Interpersonal Skills help me to be an Opportunity Magnet

We as humans comprise multiple skills. Among these skills, there are skills we acquire called hard skills, and others we develop through practice and collaboration with each other called interpersonal skills. I often refer to this as pink skill and blue skill, pink skills referred to interpersonal skills, and blue skills referred to hard skills.

When I was about 15 year old, I started with building on skills with the aim of “being skillful”.
At that time I had started with coding specialised into web development and financial investment strategy. I thought this is the important one. I should focus on these hard skills and I kept practicing these skills over a good period of time and still continuing them up.

The hard skills I learned with help of them I had started earning quite good pocket money. With this pocket money, I manage 80% of my own expenses. Still, though I’m just a 20-year old I’m good with managing my stuff over myself but my peers are struggling with this although they may have similar kinds of hard skills.

The only difference I could see between them and me is the other important people’s skills that are interpersonal skills. I was also  in a similar place about 2 year ago. About an one and a half year ago I met this awesome cool personality ADI!!! He helped me to understand how interpersonal skills are important and how I could build over this with help of being involved in  different multi-disciplinary projects and advised me to join this fellowship programme.

In the beginning, it was a tough choice but I took this decision quickly and independently. When I discovered the fees of this fellowship, I was able to pay part of the fees by winning a couple of hackathons. The Enterprise India Fellowship, a practical MBA skills-building program for undergraduate college students like me.

The Green Room and #Karo 3.0 project helped me out to enhance my public speaking skills as I co-hosted a 7 story sharing evening with a prominent story sharer and community of 300+ audience and co-facilitating the one workshop with Robin Singh, an animal activist on “How to communicate effectively through video” this helped me out.

I would be proactive because of the strong network of people I had built around me through sharing vulnerable stories in breakout sessions of The Green Room and doing a fun activity during a workshop on #Karo 3.0 

Not every move you make is a success, it takes patience to reach the goal I had built this skill to understand the process rather than measuring the quantity or quality of the result through the Chandrayaan 0.0 and Klug Avalon: Facebook Engagement Strategy Project.

I couldn’t be so much adaptive and courageous to take risks without one of the essential skill “willingness to learn more” I had learned a lot through Polymorphix : SaaS Product Research and Development Project.  I challenged myself to learn more about python and artificial intelligence.

This one year experience adds a lot of valuable interpersonal skills into my personality as public speaking, networking, team
player, storyteller, helpfulness, patience, curiosity to know more, willingness to learn and being courageous to take on the risks as opportunities. This could have been possible because of the really strong network of people I had built around me.

Mostly we focus on the blue skills(hard skills) developing and practicing it a lot but what makes more value is the pink skills (interpersonal skills). Interpersonal skills are both inherent and external to us. They are abilities we acquire through our experiences.

Soft skills are fuel to the car of hard skills, as without fuel a car couldn’t reach the destination in a similar way without soft skills, hard skills wouldn’t let us accomplish it.