Improve your soft skills

EQ advice on being a better storyteller, writer, public speaker, and how to develop executive presence

Ethan & Jason here—welcome to a *paid member-only* edition of Level Up: Your source for executive insights, high performance habits, and specific career growth actions.

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If you are not a paid subscriber, here’s popular articles you missed:

1. 4 Behaviors of Top CEOs: Harvard study findings

2. Become a "real executive": 3 skills for executive leadership

3. How you start a new role influences your success in that role: 4 immediate actions you can take

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I got fired twice because of poor soft skills.

Then, I became a VP at Amazon, where my job was more than 80% based on soft skills.

This was possible because soft skills are very learnable, and I developed processes to systematically improve my soft skills throughout my career.

Now, soft skills are one of the main things I discuss with my coaching clients, as they are often the barrier between being a competent manager and being ready to be a true executive.

Today’s newsletter is centered around improving your soft skills—namely, storytelling, writing, executive presence, and speaking in front of large crowds.

The questions come from our Level Up Newsletter Community, and they reflect real challenges being faced by professionals every day.

To help me go in-depth, you will also get advice from my good friend, Rich Hua, Worldwide Head of EPIC Leadership at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the Founder of EQ@Amazon. His EQ training program has helped over 400,000 Amazonians and 100,000 customers develop their EQ “power skills” (officially past the half million mark!)—to say that Rich is an EQ expert is an understatement.

Note: We did not plan nor align our responses in advance, so you may read similar or different advice (which is a good thing)!

4 questions our community members asked:

1. “How do I improve my storytelling skills?” — Sales Operations Leader

2. “What resources or tools would you recommend to get better in writing?” — Tech Program Leader

3. “What are the top 3 ways to improve my executive presence?” — Product Manager

4. “I am uncomfortable talking in front of large crowds and unknown people, but as I move up, I need to do this more. How do I get comfortable with this?” — Director of Technical Program Management

If you have a question for me, submit it in the form at the end of this article—I look forward to reading through them.

From Rich Hua—In terms of improving these social-emotional “power skills,” there are a few things to keep in mind:

1. Understand how important they really are. Research has found that EQ (not IQ) accounts for a majority of long-term career success. Higher social-emotional skills improve work performance, innovation, creativity, job satisfaction, and well-being (lowers burnout). These skills are not “nice to have” but vital capabilities for career (and personal) success.

2. Start with self-awareness. Understand your strengths and weaknesses–what you’re already good at and what you’re not. You can take a myriad of assessments (many of them free) or simply ask 5-7 trusted people, “I’d like to get your advice. I want to improve as a colleague/employee/leader/friend. Please give me two ideas for what I can do.” Asking for advice is more effective than asking for feedback because it’s forward-looking and solution-oriented (feels positive) vs. backward-looking and critical (can feel negative). As best-selling author Ryan Holiday says in Ego is the Enemy, “The greatest ability is to be able to honestly assess one’s own ability. Without it, improvement is not possible.”

3. Surround yourself with good books and good people. Famed Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz once said that the two things that impact your life the most are “the books you read and the people you know.” Read quality books and build quality relationships. You can find an excellent list of books on my website. When it comes to quality relationships, make sure you have people in your life who give you helpful input and encouragement, people who possess the qualities and skills to which you aspire, or both. Remember that you will be the average of your five closest friends.

4. Practice deliberately. There is only one way to get better at something, and that is by practicing–but you must do it deliberately. That means working on things that are just at the edge of (or slightly beyond) your comfort zone and getting quality feedback/advice on how you are doing. This means getting comfortable with being uncomfortable. You will “fail” a lot at first, but think of FAIL as “first attempt in learning.” As G. K. Chesterton said, “anything worth doing is worth doing badly (at first).”

1. “How do I improve my storytelling skills?” — Sales Operations Leader

The good news is storytelling is an art you can study. There are great books on it, and the best current author on this topic is Matthew Dicks. He has two books called Storyworthy and Stories Sell. I've read all of one and part of the other. However, you don't have to go as far as reading the books to get started. What you have to do is learn to love the art of storytelling, and from there, you will naturally gravitate towards practice and resources that will help you improve (like the books).

The thing to realize is that all of us tell stories all the time. When we talk to our friends, we're usually storytelling. So, if we shift our focus to many of the ways we already communicate through stories, we can notice areas for improvement. As you are thinking about the stories you already tell, focus on the elements that construct each story: Suspense, emotion, a punch line or hook to hold people's attention, and tension. Understand that these are the building blocks of a story, and take notice of how they appear in the stories you tell and hear.

Once you have done that, the second thing is to practice. I tell stories in my classes, and they are usually stories that I've already told many times. Because of this, I don't have to think about how to put it together or how it flows, even though it's not memorized word for word. Being comfortable with the story after many practice rounds allows me to tell it better each time.

Think about the key lines of your story, the key emotions, and the key pieces that your audience will relate to. Storytelling is all about involving people, so if is no emotional hook or relatable emotional experience, it's unlikely to work.

