The Power of "Soft" Skills

Last week I watched a movie with my kids. Their choice was "Alice in Wonderland". I had never seen this movie before, but somehow I felt a connection very quickly. Everything is normal and great until Alice slips down the rabbit hole, without really intending to, and finds herself in a bizarre world that seems to be a twisted weird version of what she knows but somehow not. That started to sound very familiar. At some point in the movie, Alice says: "it would be so nice if something made sense for a change". Yeah, Alice, girl, it would. For the past few weeks I have been thinking that every single day.

Somehow, the whole world seems to have gone down the rabbit hole as well. I don't think Wonderland is the term that would come to mind though (at least not to mine - "wonder", for me, has more of a positive connotation). This is ratherlike a topsy-turvy universe that makes no sense whatsoever. Up is down, left is right, some rules still apply, others don't, and the minute we feel we start to figure it out or see a light indicating the end of the tunnel something changes again and we are back where we started (if we are lucky) - or someplace else (if we are not), fighting to keep a grip on well - anything really. And no grinning cat to guide us through this.

So if this is our own version of Alice in wonderland, what if I am not Alice, what if I was the grinning cat, the guide, the coach? What words of wisdom or hope, or advise, can one possibly provide to people that are in the middle of a storm, lost, tossed around, scared and insecure - literally down several rabbit holes? "You got this?". "Everything will be ok?" Or quote Mary Poppins, another of my kids' favorite, who suggests: "when the world turns upside down, the best thing to do is turn right along with it".

When your main job and purpose is to help people develop, learn, grow, to inspire and assist them to be the best possible version of themselves, to foster hope, engagement and excitement, you want to do better than just platitudes.

So when I started thinking about the storm, another story came to mind. The story of the bamboo and the mango tree. In essence, in that story, the mango tree mocks the bamboo for being thin, weak, fragile, just one step away from worthless. But when the storm hits, the bamboo bends and stands strong, where as the mango tree gets uprooted. The message here has been summarized by no lesser than Bruce Lee:

Notice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind.”

We have the instinct to brace ourselves and try to fight the storm. But maybe what we really need to try instead is to bend, to go with it, and trust in our strength, in our roots, in our power, in our flexibility. And even if mango trees all around us told us over and over again that our soft skills - our empathy, our instinct, our emotional intelligence - are weak, or worthless, I wonder if it is not the exact opposite. It is these skills that allow us to bend our minds to the storm, to hold strong because we are connected to our roots, to the deepest power that is within ourselves, to who we are when we are our strongest, even if we feel weak.

Emotional intelligence, is the baseline for self-awareness - which is what you need if you want to identify what is making you stand tall and stiff instead of flexible and yielding, it is the core power that will make you adaptable to the situation at hand. It is equally important as a skill to help the people around you to adapt to change instead of fighting it, to overcome their fears, and trust in their power.

Soft skills have rarely been given the credit they deserve, but now is the time where they are more important than ever before. When the reality around us shifts, dissolves, turns and twists with input that we have no way to understand, the only thing we can to is to find our own way to embrace it, and to make our own. To turn things around, fly with the unexpected. That is when we start to define and re-define ourselves, and that is when nothing is impossible anymore and we are limited only by our imagination, or not at all.