9 Underrated Soft Skills You Need for Success

Being successful isn’t just about practicing and applying knowledge. It’s about being able to function well with other people.

When it comes to work, it’s important to master the technical aspects of what you’re doing. From brain surgeons to app coders, from driving instructors to landscapers, understanding the ins and outs of your craft is necessary for your success. However, with so much emphasis on developing hard skills, soft skills get neglected.

Weak soft skills can take many forms. Team members become frustrated. Customers feel neglected. Your own work starts to pile up as you struggle to organize, delegate, and strategize your projects and goals. Watching your business struggle then feeds into your anxiety, further causing issues.

In this article, we’ll explore the relationship between hard and soft skills, which soft skills you should start developing, and how they can benefit your work and quality of life beyond your projects.

Soft Skills vs. Hard Skills

Like everything else in life, it all boils down to balance. When it comes to your professional skill set, that balance takes the form of soft vs. hard skills.

Hard skills are your measurable knowledge within a specific field. For instance, knowing how to manage a warehouse, the steps to cook every dish at a restaurant, and how to code in Python and JavaScript are all examples of hard skills.

While these technical skills are necessary to be competent in a given role, they remain specific; your experience as a chef isn’t easily transferable to a new job as a hairdresser.

Soft skills, however, are interpersonal skills that aren’t related to a specific field. These include knowing how to communicate with others, think critically about problems and identify solutions, and adapt to market changes quickly and effectively.

These skills underpin and enhance the performance of hard skills; a coder that can program well and knows how to comment their code and present it to non-technical people is a much more flexible individual than a coder who leaves everyone guessing how their code works (especially when it comes to quality assurance and writing user manuals).

The following list isn’t exhaustive, but if you’re looking for a place to start strengthening your own soft skills, these are some of the most valuable ones to consider.

1. Empathy

In a world seen so cold and scary, empathy provides much-needed warmth and humanity. While it’s easy to live inside your head and see something through just your eyes, empathy is the practice of stepping outside of yourself and trying to see something with someone else’s perspective. Doing so doesn’t mean you automatically are subscribing to their beliefs and views. You’re simply trying to understand how they formed.

For instance, if a co-worker is being uncharacteristically rude, empathy is trying to understand why that is. Are they having a bad day? Did you mishear them because you’re having a bad day and everything else just seems sharper than usual? Of course, asking them and listening with a supportive ear can help answer those questions, but taking time to acknowledge your shared humanity makes it easier to control your emotional responses, keep calm, and de-escalate the situation.

2. Patience

We love instant gratification. If we don’t get what we want now, it’s almost painful. However, there’s a quiet power in practicing patience.

Taking things slower and thinking deeper before acting gives you more control over your ability to respond. While being proactive is often good, it’s not always the best course of action. Patience allows you more freedom to choose between a proactive or reactive response, increasing your flexibility and finding outcomes that benefit everyone better.

Ironically, by developing patience, you can keep from feeling rushed and overwhelmed. Because of this, your responses to different situations become so much more effective, you’ll notice progress towards your goals speed up as a result.

3. Listening

There’s a common quote that’s been floating around on social media for years: “Too many people listen to respond instead of listening to understand.” Participating in a conversation shouldn’t be about boosting your ego. It’s about trying to understand what your conversation partner is saying.

If you know multiple languages, you might be familiar with the concept of false cognates — words that sound similar but mean very different things. For me, it’s the dichotomy of gift; it’s something in English that you give to someone you care about, but in German, it’s something you’d give someone you hated (since Gift in German means poison). In other words, just because you’re saying the same words, doesn’t mean you’re speaking the same language.

To strengthen this skill, take time to actively listen to what someone else is saying, why they’re saying it, and the context of how they’re saying it. By taking a little extra time to dissect that, you’ll be able to suss out what they say they want and what they actually want can be two very different things.

4. Taking Genuine Interest in Others

But what if you don’t like the person you’re talking to or have no interest in what they’re saying? You don’t have to like everything or everyone, but letting your eyes glaze over when someone you care about is excited about something is sure to cause friction.

If you struggle taking interest in a conversation, focus on the person instead: why are they excited about it and get excited for them. While this is another way to practice empathy, looking at topic through another person’s eyes, listening, and understanding them can help you not only learn to appreciate new interests, but might help you make a new friend from someone you didn’t initially like.

5. Knowing When vs. How to Speak

It’s often difficult to remember the difference between knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge is the demonstration of… well… knowing about something. Wisdom, however, is knowing how and when to say it. In other words, just because you’re correct, doesn’t mean it’s being said in the correct way.

This is especially true for those who have a habit of offering unsolicited advice. Sometimes people want someone to just listen and vent to instead of someone trying to solve their problem for them. If this is something you struggle with, an easy way to combat this habit is asking someone who’s trying to vent if they want someone to talk to or at.

Again, sometimes people just need a friend to unpack their thoughts to and reorganize them while being kept company. Other times, they might want an active participant to help them work through a problem. Either way, if you are going to offer advice, ask them first if they want it. By asking, you’re showing that you care about their emotional state while offering unconditional support instead of using their problem to show off how smart you are.

6. Forgiveness

Anger can be a great source of motivation. As someone who wanted to prove his naysayers wrong, I know how addicting it can be first-hand. But anger is ultimately a destructive emotion that will burn you from the inside out, no matter how you rationalize it.

Forgiveness and grace are the practice of letting things go. When forgiving others who might’ve hurt you, forgiveness is often not about them, but allowing yourself to move on. Incidentally, getting good at forgiving others allows you to better safeguard your energy and identify toxic influences in your life — including addressing your own toxic behaviors.

7. Critical Thinking & Problem-Solving

Problem-solving and critical thinking are two skills that go hand-in-hand. Critical thinking allows you to play around with concepts and examine them from different angles. Problem-solving helps you identify all the different solutions and outcomes to a given problem. Together, you can create strategies and choose the right pathway forward.

Even if you know how to come up with strong, clear goals, without knowing how to chart a pathway to your destination or even move towards it keeps you stuck in one place.

8. Adaptability

While it’s important to remain strong in the face of adversity, if you don’t know how to bend to accommodate the pressure you’re under, you’re liable to break. People often fear that being flexible and adaptable means wishy-washy or unable to maintain your values, but this is simply not the case. Adaptability is simply your ability to adjust to what life (and the marketplace) are giving you. Compromising your values isn’t a prerequisite for that — unless your main value is “never change, ever.”

One way to improve your ability to adapt is by acknowledging a lot in life is outside of your control. Come to think of it, the only thing that is in your control is how you react. Adaptability, then, is the practice of controlling your reaction, pushing back against any pressures and problems you face in a way that doesn’t break you and wear you down to the point that it’s mentally and emotionally crippling.

9. Creativity

Last but not least, creativity is one of your best tools in your tool box. It’s creativity that allows you to think about problems in different ways, come up with better ideas and means to accomplish your goals, and to add an overall better quality of life by being more in tune with what you’re doing.

By practicing your creativity, whether it’s through fostering stronger relationships with others or finding an artistic hobby to let your mind and soul wander, you’ll be able to ground yourself in such a way that the little things don’t bother you as much, knowing that you can conquer any obstacle that comes your way.