experiences, it was amazing to see the stark differences between our typical training or learning experiences.

Why Is There a Difference in Learning Hard Vs Soft Skills?

Before we dive into understanding how to master soft skills effectively, we need to have an understanding of why is there a difference in learning styles? The simple answer would be because we use the skills differently hence the way to master both skills are different.

How Do We Best Learn Hard Skills?

Hard Skills are the knowledge or understanding behind concepts that will assist you to know what you need need to do. An example of this would be an understanding of Agile or Cloud. Through understanding the key concepts, your brain creates neuro-pathways that make it easier for you to recall this information when you need to use it. Hence the ability to store, retrieve information and knowing when to use it would be an effective way to learn hard skills.

Ok, Now What About Learning Soft Skills?

Soft skills are behaviours or actions that help you get the job done; it is more challenging to measure as there isn't a single right way to complete a task. Soft skills are a product of our habits, and as such, we need to identify what are the habits we can cultivate to develop them. Knowing how to communicate will not help make you an inspiring speaker unless we practise and embody it.

Now that we got those comparisons out of the way lets take a deep dive into the 1-2-3 of mastering soft skills.

Step 1: Schedule in The Time

Soft skills are acquired and mastered through practising it again and again until it is ingrained into us. It will be difficult to master soft skills if you are not intentional about it, as we are so caught up in our daily life. The simplest way to ensure we practise it daily is to cultivate a daily habit and set a fixed time to practise it. Until you have mastered the soft skill you are interested, trying to use it at work when there are datelines and a constant sense of urgency will be challenging. Soft skills are hard to develop because

1. We need to be more intentional in practising it until we master it. We can't be an inspiring speaker without consciously practising it.
2. We need to put in the time after reading or attended a training course to practise what we learned.
3. Delayed reward and recognition. Given the challenges in demonstrating soft skills, it often feels that you are not improving and hence the motivation to strengthen it falls to the wayside.

The lack of time to practise is a limiting belief; if our roof is leaking, we will magically create the time to have it fixed. Below are 2 hacks to create time into our lives

Time Hack#1: Classify Daily Tasks as Important Vs Urgent

How important and urgent is developing this skill to you? The biggest issue most people face is lack of time. We make time for the important and urgent tasks, and hence we are always in a crisis-fighting mode, the important and not urgent tasks are left to the side until it becomes urgent. Stephen Covey has a simple but effective way to quantify tasks which is to list your tasks in quadrants of Important vs Urgent as below. Learning falls under the Important and Not Urgent quadrant, and hence we don't make time for it. If we want to have transformational changes in our lives, we need to prioritize the Effectiveness Quadrant.

The Effectiveness Quadrant is where the magic happens. It is the quadrant of growth and well being. Learning, taking care of your health, investing, building relationships are all activities in this quadrant that if you put time and energy into it, over time will produce amazing results. Imagine if you consistently invested 10% of your salary 10 years ago and now that investment has grown to return 100% returns. Would that not be a great use of your money? Learning is the same, you won't notice any gains in the short term, but over time when you look back where you were 1 year ago, you will be amazed as the learnings and habits stack up and compound the benefits you have gained.

Our lives won't change much if we spend time in the other 3 quadrants because those are transactional day to day activities. Yes getting our jobs done at work is important but at a certain point in your career, if you want to add more value and grow as a person, you will need to start spending time in the Effectiveness Quadrant.

Time Hack#2: Use the First 90 Minutes of The Day Wisely

Robin Sharma's 90-90-1 rule has helped me get the most of my day and helped me in creating my most satisfying and enriching work to date. The 90-90-1 rule states for the next 90 days spend the first 90 minutes of your day on the single most important work that will make a significant impact on your life. At the start of the day, you are the most physically and mentally focused; hence you will get the most results if you focus on your biggest most important piece of work. If you have challenges to spend 90 minutes, practise creativity and see how you can make it work for you. You could wake up earlier or spend 30 minutes instead of 90 minutes, but in essence, you want to use the prime time when you are physically and mentally clear and energized to do the work that will move the needle the most.

Step 2: Practise What You Learned

How To Practise: Break Down the Skills Into Manageable Chunks

Every skill has a few core fundamentals; after reading or consuming information about the skill, you will want to identify the fundamentals that you can take action on and practice. Use the 80/20 Rule and identify 20% of the skill that will achieve 80% of the results. Breaking down the skills into sub-skills helps with the following.

• Identifying the amount of time you would need to improve on that area and help feed into your overall learning plan.
• Makes each step less overwhelming
• Chunks the practice sessions into smaller chunks of time and ensures that practice is sustainable over the long run.
• Reduce the complexity of the overall skill, allows you to focus on a particular area of the skill.

An example of breaking down the sub-skills for delivering a speech I had to do was:

• Writing the Draft of my speech covering the situation, challenges, action taken to get the desired outcome.
• Tone, Pace, Pitch
• Body Language
• Conviction or Passion of delivery

The time allocation for each sub-skill will vary based on our own individual competencies in each area; however we should always include time to receive and incorporate feedback.

Step 3: Receive & Incorporate Feedback

Feedback is such an important element in mastering any skill as through it; we become aware of what we are good at and what we are not good at. The important thing about feedback is to

Ask For Feedback

The best ideas come from viewpoints from multiple sources, hence capturing feedback from different people in your circle will help shine a light and provide a better result. When asking for feedback ask specifically

• What 2 things did they like about it?
• What is 1 thing you could do better?

Being specific helps others deeply consider and reflect the questions and provides you with valuable insight into how you are doing. If the feedback is vague, ask for specific examples on what they liked/ felt you could improve on.

It will be interesting to see if in the future AI will be able to provide us with direct feedback to help us master specific skills. Already there are programs to help evaluate our pronunciation to master foreign languages, check for tone and grammar in our online writing. But while waiting for that future to happen the best source is to ask for feedback from multiple people.

Capture The Feedback

There is only so much that we can remember in a given time hence capturing the feedback ensures that you can look back and analyse it. In the simplest form writing it down on paper will help you revisit the feedback. I personally prefer to track feedback I have done on Coaching others on Google Spreadsheets as the benefits of that are

• Ability to see all feedback in 1 document
• Access anytime, anywhere to it
• Ability to compare the different feedback I received for similar situations

What is important here is not just capturing the feedback, but what you do with it.

Capturing the feedback helps you analyze the feedback provided and look if there are similar patterns or divergent feedback. It helps you uncover areas of strengths and weakness that you might not have known and from there move on to the next step of incorporating the feedback.

Reflect & Incorporate

This is where you review the feedback provided and decide

• Which feedback you want to take action on
• Plan when you will take action on it
• Schedule it in your calendar
• Just Do It!
• If required, ask for feedback again and repeat this step.

In Summary

There never is an end in sight in mastering soft skills as mastery is subjective and depends on each person, hence decide on what you want to use it for and plan how far you want to go on the journey. Always remember your "Why", your reason for mastering this skill, do not hold back out of fear that you are not good enough but be free, put it out there in the world as there never is an end to the journey to mastery.