The skills that can make you highly successful aren’t necessarily innate. You can practice them, and get better at them.
That’s according to bestselling authors and leadership researchers Brené Brown and Simon Sinek, who sat down with Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant for a recent episode of his “ReThinking” podcast.
“They’re skills that are observable, measurable, teachable — we can practice them,” Brown said.
Specifically, Sinek and Brown highlighted three soft skills that highly successful people tend to share:
- Public speaking
- Boundary setting
- Vulnerability
Cultivating these skills can be tough. If they don’t come naturally to you, it means getting out of your comfort zone and opening yourself up to external judgment.
Here’s how to practice them as comfortably as you can, according to Brown and Sinek.
Public speaking
Public speaking can help boost your confidence levels and leadership skills, according to Stanford University Graduate School of Business organizational behavior lecturer Matt Abrahams, who referenced a corporate study of more than 100,000 professional presentations in a 2016 university blog post.
But it’s one of the most anxiety-inducing workplace skills of them all: 15% to 30% of people actively fear it, found a 2016 study published in the Journal of Graduate Medical Education.
Even for Sinek, who’s delivered multiple TED Talks, public speaking and communicating effectively with others can be hard. His solution is more physical than mental, he said.
“There’s a physiological connection between our hands and how fast we talk,” said Sinek. “I talk very fast and I move my hands a lot. If I’m with other people that speak fast and move their hands, it’s all good … If I’m in a meeting with somebody who is slower, they think before they speak, what I’ve learned to do is to interlock my fingers and to hold my hands still.”
Holding his hands closed helps him speak more slowly without devoting too much focus to it, allowing him to instead pay more…
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