Soft skills are personality traits and can be displayed in certain behaviors. They are often compared and opposed to hard skills which refer to a capacity to do something very specific or technical.That definition is the testimony of why soft skills are such a difficult subject to grasp. In order to make you handle it successfully I’ll proceed to describe some of the psychologist traits that could be of use to explain what makes us different and furthermore better in certain fields than others who have not done our studies.
Soft skills can be any qualities or characteristics that are not easy to target. They can be somehow natural to you, but also gain through great effort. You are now one or two years away from being a psychologist, that means you’ll need to be capable of explaining what your studies are about and what they brought you. How come we’re close to be graduates and we are unable to tell others in what way we’re more capable than before.
It’s because what we learn is more close to soft skills than hard ones. Tired of hearing the name already ? I get it, we’ve all been through some of the greatest experimentation of our field : Milgram and the submission to authority for example. What have we learned from it ? well it’s a great proof that the human is not bad but quite eager to give up his responsibility if he’s given the chance to do it. Also we can say that some won’t give up the responsibility of their actions , roughly one third of the participants. Zimbardo’s experiment of the prison taught us that even if a human is neutral his environment can make him do bad things. Tajfel’s social identity theory explains that humans tend to favor their own group and to disadvantage anyone that’s from another group.
That’s not an exhaustive list, and you already have a more powerful insight and understanding of the human behavior and tendencies. Studies after studies we become greater at understanding them, and faster to do so. Besides the interview training, nothing makes us better at communication, so why bringing it up all the time ? because we do get better at it through our better understanding of the humans, of their behavior, we can understand faster than others what’s at stake in a situation, we became better at finding the source of the problem.How is that ? It’s thanks to our studies, we learned the human logic which by the way isn’t the best. To illustrate this you can look at the cognitive bias which are numerous and outrageously impervious to the naked eye. By that I mean that if you are novice to them you probably won’t be able to recall them if they were to be demonstrated in front of you. That’s another soft skill , we’re able to find errors of judgement in humans because we learned about cognitive bias.
Psychology is the science of human behavior, so it’s only fair to bring it on the table and be proud of it. We’re so focused on others that we forgot to look at how much we’ve improved on the human field, to get a more profound understanding of which soft skills you may carry on your behalf, try to deconstruct the things you are capable of. By doing so you’ll see that what makes you capable of being good at doing an interview, analyzing a
problematic situation, reading thoughts through basic observation, is before anything else, your understanding of human behavior.