How To Level Up Your Soft Skills
Your soft skills are personal attributes that affect the quality of your work. They include skills such as communication, problem-solving, teamwork, time management and adaptability.
They are different from hard skills like driving, programming, accounting, copywriting and bricklaying that are measurable and industry-specific.
While hard skills are often easier to build upon through training and education, soft skills can be a little more difficult to improve. Some people even assume that they are innate and therefore cannot be built upon. However, it is in fact very possible to level up your soft skills. Here are just a few tips on how to do this.
Identify your strengths and weaknesses
First, you need to assess exactly what your greatest soft skills are. You then need to consider which soft skills need improving the most.
Focus the most on addressing your weakest skills. At the same time, don’t stop nurturing your strongest skills - you may already be a great problem-solver, but you can become even better, competing to become better than other problem-solvers in your field.
Gather feedback from others
Don’t be afraid of personal criticism. It can be a chance to learn and improve.
As a business owner, you can collect feedback from clients via surveys, or by simply seeing what people are saying in reviews.
You can also collect feedback from your colleagues - including any business partners or employees. Use one-on-one sessions with employees to see what concerns or praises they may have about the company. You can use this feedback to assess your leadership and organisational skills.
Self-assess with AI
Did you know that you can now use AI to help you level up your soft skills? The likes of this AI-powered skills intelligence app can be used to monitor your digital activity - including how you interact with emails or conduct video calls - and then rate your soft skills, while providing pointers on how to improve. A cutting-edge approach to self-growth.
Get out your comfort zone
Only by doing things that make you uncomfortable can you challenge yourself to build new personal skills. A classic example of this is public speaking. Many business owners will shy away from it wherever they can, sometimes hiring speakers to lead events on their behalf. But public speaking is a skill you can build by doing it more regularly.
Similarly, when it comes to being creative, don’t just rely on other people for ideas. Actively brainstorm and analyze other industries to improve your ability to think outside of the box.
Consider hiring a mentor
While there is often no formal training for soft skills, you can still hire mentors to help you build these skills. Mentors can help to suggest mental exercises, conduct role plays with you and teach you routines that can help you boost your soft skills.
For example, there may be organizational mentors out there that can teach time-keeping skills if you often struggle to juggle different deadlines and projects. This could include teaching tricks to like setting timers and alarms, or teaching you to be more realistic when setting deadlines.
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