Soft skills you need for success
Before starting with anything, you ought to remember that there are no hard and fast rules to achieve success. While some can achieve with ease, whereas others take a considerable amount of time to achieve the same amount of success and that too in the same niche!
Here is a quote that I would love to highlight before you go through the entire article.
“Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations. The only sin is a limitation. As soon as you once come up to a man’s limitations, it is all over with him.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Before you dive into the soft skills for success, you must not allow your limitations to come in your way. Every skill here can be learned with enough patience and practice. Learning is impossible for none.
1. Soft skills for success- Self-confidence
The moment you read the word self-confidence, you visualize a smart man walking like a boss with a superb posture answering all questions confidently, and dealing with others with tremendous coziness. Self-confidence is not just that.
When someone asks you a question, and you fail to answer, you have a tendency to avoid listening to the correct answer or try to bring up a lame excuse to cover up your mistake in your answer. Self-confidence is not doing everything or answering everyone correctly but is way beyond what you think it to be.
Self-confidence is the opposite of the word EGO. What an absurd way to define self-confidence, isn’t it?
“I know everything” versus “I know something” has a difference in success and failure. The first line can limit your otherwise limitless success. The other one can brighten your future and pave an easy path for your success even before you know it. Though there is a thin line of demarcation between the two, it has the power to flip your future in the flick of a finger even before you start realizing it.
Self-confidence is another name for self-belief. The chanting of the “I believe in myself” mantra has been the cause of the success of nearly every successful person on the planet to date. There is power in this line only if it comes out from the heart rather than your mind.
Your mind is a silly girl that will chatter and de-motivate you for the mistake you made, but your heart speaks differently. Your heart speaks the truth about you. Let your heart speak that you believe in yourself.
How does this self-confidence come to you?
It can come only when you know that you are growing every day with each lesson of life you are taking to bed before wishing good night. Read it again. You will get the subtlety of the lines above.
Self-confidence is the basic foundation stone for success.
2. Soft skills for success- Pleasing personality
If self-confidence is the root of the tree, a pleasing personality is a trunk. You have already heard the following quote,
The first impression is the last.
It is obvious to state that if you are poorly dressed, no matter the number of talents you exhibit, you will not attract anybody. To attract someone, you must have a positive magnetic personality. Just like a magnet attracts iron nails, you can attract people and hence opportunities.
A pleasing personality, of course, means an attractive personality, but do not confuse it with the outer looks or beauty. When talking about personality, I am not referring to the “believer in fad” boys and girls who act like heroes and heroines dropped down from heaven on earth.
A pleasing personality is a magnetic personality or a fabulous impression that gets etched in the minds of the people who see and interact with you.
An ugly person may attract better than a handsome persona. It depends not on your outer shell but your own portrayal of your inner self on the other people.
Don’t get me wrong. Clothes do matter when it comes to personality. Personality includes each and everything about yourself, be it the way you walk, the way you talk or eat, the way you handle situations, the clothes you wear (they must be clean, not rich), the habits you possess, your positive attitude, etc. With self-confidence, you can easily build up a pleasing personality.
3. Soft skills for success- Communication skills
What if you cannot comprehend my beautiful message conveyed throughout this article? Will I then become successful?
Just like me, you are also communicating a piece of content to someone. That piece can either be a line to a friend or to your mom or dad. If your message cannot be conveyed meaningfully to the recipient, your message would be a sheer waste of time for the person who is listening to you as well as yours.
Communication does not always mean oral. It can be written as well. I cannot state these lines without thinking about the old age adage,
The pen is mightier than the sword.
Provided you know how to use that sword effectively!
No person on this planet can be successful unless he or she knows the art of interpersonal communication. You must know when to speak and when to pen down messages.
You can argue about successful people like Stephen Hawking, who could neither speak nor write due to paralysis of his entire body. He communicated his early life as much as he could. He used power as long as he wielded them. If a man like him can do wonders, what are you doing with your god gifted tongue and hands?
The more effectively you can communicate, the closer you attract people to pay attention to you. Show me a leader without possessing this valuable art. Not a grotesque politician but a leader in the true sense of the word. I cannot stop thinking about people like Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln. They were not just politicians. They were leaders- leaders with the power to change people through communication.
