Soft Skills Make You Stronger

“Soft skills,” which include empathy, listening, and storytelling, are known to not be as important as hard skills. If you’re an architect, your hard skills are what you learned in school—i.e., how to design a building. If you’re a lawyer, your hard skills are what you learned in law school and passing the bar. If you’re a keynote speaker, your hard skills are knowing how to put together a talk that has a beginning, middle, and end—i.e. the craft of speaking.

No matter what your profession, mastering the soft skills is what makes you stronger than your competition. Recently, a top architecture firm had me speak to their team about how to build better client relationships. Their old way of winning new business was to show their design and hope that would be enough to get a new client. When a client told them they were going to hire the firm they liked the best, because the project would last 5 years, they panicked. “How do we become more likable?” they asked me.

Enter: soft skills!

I told them that one of the best ways to increase your likeability is to show empathy. The more people think you understand the stress they are under and how you can help them, the more they like and want to work with you. Telling stories is a great way to build rapport, especially when you tell a story of origin around what inspired you to do what you do. People love working with people who are passionate because they usually means the process will be fun. When I showed them how to turn their case study into a case STORY, about when they helped a client meet a deadline, the prospect new client knew they have found the right firm for them.

Continue reading for my tips you can use to make your soft skills even stronger.