The co-founder of Lead-Afrique International, Letitia Ohene-Effah stressed the importance of soft skills when she appeared for the Effective Living Series on the Citi Breakfast Show.
She noted that hard skills were important to any profession, however, soft skills like how you communicate with people and your composure are important as well and the defining difference between a person and their competitors.
Here are the seven soft skill she urged audiences to develop:
- Leadership skills: Mrs. Ohene Effah explained that leadership was a role but must also be viewed as an action. According to her, it was important that people learned to lead themselves because you can’t lead people if you can’t lead yourself. “You need to know the way and go the way,” she said.
- Emotional Intelligence: She advised listeners to find out where their limits are in dealing with people so they can control their emotions. One of her pointers was for people must understand that they are “deserving”, and that we must know who we are and our self worth.
- Resilience: Without a scar, you won’t know how life is Mrs. Ohene Effah said. She advised that we stick to the decisions we make and not quit halfway through. It’s okay to cry or fall during setbacks but we must be able to pick ourselves up and move on.
- Influencing skills: She reminded that for whatever we do, we must be mindful of the fact that we are always influencing someone else and are selling our personality. “Arouse in another person the desire to want,” Mrs. Ohene Effah noted of the skill she said we cannot do without.
- Critical-thinking skills: “One of the ways to build critical-thinking skills is to become your own critic,” Mrs. Ohene Effah said. She advised us to understand what we do and why we do it. “Think about things holistically before you solve a problem,” she added.
- Communication Skills: Mrs. Ohene Effah stressed that we be aware of what we want people to take away when we communicate. There must be clarity and we must be fully present when communicating with people. “If there are too many distractions, it results in us not getting the authenticity of the message.”
- Time Utilisation: How we use the 24 hours we have a day makes all the difference, said Mrs. Ohene Effah. If you don’t learn how to use these hours, “you are in trouble.” Being able to utilise time means you are learning to stay focus and learning to prioritise.