I am by training an accountant and an attorney, and worked briefly as an auditor; all hardheaded professions, grounded in hard skills. However, as I reflect on my life I attribute most of my success to the softer side. I journal and even visited a therapist for a good while and it is to the journey within, the eternal search for self-awareness and self-knowledge that I attribute any success in my life beyond the norm.
Interestingly, when I teach at the business or law school, I experience a curious internal reluctance to delve deeper into the soft side. Perhaps because soft skills can be perceived as emotionally messy/challenging, subjective, even maudlin in the eyes of some and lack a clear ‘answer key’. It is much easier to ask students to memorize facts and rules than to honestly assess how insecurities and biases could affect performance. Unfortunately, soft is often mistaken for easy or sentimental, when actually progressing in self-awareness requires high-leverage cognitive skills.
We spend much of our lives credential-hunting and status-seeking, climbing the economic ladder. Hard skills equate emotionally to armor: quantifiable, verifiable, respected, universally accepted. Diving into the soft side seems like discarding our protective coverings, the fortifications against the uncertainties of life we have worked so hard to acquire. Plus, the ambiguity of self-reflection seems more like a threat to our competence rather than a tool to advance it. There are few if any guideposts, the way forward is vague, mile markers non-existent, and the goal posts always fading away in the far distance. How does one measure progress toward self-awareness, much less know when one has achieved it? Paradoxically, the very feeling one has achieved it is an excellent indication that one has not!
Why do I shy away from investing extensive class time exploring the soft side in spite of how incredibly valuable I’ve found it personally? I tell myself it’s due to its amorphous nature, the challenge of conveying the deep meaning of a subject so formless, so unstructured, so unshaped. Truth be told, I think it is something more fundamental. I can lay the concepts before them relatively quickly, what happens afterwards has little to do with me or the classroom. The concepts are relatively simple, their power comes from repeated attempts at application, struggling over and over with them, slowly mastering them, failing at ever higher levels. The classroom for that is fullness of life, not the 4 physical walls wherein I attempt to share learnings. It takes but a few moments to be taught the proper technique of weightlifting; it takes dedication, commitment, and never ending, ongoing effort to achieve and maintain lifelong physical fitness.
Closing Quotes:
“We are blind to our blindness.” – Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast & Slow
“The soft skills are the hard skills.” – Amy Edmondson, The Fearless Organization
“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.” – Carl Jung, 1875-1961
“I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics.” – Michel de Montaigne, 1533-1592
“There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know oneself.” – Benjamin Franklin, 1706-1790
“Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.” – Peter Drucker, 1909-2005
“The greatest barrier to courageous leadership is not fear; it’s how we respond to our fear. Our armor—the thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that we use to protect ourselves—prevents us from being our most courageous selves.” – Brené Brown, Daring Greatly
As always, I share what I most want and need to learn. – Nathan S. Collier
Note: Every effort has been made to properly source any 3rd person material. I am, however, a voracious reader. If anyone finds any unattributed material, pls let me know asap and I will be delighted to give credit where credit is due.
“All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749-1832
