Episode Transcript

Hey what’s up? What’s up? What’s up, everybody? Welcome back to THE a.m guys, welcome back to five minute rants. I’m your host, Michael Abernathy. And welcome back to the show predicated on the journey of life and business. Well, everybody, I hope you’re having a great day. I hope that life is treating you well, I’m better than I deserve. And I’m just gonna go ahead and jump straight into this.

So last episode, I kind of talked about team and how teamwork is not a hard skill set. And I really want to deep dive into that more. And I want to go down to another level. And I really want to talk about soft skills versus hard skills. Hard skills are the things that you learn in school, or in a certificate program such as coding, right? Like, I’ve got a hard skill in C++, and I don’t, I’m just being hypothetical and giving you guys an example. And I’ve got a hard skill in Java, or CSS or whatever it is okay, or I am a plumber. That’s a hard skill. That’s a hard skill set. Okay. And I think it’s very interesting, because the skill set that is most overlooked in culture, and society, is actually the soft skills, the skills that involve negotiating, people and culture. And, and I’m not saying like negotiating as I’m like, talking and making deals that that is part of this. But What I’m saying is, it’s really navigating people navigating culture, navigating how things are done.

So for instance, just walking into a room and being able to understand the room and the culture within that room, right, you go networking, or you just walk into a party, and then you can automatically feel the pulse of the room understand and, and fit in, okay. And soft skills are important. Everybody uses soft skills. There’s a book called everyone to salesman, and I’d recommend reading it because it’s really good, because it really shows how you negotiate life doing sales all the time because of soft skills. But soft skills is like breathing. It’s so used and so underrated. That you never think about it, right? Like you don’t ever think about breathing, you don’t ever think about taking your next breath. You don’t ever think about oh my gosh, I gotta breathe, I’m going to die, that that doesn’t happen. And that’s how soft skills are because they are so common. And they’re used so frequently within work, right? They’re used so frequently within your day to day life. They’re used frequently with your kids or with your spouse or with your friends they are used all the time. And so they’re taken for granted. And things that we take for granted. We don’t normally craft or Hone, and we don’t normally get better at because cool, why would I need to get better at breathing? I don’t know. There’s a lot of long term effects for being able to breathe better. And, and that’s not What I’m talking about is breath. But What I’m talking about is like the heart intention to improve and improve something that is vital every day. I don’t know I use breathing everyday, maybe I should work out so that my cardiovascular system gets better and my respiratory system get better. It’s one of the most used things that I do is have a beating heart. And taking a breath. It’s the same thing with soft skills.

If you develop soft skills, you go into an interview, you would be so much better because an interview is just a negotiation. You’re literally making a deal. You walk in you say hey, I can give you this value. They’re like awesome. That’s kind of the value we’re looking for. And they’re like, but this is my price tag. Oh, okay. Well, I don’t know, that’s the price we want to pay. And you’re in negotiation and a lot of people struggle with the interview, because they’re not aware of soft skill. So a few things about soft skills. To just kind of help with this. They take experience, you got to have experience with soft skills. And the way you get experience with soft skills is through self awareness to really be aware of What you’re saying and doing. And I’m not talking about from this manipulative standpoint, because there’s a lot of people who use manipulation, and we’re gonna get into this. But there’s a whole scummy side to soft skills to sales. And there’s a lot of stuff that is tactical like that, that I disagree with the heart behind it at least, right. But What I’m saying is you got to be aware of how you’re communicating how you’re talking, you’ve got to actually listen, one of the hardest things about soft skills is nobody listens. And a lot of people who even practice and I’m err, quoting, practice soft skills. They don’t listen, if you can learn to listen, in any position that you’re in, no matter What you’re doing, right. You’re you’re at home with the kids, you learn to listen to your kids better to actually understand What they need in the moment and What they want. Holy mess is your relationship radically going to change with them because you can actually serve them and actually communicate to them with What they need versus well kind of maybe What you partially heard and listening is very much like breathing. We do it all the time. So we take it for granted and it’s not an art that we practice. So is experience, self awareness. The other thing is observation. You got to constantly be curious and look and be like, Hmm, I wonder why they did that or why they did this or why they did those things. And then it helps you navigate people to really understand to really understand people, and a lot of soft skills are predicated on listening.

Anyways guys, I’m way way over. So I’ll catch you on the flip side peace