Cover Story Part III
Cover Story | Part III: Turning Weaknesses into Strengths – Hardening Your Soft Skills

Turning Weaknesses into Strengths

- Hardening Your Soft Skills
Part III- Turning Weaknesses into Strengths

After you have called the SWOT team on your personal brand to raid it in a thorough and merciless manner, it is time to turn some of that weaknesses into strengths and opportunities.

Now, soft skills are some of the most difficult competencies for people to understand. We struggle with the challenge of defining, demonstrating, and recognising soft skills. Here are some to hone to assist you in attaining a ‘yes’ instead of a ‘no’ in your endeavours.


Hard vs. Soft Skills

The term ‘soft skills’ is often difficult to understand. Soft skills are also referred to as transferable skills, interpersonal skills, or social skills. Soft skills are difficult to measure. Hard skills, in contrast, are those skills that are very easily measured and defined. These include abilities like accounting, computer programming, or dentistry. You can easily obtain a degree or professional certification in these areas.

Hard skills apply to very specific professions. Web design skills are not applicable to a career as a surgeon. Hard skills lock you into a particular occupation. But soft skills are highly flexible and serve you well in numerous occupations and settings. They take more effort and creativity to properly demonstrate these abilities, but are highly valuable to any situation.

Professionalism

Some key skills of professionalism are selfmotivation, work ethics, and resilience. They are skilled in time management and possess the skills needed to overcome common challenges, such as patience and stress management.

Interpersonal Skills

Interpersonal skills are another important subset of your soft skills. These skills pertain to how you relate to others, both inside and outside the company. Demonstrating strong listening skills, emotional intelligence, and communication skills will serve you well no matter where you are. Those who are good at networking will reap the benefits of this valuable asset as well.

Leadership and Management Skills

While leadership skills are most relevant to those in a business management position, do not think that you have to be at the top of the pack to showcase these soft skills. Demonstrating that you are an effective leader will serve you well in any industry or position.

Good leaders (managers) are skilled with problem solving and project management. They are usually good at performing essential research and analytics. Strong leaders also know how to handle interpersonal issues that arise with those around them. They have critical observation skills that help them identify problems as well as conflict resolution skills to help them skillfully mediate disagreements.