How do you learn and improve your soft skills?

I used to be annoyed with people that repeated themselves often. After I did a few communication courses I realized that people repeated themselves because I gave no indication that I had heard and understood them. I was a typical inward looking computer programmer. When people told me something important to them I started responding with things like "that's interesting", "I never thought about it that way" or by asking them a follow up question. The incidences of people repeating themselves to me dropped noticeably.

What is Active Listening?

https://www.usip.org/public-education-new/what-active-listen...

What is Nonviolent Communication?

https://www.cnvc.org/learn-nvc/what-is-nvc

What is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?

https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/patients-and-families/cog...

CBT is good for understanding how your emotions might be getting in the way, such as jumping to conclusions, "mind reading", etc...

Learning from different fields has been really beneficial to me. When I was young, I was very into etiquette books like The Essential 55. Even reading "outdated" social analysis/advice is helpful because it gives me a bigger picture of the history of different cultural behaviors, and ways to think about how I present myself.

In high school, I taught martial arts at the place that I grew up going to, and they had a pretty good program for training young people to instruct different age groups, talk to parents, keep up with your own training, etc. So, suggestion 2 is take team/training advice from weird solo sports. People love to make management like football or baseball, but why not think about how people get to the "top of their game" in pool or something? There are a lot of different coaching vibes.

Soooo after that I was a k-8 teacher for a few years, which is another great group of people to look at for examples. People who can get a room full of 7 year olds to function are verrryyyy good at soft skills, and you just change the vocabulary a little to make it for adults.

It's a good start to acknowledge the fact that you want to learn and improve soft skills.

I like to read books about different things. I would call this the "theoretical foundation".

- Fictitious stories can help you understand different view points.

- Books about society, philosophy, listening strategies, ... can help to put it into a broader context.

- Dedicated books about organizing teams, conflict management, how to be a leader, that kind of thing.

I am pretty sure that there are also videos aboiut these topics.

In the end, you need to apply these things. Next time you get a new junior on your team, try to be a mentor for them, help them understand what they need to know.

That said, soft skills are .. soft. There is no right and wrong. What works for me, might not do it for you. You way of communicating might be perfect when you talk to senior engineers, but completely overwhelming for a junior.