How to Fight Fear … with Soft Skills!

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In this delicate moment the Soft Skills prove to be more useful than our Knowledge

Premise

In the days we are living in, characterized by continuous alarming news on the exponential spread of the Covid-19 pandemic infections throughout the planet, Fear has resurfaced in our minds, which has clothed itself with a set of negative values, affecting all our certainties (from health, to family, to work and free time).

Unfortunately, since a vaccine to combat the virus is not yet available, we have to live forever in a condition of absolute discomfort because, being the invisible enemy, we are forced to limit our habits and activities, trying to adopt the “right” behaviors to limit its spread ; in all this, however, we are not helped by science nor our knowledge, as we still feel a lot of “confusion” in what is transmitted to us by the media and in the recommendations given by our governors and it is for this reason that we can instead rely to our Soft Skills to fight and… why not… defeat the Fear!

What are Soft Skills

The phrase of the English philosopher Bertrand Russell “everything you know how to do well contributes to your happiness” is suitable for defining the meaning of “Soft Skill”, that is the set of all our attitudes that we possess since birth and which give rise to personal thoughts and ideas that then develop in the form of creative and original actions. In fact, Soft Skills (or Transversal Skills) do not derive like Hard Skills (or Vertical Skills), from “technical” knowledge or learning that feeds our Cognitive System, but are represented by skills or attitudes that can only be minimally be learned, because they are the fruit of our uniqueness.

As an example we can refer to the Ability to Solve Problems (so-called Problem Solving), the Management of Change, our Communication Styles, the Ability to Create Empathy (so-called Emotional Intelligence), the aptitude to Work in a Group (so-called Team Building), Creativity, Self Marketing etc.

How to Fight Fear with Soft Skills

An effective “exercise” to use to combat Fear could be to “abstract” from the surrounding context, thinking in terms of an “active subject” (the one who sets his own actions) and not a “passive subject” (the one who suffers the external consequences) and to field those of our particular “Soft Skills”, towards which we have a greater natural propensity to use them and to which our greatest personal gratifications are associated. Thus, again by way of example, the most imaginative people will be able to use Creativity and Problem Solving to find new ways of dealing with external difficulties and new methods of problem solving, while those who love to relate to others will be able to experiment, despite the “social distancing “imposed, new” digital “tools to communicate and work remotely, without disregarding the objectives of one’s business.