Soft skills are critical to success in life, love, and our chosen vocation. But what are soft skills? How do you clearly define and quantitatively measure a non-tangible asset? Largely, we measure soft skills by how well they match with our identity, but that’s a whole other conversation. In a nutshell, soft skills are personal attributes, personality traits, and communication abilities that enable individuals to interact effectively and harmoniously with others. They are sometimes referred to as interpersonal skills, people skills, or essential skills.

Soft skills complement hard skills (technical knowledge and job-specific skills). While hard skills teach us the technical knowledge and capability of performing a task, soft skills get you there.

The difficulty with soft skills is that they are generally unmeasurable, and when measured, the scale is skewed by our own perspective and is arbitrary, making them often difficult to teach. Yet, in an industry that prides itself on delivering luxury with every breath, the soft skill is a hard skill. We like to separate soft skills into two categories.

Earned

These skills are commonly learned through the successes and failures in life. The teacher is life. Our parents work diligently to instill us with these tools, but there is no better teacher than life and the experiences we have along the way. These, we have to “figure out.”

Learned

These skills can be learned and developed through education, training, mentorship, and continued diligent self-development.