If you want to achieve success, be it in a career or even in relationships, it is high time you start learning this art.
There is a common misconception about communication that it involves only talking or writing messages. But we tend to ignore the most important aspect of it- that is listening. This is why we have 2 ears and 1 mouth, isn’t it?
Convey messages only when it is required but not at the cost of losing wisdom granted by the person you are talking too. Take a pause and start relating my words to your own life. You will be able to connect with me.
4. Soft skills for success- Problem-solving skill
Ah! I am not talking about a tedious mathematics sum that you used to run away from. By problem-solving, I mean a tendency to talk less and work out more. That takes a considerable amount of courage to shut up your mouth in case of unfortunate circumstances and stop making victimizing yourself.
Success will shoot a harsh “no” at you if you don’t try to find the solution instead of branching out more problems from the already existing ones.
“Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do.”
⁃Dale Carnegie, the author of The Law of Success
How to be a problem solver?
There is a magical line which I would like to quote from the American author Mark Manson,
“If suffering is inevitable, if our problems in life are unavoidable, then the question we should be asking is not ‘How do I stop suffering?’ but ‘Why am I suffering-for what purpose?”
If you keep this line close to your heart, you will become an opportunist trying to find an advantage in every problem you face. If you are trapped in a well, the next step is to find the solution to get out of it instead of waiting for someone to pass by the well and pull you out. Giving up on the problem is the last resort.
Problems do not always mean your personal problems, but they can also mean the problems you face at your workplace or with your co-workers or with your friends.
Every day in your job or studies, you encounter several problems. Since childhood, you have been filling out the solutions to every problem asked in the exam papers! In the exam hall, even if you do not know the solution, you try to attempt it.
That kind of attitude is required in real life for success. Problem-solving skill is a must to develop the skill.
5. Soft skills for success- Leadership and teamwork
It is needless to state that there is no sole contributor in a winning team though there may be game-changers. You can prefer to work alone for a period of time, but very soon you will be working in a team to achieve greater heights.
Being included in a team does not make you a team player. Your commitment makes you so. You can only be a team player when you love not only the vision of the team but the team itself.
In the real world, the value of being a team player is undermined because you can see only the so-called “sole contributors” or “self-made millionaires” on the silver screen. This puts us into the belief that it must be “I” and not “we” if we truly want to achieve something. This is just a fallacy.
If being a team player is hard, being a leader is tougher. I do not mean the fake politicians flooding with fake promises and playing on the emotional sentiments of the people. I mean true leaders.
“A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.”
-Martin Luther King
The quote is subtly meaningful. A leader will not try to search for an agreement in a team but will try to lead into a path that the team ought to take, not want to take.
Leadership requires self-sacrifice. It involves keeping the team about your self-goals. If you want to be an eagle soaring high in the clouds of success, these soft skills of leadership and team player cannot be ignored.
6. Soft skills for success- Emotional intelligence
The word IQ has always been overstressed. IQ tests may reveal your true scores of intelligence but not necessarily success.
Success can be achieved with a fair amount of Emotional intelligence. However, being emotionally intelligent does not mean being less emotional or sensitive. It is a measure of how much you can control your emotions.
In every aspect of your life, you are required to make intelligent decisions. IQ can help you analyze a situation quickly, but a simple analysis is not enough. You must have the courage to follow it. That courage will lead you to success.
For instance, If you make decisions while you are angry, there is a 99.9 percent chance for the decision to go flaw. If you fail and give up becoming de-motivated, you will lose success waiting for you just on the other side of the island. It is good to be logical at times, but the fact is humans are emotional beings.
What do you do if you are emotional?
Having emotions is actually an asset, not a curse. If a logical decision is backed up by emotions, the decision penetrates your subconscious faster like water seeping through the loose mud.
Emotions are energies, that when directed to a goal, can cause fire just like sun rays on a focussed magnifying glass on a piece of paper.
It ought to be remembered that India, as well as other countries, have earned their independence due to directing their emotions to cause havoc in the British empire.
These 6 skills for success are the guru mantras that have been historically proven to be the most important ingredients of success. If success was that easy, then everybody would have achieved it. It is never too late to achieve success. Start focussing on these soft skills from now.
Do you know you can access other informational articles too for free? To access, click here.
0 Comments