SOFT SKILLS

Soft skills is a sociological term relating to a person's

"EQ" (Emotional Intelligence Quotient),

1.      The cluster of personality traits,

2.      Social graces,

3.      Communication,

4.      Language,

5.      Personal habits,

6.      Friendliness, and

7.      Optimism

that characterize relationships with other people.
Soft skills complement hard skills, which are the occupational requirements of a job and many other activities.
A person's soft skill EQ is an important part of their individual contribution to the success of an organization. Particularly those organizations dealing with customers face-to-face are generally more successful if they train their staff to use these skills.
Screening or training for personal habits or traits such as dependability and conscientiousness can yield significant return on investment for an organization.
For this reason, soft skills are increasingly sought out by employers in addition to standard qualifications.
It has been suggested that in a number of professions soft skills may be more important over the long term than occupational skills.
The legal profession is one example where the ability to deal with people effectively and politely, more than their mere occupational skills, can determine the professional success of a lawyer.

Examples of soft skills

• Participate in a team
• Lead a team
• Unite a team amidst cultural differences
• Teach others
• Provide services
• Negotiate
• Motivate others
• Make decisions
• Solve problems
• Observe forms of etiquette
• Interact with others
• Maintain meaningless conversation
• Maintain meaningful conversation (discussion/debate)
• Defuse arguments with timing, instructions and polite, concise language
• Feign interest and speak intelligently about any topic

SELF-RELIANCE -- 3

And therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face.

The by-standers look askance on him in the public street or in the friend's parlour.

If this aversation had its origin in contempt and resistance like his own, he might well go home with a sad countenance;

But the sour faces of the multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs.

Their rage is decorous and prudent, for they are timid as being very vulnerable themselves.

But

when to their feminine rage the indignation of the people is added,

when the ignorant and the poor are aroused,

when the unintelligent brute force that lies at the bottom of society is made to growl and mow,

it needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike as a trifle of no concernment.

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency;

a reverence for our past act or word,

because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and

we are loath to disappoint them.

But why should you keep your head over your shoulder?

Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place?

Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then?

It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day.

In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity:

yet when the devout motions of the soul come,

yield to them heart and life,

though they should clothe God with shape and color.

Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.

He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall.

Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said to-day.

"Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood."

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood?

Pythagoras was misunderstood,

and

Socrates, and

Jesus,

Luther, and

Copernicus, and

Galileo, and

Newton, and

every pure

and wise spirit that ever took flesh.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

I suppose no man can violate his nature.

All the sallies of his will are rounded in by the law of his being, as the inequalities of Andes and Himmaleh are insignificant in the curve of the sphere.

Nor does it matter how you gauge and try him.

A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.

My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects.

The swallow over my window should interweave that thread or straw he carries in his bill into my web also.

We pass for what we are.

Character teaches above our wills.

Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that

Virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.

There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, so they be each honest and natural in their hour.

For of one will, the actions will be harmonious, however unlike they seem.

These varieties are lost sight of at a little distance, at a little height of thought.

One tendency unites them all.

The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks.

See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency.

Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions.

Your conformity explains nothing.

Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now.

Greatness appeals to the future.

If I can be firm enough to-day to do right, and scorn eyes, I must have done so much right before as to defend me now.

Be it how it will, do right now.

Always scorn appearances, and you always may.

The force of character is cumulative.

All the foregone days of virtue work their health into this.

What makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate and the field, which so fills the imagination?

The consciousness of a train of great days and victories behind.

They shed a united light on the advancing actor.

He is attended as by a visible escort of angels.

That is it which throws thunder into Chatham's voice, and dignity into Washington's port, and America into Adams's eye.

Honor is venerable to us because it is no ephemeris.

It is always ancient virtue.

We worship it to-day because it is not of to-day.

We love it and pay it homage,

because it is not a trap for our love and homage,

but is

self-dependent,

self-derived,

and therefore of an old immaculate pedigree, even if shown in a young person.

SELF-RELIANCE -- 2

Are they my poor?

I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.

There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold;

for them I will go to prison, if need be;

but your miscellaneous popular charities;

the education at college of fools;

the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand;

alms to sots; and

the thousandfold Relief Societies;

though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.

Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule.

There is the man and his virtues.

Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade.

Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world, as invalids and the insane pay a high board.

Their virtues are penances.

I do not wish to expiate, but to live.

My life is for itself and not for a spectacle.

I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady.

I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding.

I ask primary evidence that you are a man, and refuse this appeal from the man to his actions.

I know that for myself it makes no difference whether I do or forbear those actions which are reckoned excellent.

I cannot consent to pay for a privilege where I have intrinsic right.

Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.

This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness.

It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it.

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion;

it is easy in solitude to live after our own;

but

the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with

perfect sweetness

the independence of solitude.

The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is, that it scatters your force.

It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character.

If you maintain a dead church,

contribute to a dead Bible-society,

vote with a great party

either for the government or against it,

spread your table like base housekeepers,

under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are.

And, of course, so much force is withdrawn from your proper life.

But do your work, and I shall know you.

Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.

A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity.

If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument.

I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church.

Do I not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous word?

Do I not know that, with all this ostentation of examining the grounds of the institution, he will do no such thing?

Do I not know that he is pledged to himself not to look but at one side, — the permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister?

He is a retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are the emptiest affectation.

Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion.

This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars.

Their every truth is not quite true.

Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right.

Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere.

We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression.

There is a mortifying experience in particular, which does not fail to wreak itself also in the general history;

I mean "the foolish face of praise," the forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest us.

The muscles, not spontaneously moved, but moved by a low usurping willfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face with the most disagreeable sensation.

For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure.

SELF-RELIANCE -- 1

The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may.

The sentiment they instill is of more value than any thought they may contain.

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius.

Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.

Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought.

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this.

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that

1.      Envy is ignorance;

2.      That imitation is suicide;

3.      That he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion;

4.      That though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

        The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

        Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none.

Trust thyself:

Every heart vibrates to that iron string.

        Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.

1.      Great men have always done so, and

2.      confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age,

3.      betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart,

4.      working through their hands,

5.      predominating in all their being.

And we are now men, 

Must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; 

Not minors and invalids in a protected corner,

Not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers,

Benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.

God has armed youth and puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, 

made it enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put by,

if it will stand by itself.

Do not think the youth has no force, because he cannot speak to you and me.

Hark! in the next room his voice is sufficiently clear and emphatic.

It seems he knows how to speak to his contemporaries.

Bashful or bold, then, he will know how to make us seniors very unnecessary.

The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature.

A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the playhouse;

independent,

irresponsible,

looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by,

he tries and sentences them on their merits,

in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome.

He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests:

he gives an independent, genuine verdict.

You must court him:

he does not court you.

But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness.

As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat, he is a committed person,

watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds,

whose affections must now enter into his account.

There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality!

Who can thus avoid all pledges, and having observed, observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always be formidable.

He would utter opinions on all passing affairs, which being seen to be not private, but necessary,

would sink like darts into the ear of men, and put them in fear.

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world.

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.

Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater.

The virtue in most request is conformity.

Self-reliance is its aversion.

It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church.

On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within?

my friend suggested, "But these impulses may be from below, not from above."

I replied, "They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil."

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.

Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this;

the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it.

 A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if everything were titular and ephemeral but he.

I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.

Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right.

I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.

If malice and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass?

If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from Barbados,

Why should I not say to him?????????,

'Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper: be good-natured and modest: have that grace; and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home.'

Rough and graceless would be such greeting, but

Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love.

Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.

The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of love when that pules and whines.

I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me.

I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation.

Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company. Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations.

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