“I want hard skills,” the CEO snapped, “I’m not interested in any of that soft stuff.”
“Then go home on Friday,” I retorted, “and spend the weekend alone with no television, no socialising, and no distractions, just sitting with and facing yourself. Then come back on Monday and tell me about ‘hard’.”
That was 25 years ago and, thankfully, things have shifted since. Not easily, I might add. The soft stuff can come as the hardest lesson, no matter how many times you have been through it. In fact, it intensifies as you grow. The wiser you get, the more you have to forge yourself in the furnace of softness.
I have never called them soft skills. That’s not my experience or my choice of language, although I will use the term to reframe it, adding the words “so-called”. The dismissive term denotes ignorance and disrespect, which are bound to change with time. Wisdom can be persistent and ruthless, and you know it’s ultimately coming for you.
It could easily have you begging for the relative relief of what you once called hard. Then, after a breakthrough, it will have you respectfully giving thanks for the realisation. Wisdom in all its mercy has given you grace, and you have levelled up.
The work is in becoming more sincere, and it will happen one way or another. This is the place of true authority, at the expense of your outlived ways and your careless clinging to them. The growth is in facing the pain and surrendering to who you really are. The resulting power is in more profundity.
Hard skills are easy and soft skills are hard. Both have their place, although with both, you will see things holistically.
We resist awakening with every fibre of our form, and acquiesce only as a last resort, which brings less constraint, more understanding, and new life. Ongoing psychological death and rebirth are the stuff of emotional intelligence and spiritual awakening, and these are the essence of success in a more conscious and human world.
Dying to what is old is your emergence on a new level, and it’s hardly soft, although it makes you gentler and wiser. As you crack and burn that crusty sense of self and emerge as a phoenix, you’ll repeatedly see. True life remains, reverence rises, and that’s good for business.
It’s not about sending staff on a course and expecting measurable return on investment; and it’s not about patronising your outsourced service providers because you are paying. Pay you must, and returns you’ll get, but respect must reign. It’s the new level and the new way.
You cannot conjure humility. That would be a crafty form of more supremacy. You cannot convey it either, because it is not content-based. However, you can live it yourself, foster it as a business culture, and facilitate it in an ever-awakening organisation of aligned souls fulfilling their purposes as a thriving brand. This is the big work and the language of so-called soft skills.
You can listen to people and truly hear them, provide meaning through challenging patches, and spread the emerging wisdom in a real and open way. You can have a continuous conversation of authenticity and mutual awareness, hinged on your service, branding and marketing.
You can face yourselves individually and collectively, and bring your ever-better best into being as a wholesome economic endeavour. You can be a portal to the bigger picture, and much more affluent than the mere bottom line.
Isn’t that what leadership is about? It’s tough to see while in pain, and losing perspective is often required for you to gain higher perspective, but it’s as clear as day when the clouds shift and the truth remains resplendently.
Hard skills are easy and soft skills are hard. Both have their place, although with both, you will see things holistically. The tough stuff is a doorway. Look out for and embrace it, however vicious your instinct to resist.
Hold space for the new to come through and take the opportunity before you. Profound discomfort notwithstanding, build-ups will shift, barriers will dissolve, and you will be increasingly enlightened.
Timing is intelligence, so trust it. Maybe things have been too easy, and you’ve been ignorant and arrogant. Well, aren’t we all? Thankfully, life is hard and we learn.
• Wheeler helps leaders, brands and cultures awaken, align and thrive through ‘being yourself for a living’.
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