Ask HN: How can someone increase their soft skills?

Like any other skill, it all comes down to practice, practice, practice. There's no fast track to excellence. You need to just do whichever soft skill you want to master over and over again until it becomes second nature. It's a lot of work and will likely take you months or years to feel comfortable. That's okay. That's progress.

The second major component is creating a feedback loop so that you can identify areas of improvement and determine whether your efforts are bearing fruit. Find someone you trust and get feedback. Accept that feedback. Act on that feedback. Put yourself out there and talk to as many people as you can about as many things as you can. Pay attention to their reactions, and adjust your own reactions and see how they go.

There's a great book called "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie, which is kind of old but the principles still apply today. It's a fantastic book that highlights a number of things that improve the soft skills thing. Pretty popular book and it's one of my favorites.

Best of luck!

By attending course on soft skills, reading books, watching tutorials, etc.

A good mentor can really help. I remember that on one course we were recording us and then we analyzed those recordings. This is a good method in my opinion.

How and when to push back.... I have observed that you should have solid emotional intelligence so that you can handle different personalities.

Any resources/books or leads on this topic ?

Get into sales. It’s basically 100% soft skills.

helps a lot to be neurotypical, white, male, upper class, all that…. the more ‘different’ you are the less benefit you’ll get from that kind of training.