There Is Nothing Soft About Surviving This Moment

A recruiter once told me my communication, relational, and adaptive skills “weren’t important because everyone had soft skills.”

No ma’am. They absolutely do not.

Look around. Look at your leadership. Look at the country’s leadership. Look at the boardrooms and the comment sections and the performance reviews that crush people for not hitting metrics while ignoring the manager who confuses being feared with being respected.

When you call these skills soft, soft ends up meaning optional. Soft means nice to have if we get around to it after the real stuff.

And if we’re really putting it all out there, soft is often a gendered dismissal. The skills that require you to read a room, regulate your own reactions, navigate conflict without detonating everything in sight, build trust across difference, and actually listen have been coded as feminine and therefore coded as less.

Meanwhile, the same organizations that devalue these skills are in crisis because nobody knows how to talk to each other, give feedback without destroying morale, or disagree without declaring war.

We are living through a moment that is actively hostile to nuance, empathy, complexity, and collaborative power at the same time where we hand every messy human problem to an algorithm or a dashboard so that we don’t have to endure the discomfort of actually dealing with people.

The skills that will get us out of this mess are exactly the ones we’ve been dismissing.

The ability to build coalitions across difference.

To de-escalate without capitulating.

To tell the truth in a way people can actually hear.

To navigate conflict without making it worse.

To hold firm on values while staying curious about people.

These aren’t soft skills.

These are survival skills.

And no, not everyone has them. (But you CAN build them. 🥳 )