Soft skills are the human skills we can all develop and are necessary to everyone.

Cultivating soft skills- especially at an age when one’s personality and habits are still shaping- can be a real game changer. Encompassing curiosity, inquisitiveness, imagination, and creativity, building agility, adaptability, resilience, and conferring the ability to face, overcome, and learn from failure are skills that we all possess by nature. However, we let them fade away and focus our efforts on what traditional education is focused on; hard skills.

Soft skills are able to create a better future in education too, where students respect each other, show emotional intelligence, empathy and learn to work in teams. They widen their problem-solving skills and critical thinking, resulting in shaping their identity. These skills allow learners to create new paths, that no one has ever walked before. They are the skills that make us better humans.

The fast-paced life rhythm we are experiencing over the last decades constantly pushes us to go beyond our limits. Having solid soft skills affects every aspect of our life. In the pursuit of our personal goals, we need to understand and manage our strengths and weaknesses, our behavior, emotions, and thoughts. The above soft skills are defined as self-awareness, self-management, and self-regulation. Soft skills such as curiosity have been linked to numerous benefits in life. Curious people have been generally rated more positively in social encounters and seem to enjoy socializing more, as they can connect on a deeper level. Creativity has been associated with higher levels of positive emotions, lower levels of anxiety, and more satisfaction with life. And the list keeps going on!

In Morphoses we expose our young learners to activities where they practice self-awareness, self-management, and self-regulation so that they can begin to further develop and understand themselves.

Meantime, soft skills help us manage and build strong and healthy relationships with others. On the contrary, having poor levels of emotional intelligence, empathy, active listening, flexibility, and many more, deprives us of shaping meaningful interactions and creating real bonds.

Soft skills have been linked to resilience and can be operated as protective factors for mental health.

But soft skills are not just intrapersonal. People with strong soft skills can use them in beneficial ways, to promote Mental Health Awareness and support people who might struggle. To be more specific, we can use the soft skill of influencing to help empower others, and the soft skill of social awareness and acceptance to include every member of our community.

Furthermore, we can use our soft skills to stay present and be mindful, in other words, having self-awareness. We can become great active listeners with communication skills with all the above.