The majority of the skills we wield are categorized into soft and hard skills. Soft skills tend to benefit everyone who acquires them by enabling them to make advancement in their task, while hard skills seem to be far more specific skills, depending on the sector, ranging from programming, photography, design, to name but a few. Out of a multitude of possible soft skills that you can acquire, some can make a difference and make you a much more efficient top performer both at work and at home.
So let’s take a look at ten of the skills that help performers reach the top:
1. Self-Awareness
Understanding who you are, what influences you, what your core values and beliefs are, and what shapes you into the individual you are today is crucial to moving forward and achieving your goals. This doesn’t mean, of course, that you do this once and you’re done. It’s a process you should continue through your life. This is one of the only ways to remain fully authentic in a hectic world.
2. Get Clarity & Learn How to Pivot Accordingly
The very first step is to ensure you have an understanding of yourself and is essential to understanding your short-term and long-term path in life. Regrettably, times are so uncertain, and setting a long-term perspective for yourself isn’t wise as situations change regularly. However, this should not stop you from defining one-to three-year goals, and then defining what high-level activities you need to carry out will help you make the most progress.
3. Comprehensive Reading
Envisage this skill set as the speed of your car. Once you understand it, depending on your requirements or expectations, you could even speed up or slow down your reading. This applies not just to the reading aspect but also to the overall consumption of information. Reading is a time-consuming aspect of your life, and you should not consume haphazardly whatever might happen to catch your attention, but rather have a far more intentional approach. Choose which websites you visit carefully, and what kind of content you’re going through.
4. Memory Improvement
This may seem outdated, especially if we can use devices to help us store information. But we should try to make the most of our memory. Like anything else, it can be improved, and you’d be amazed at how much, not just that, but how useful it can be in your life.
5. Accelerated Learning
Anybody who wants to take their life or business to the next level must have as much control as possible over their learning. The easiest way to do this is to acquire skills that complement your goals. Each goal is a set of activities that you’re supposed to do. If you want to carry out these activities, you need to learn how to do them, ergo, you need to acquire specific skills for this type of activity.
6. Productivity
This ought to be the number-one skill to be mindful of. As time is our most valuable resource, you need to learn how to direct it to things that will bring the greatest return on investment. You must have clarity (which goes back to the first skill we’ve mentioned) about what you want to do in your life.
7. Habit
You can start forming several habits at any given time that will drastically improve your life, and if you drop some of them, there are also a few that will improve your life. That’s why you need to select the ones that will help you craft the best consistent ideal day. Try to find an essential one that will serve as the cornerstone of every other positive thing that you want to do on an ongoing basis.
8. Flow on Command
You go deep into that obsessive state of focus when you engage in an activity that you know will take you closer to your goal, and suddenly, three hours later, you raise your head and the task is complete. Without you even noticing it, time flew by. For those who want to go further in life, as this is the most productive mental state anyone can be in, they should learn how to get into this state on command. Begin by clearing your atmosphere (make sure there are no distractions), and experiment with music. It’s known to have a pretty high flow correlation.
9. Networking
Even with the technological advances that make it easier to connect, reach out, and stay in touch with not only people close to us but people all over the world, it seems that people are growing more apart somehow. Not only do you have to be good at finding and meeting the right people for you, but you also have to learn how to maintain constant and deliberate contact with people you consider valuable.
10. Assertive Communication
You’ll need to learn how to communicate these to individuals around you assertively when working with individuals. It is also essential to be mindful of the situation and to be conscious of when you need to stop pushing and when the idea of someone else is better. Being assertive will boost your persuasion and negotiation ability. It will, by default, help you in other aspects of the communication cluster of mini-skills as you learn how to stand up for yourself.
All these skills are connected, just like skill sets you have already acquired through most of your life, and you get a cascade effect whenever you acquire one more. Then it does become easier until everything finally reaches the point when you know how to use these skills that you have learned in life to accomplish anything.