I learned to tell stories largely because I love doing it, but also because I honed my thinking about what made my stories compelling and dramatic. The key point to telling a compelling story, at least according to Matthew Dicks, is that the subject of the story must learn or change in some way at the end. In personal stories, that is us!

When crafting our own stories, we need to include how the experience changed or influenced us in order for the story to be compelling.

Rich Hua:

Connect with emotions. This means your emotions and the emotions of your listeners. To connect with your emotions, ask questions such as: What do I feel about this story (both positive and negative)? What makes me excited, happy, or inspired? What makes me sad, angry, or disappointed? The more you connect with what’s inside of you, the better you can channel it and express it. Connecting with other people’s emotions requires empathy, specifically perspective-taking! Consider ahead of time: What will interest my audience? What will make them curious or capture their imagination? What do I want people to feel when I tell this story? What emotion am I trying to elicit?

(Note: even better than perspective-taking is perspective-seeking. This means asking your listeners some questions to get to know them and confirm/disconfirm your thoughts. This, of course, may not always be possible.)

One common mistake people make when story-telling is they only ask, “What information do I want to convey? What do I want people to know?” They talk to the head, but not the heart. Effective story-telling is about engaging both.

Another mistake is talking about something you are interested in but others are not. You wind up sharing a lot of details that you care about but others don’t. The result is that you come across as boring or irrelevant. Instead, consider what details are important to the audience? What should I include? What can I leave out?

Once you understand yourself and your audience, you can work on telling the story in an effective way. The most compelling stories are at the intersection of what is meaningful to you + what is meaningful to your listeners.

2. “What resources or tools would you recommend to get better in writing?” — Tech Program Leader

My number one piece of advice is practice. Find something that will cause you to practice a lot. This could be posting on social media, writing a blog, or having a pen pal. The point is that the thought process for writing is different than other thought processes we use in our daily lives, so you need to engage with this thought process regularly if you would like to improve.

Number two, find a way to get feedback. Social media is great for this because the feedback is very quick and very direct. I post all the time on LinkedIn, and people comment in ways that teach me about my writing. They comment about what I missed, which shows me a gap in my writing. They misinterpret me, which shows me where I have been unclear. These comments show me how my writing is interpreted once it is let loose into the wild, and that teaches me how to express myself in ways that can be understood more effectively. The key to get better at anything is a tight feedback loop, so the more you write and the more feedback you get, the faster you will improve. It doesn't really matter what you write as long as you do it consistently, get feedback, and implement the feedback.

There are also plenty of resources you can use, including classes, tools, and editing services. I personally use an editor who gives me weekly feedback on my writing in addition to line-by-line edits that also help me learn. I also know that my editor, Daniel, uses a number of tools to help with his editing. These include Grammarly Pro, Hemingway, and ChatGPT. These tools are not just helpful for grammar and redaction but also for helping you recognize when you aren’t being clear.

However, the important thing to remember is that no tool or editing help will improve your writing if you aren’t writing consistently. That is the beginning and end of improving your writing- write more. Everything else is a detail. A helpful detail, but a detail nonetheless.

For more advice that comes from my writing, read Daniel's (my editor) excerpt on how to write clearly in a newsletter from a few months back.

Rich Hua:

This question is quite broad, and the specifics will vary with the type of writing you want to do (e.g., persuasive vs. technical). That being said, there are some specific things you can do to improve your writing. The first two are a little more well-known, while the last one is not so much.

1. Read…a lot. Read the works of good authors. There is nothing like filling your mind with content from good writers to inform your own writing.They provide you with examples that you can emulate. In terms of the art of writing, two essential books are Elements of Style, by Strunk and White and On Writing Well, by William Zinsser.

2. Write…a lot. And seek feedback on your writing. The more you write, the better you’ll become. Be willing to create a lot of bad stuff to get to the good stuff. Research shows that people who generate a lot of content (even if most of it isn’t great) will ultimately generate more great content (vs. people who try to generate a small amount of “great” content). For feedback, you can seek it from competent writers or use Gen AI.

   1. Tip: ask for specific feedback. Don’t just ask “How is this?” but provide context. This means stating your intention/purpose, identifying your audience, and defining your constraints. Asking out what parts resonated and were clear and what parts didn’t resonate or were not clear.

3. One important thing that many writers don’t consider enough is the balance between the analytical and emotional–influencing the head and the heart. Good writing impacts both–especially if it’s meant to persuade, which is the goal of much business writing. In the corporate/tech world, we tend to overindex on the data and writing tends to be dry and uninspiring. The ratio of facts to feelings should, of course, be determined by the audience, the context, and the goal, but we need to remember that executives and engineers are all humans who experience emotions. From a neurobiological perspective, people can’t make decisions without engaging the emotional centers of their brain. Thus, to persuade people, you need to win “hearts and minds”–not minds and minds. Developing this awareness and skill will make you more influential in your writing. Here is a great article from MIT Sloan Review about this concept.

3. “What are the top 3 ways to improve my executive presence?” — Product Manager