Why skills like resilience, confidence & courage are so hard and what to do about it!

Anytime I'm facilitating a training session and ask about the skills needed to lead the growth of a business or organisation, the initial responses are always the same: strategy development, marketing, finance, IT, sales, customer service…

These 'hard' skills responses usually come hard and fast, then silence until eventually someone will say something like 'resilience', 'confidence', 'courage', 'creativity', 'self-management', 'empathy' or 'emotional intelligence'.

Not only does listing the soft skills comes second in a training scenario, but they also tend to come second in real life too.

For example, an organisation who's marketing isn't performing at it's best might automatically jump to the conclusion that they need more marketing training when actually all they really need is more creativity or an organisation who's profits are low might firstly consider hiring a new accountant or finance manager, when really what they need is to build confidence to increase their prices or to have difficult conversations with people who owe them money.

Why do we always jump straight into the hard skills when developing the softer skills can be much more cost effective... well, more effective full stop?

It's because we're naturally inclined to do the easiest thing first. While hard skills take time, effort and practice to master, in the end, they can be learned by anyone who takes the time to learn (a little caveat here to add that just because someone has learned how to do something, it doesn't necessarily mean they're good at it).

‘Soft’ skills on the other hand, take way more work, personal exploration and practice. They involve having those difficult conversations, becoming vulnerable, risking rejection and taking responsibility for your own outcomes rather than blaming outside forces.

Trying to lead a business or organisation by focusing only on developing hard skills is a little bit like trying to bake a cake using only flour. You need the eggs and milk to hold it together (resilience, team communication), the sugar to sweeten it (confidence), and the icing (creativity) to make it stand head and shoulders above all the other cakes on the shelf.

My lack of knowledge on baking a cake aside, I think you get it. The hard skills alone aren't enough.

But, here’s the thing: Yes, the hard skills are absolutely essential for growing and leading a business: the moving parts like marketing finance, logistics, etc all need taken care of, but equally, how can you grow a business if you don’t have the emotional intelligence and resilience to bounce back from inevitable setbacks? How you can you grow a business and build a team without being able to have difficult conversations? How can you lead others without confidence? Hard and soft go hand in hand, like the song from that old sitcom Love & Marriage, they: ‘go together like a horse and carriage, this I tell you brother, you can’t have one without the other’ (you sang that didn’t you? I know I did).

Why are soft skills so hard and what can you do about it?

Unlike learning to code, or work an Excel spreadsheet or develop a winning marketing or strategic development plan, things like confidence, courage, resilience, empathy, creativity and emotional intelligence can’t be learned by reading a book. You won’t attend a course and suddenly find that you’re resilient. You won’t have a conversation with an advisor and find that all of a sudden you have emotional intelligence.

Soft skills are hard, because they can’t be learned in the ways that we typically learn things. They can only come with practice and practicing soft skills leads to vulnerability and, in our society, vulnerability is seen as weakness. To practice soft skills, you have to let the armour that you’ve built to protect you from criticism, rejection, failure and ‘looking weak’, fall off.

To be courageous, you have to walk through fear. To be resilient, you have to have experienced failure, rejection, loss and hardship. To be confident, you have to know…know that you are an expert, know that it will always work out, know that you are where you are because you are supposed to be there, know that there will be challenges, know that you will have to get uncomfortable, know that what you have to say is meaningful.

All of that, is hard work and arguably takes way more time to learn that any ‘hard’ skill. There’s also the little fact that when you’re weak in a hard skill, you can always delegate it to someone else, with soft skills, there’s no delegating. It’s on you!

So, what can you do about it? This makes for a lengthy discussion but here are 3 things you can do:

• Create safe spaces: Make it ok to ask for help. Make it ok for yourself and your team to admit that you’re finding things tough, and you need more support – physically, mentally or emotionally. You can do this by joining a network if you’re working by yourself, by creating monthly ‘team time hours’ if you have a team, or by hiring a mentor or coach. This opportunity to be vulnerable increases resilience and productivity since having a lighter mental load with appropriate support systems makes doing the day job much easier.

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• Self-reflection:?Don’t just talk about self-reflection. Make it a non-negotiable part of you daily, weekly or monthly routine. Where are the fears that keep you constantly shying away, that exacerbate your need to be perfect, that make you feel you don’t belong and will get ‘found out’ some-day soon, coming from? Are they real genuine fears or are they based on deep rooted beliefs about your worth and ability? How have you been showing up for your business? Your team? Your customers? How can you be more courageous when it comes to running your business? How does being courageous manifest itself for you and what will being courageous in your decision making add to your business? When a crisis arises, reflect on how you handled it – did you react, or did you respond? How could you have reacted differently? What else could have been going on? These are hard questions and I suggest getting an accountability partner, a coach, a mentor or joining a mastermind, so that you have some-one to force you to answer the tough questions, you’re refusing to ask yourself because it’s easier to stay nice and safe.

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• Practice:?Soft skills are like muscles and you don’t become an Olympic athlete by training half-assed. You practice as often as you can, even, or especially when you don’t want to. In the words of Brian Tracy: ‘Eat that frog’. Do the hard things first. When you have that difficult conversation first thing in the morning, you’re lighter, things may not have been as bad or as uncomfortable as you thought they were or would be and you’re free to work the rest of the day without the dread of that conversation. Make eating your frog your strategy for dealing with everything that pops up. Ask yourself today: what are you not doing that you must do? And make doing that your new priority for practicing.