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Soft Skills to Fail Better

Throughout the posts on this blog, I have shared many personal stories, and really emphasized that failure is inevitable. It is seemingly unavoidable and at some point in time we will all experience it. In this post, I will share some different soft skills and how they can help prevent failure from occurring all together, or at least make it less severe. While having soft skills may not be a “fix-all” solution, they are great to have and can be very beneficial. Anything a person does requires both hard and soft skills. How I understand this is that hard skills relate directly to the task at hand, and soft skills serve as the extra things. I use this in both Biology and Chemistry labs, the hard skills would be understanding how to follow the procedure and what needs to be done. Soft skills would be how well I can communicate to my group or partner about the procedure and task. I need to have both types of skills to be successful in the lab. 
Some valuable soft skills include effective communication, time management, empathy, and self awareness.

There are many more skills that can be found on the BusinessDaily website. While some of these skills are more self explanatory some are not. Effective communication is quite simple, however many still struggle with it. Effective communication is not just being able to talk to someone else, it is how well that one can portray information. It is important to explain the “how” and the “why” and also know the audience to which one is communicating. I would not tell the same information in the same way to a peer as I would someone in a completely unrelated field of study. This is one way in which communication as a soft skill is beneficial. Empathy and self awareness can also kind of be similar. These two both deal greatly with understanding. Empathy is more focussed on relating to others, and trying to understand how they see things and where they are knowledge wise and such. Self awareness is about understanding oneself and knowing one’s limits to help them cultivate needed skills. 

It is the lack of these skills and many others that can lead to failure among individuals and groups, but it is important to remember, that just because someone may be proficient at these skills, that they are not exempt from failure. We can do everything right and still not be successful. Soft skills are just one more tool that can help. Oftentimes in my own experience, I have found soft skills to be easier than hard skills, I can use them more broadly and under nearly any circumstance, whereas hard skills usually pertain to very specific topics. Going back to the lab group story, I use these mostly in those types of settings, effective communication and understanding of each other help us get through the labs and correctly. We use effective communication to work through multiple steps that are parts of each lab and that helps us to stay on task as well. 


Pictured is my BeReal of my lab group working on data analysis of a lab we were working on.


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