Career success

What is Interpersonal Communication – Definition and 3 Myths

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Effective interpersonal communication at work is essential to your career success. Yet it’s often not clearly understood nor easy to improve. After researching on Google regarding how others discuss interpersonal communication, I will offer my own perspective – a detailed definition of what is interpersonal communication and 3 most common myths about interpersonal communication. ...  read more

How to Improve Your Soft Skills?

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NEW SOFT SKILLS GUIDE + NEWSLETTER

How to improve your soft skills is an important question to answer for your career success.  It is also a tough question to answer in general as soft skills encompass many different skills in two general categories.

  • self management skills– those we use to manage our emotions, self-perception, and reactions to unexpected situations. Examples of these soft skills include stress management, self-confidence, emotion control, etc…
  • people skills – those we use to influence how others perceive / receive us, our work, our ideas. Examples of these soft skills include communication skills, leadership skills, teamwork skills, ability to deal with difficult personalities.

Any one of these soft skills will take time to improve. At a high level, here are five tips I recommend to start improving your soft skills today. ...  read more

What are Soft Skills?

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I must admit I had no idea what are soft skills when I graduated from college.   I quickly realized on my first job at McKinsey how my lack of some soft skills were affecting my performance reviews.  Here are some of the soft skills I lacked at that time.

  • Stress Management and People Management Skills – At 22 years old, I was assigned an assistant at McKinsey.  I treated her horribly when I was stressed out and I was immature to think I have the right to since she worked for me.   Needless to say, she was NOT jumping to help me all the time.
  • Confidence and Communication Skills – I was book smart and had great ideas on projects, but sometimes I was afraid to speak up when there were senior people in the room.  I had no idea how to structure my comments and I didn’t have the confidence to think they would care what I think.  McKinsey expects Analysts to voice their opinions.
  • Resilience / Office politics skills – I was blamed for something I didn’t do on a project.  It took me a few years to move on from this one.  My manager succeeded in blaming me because he knew how to play office politics better than me.  I had no close support from any partners.

After working 15 years in consulting with 20+ Fortune 500 companies dealing with all kinds of people, personalities, and unexpected situations, I have a much greater appreciation for how important soft skills are to achieve business success.   So I would like to offer my own definition of “what are soft skills” in practical terms (see below). ...  read more

Forgive and Forget – Key to Career Success

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I had a real scare yesterday. My 3 year old daughter, Isabel, lost her balance and fell from an 8-feet-high rope ladder, head first. I screamed, and although I was a few steps away, I couldn’t reach her in time. She hit the dirt on the side of her head and right cheek. Luckily, her head does not seem to be injured. Besides a shiner on her cheek, she was just super scared. ...  read more