Honor Your Soft Skills for Business Success
By Darla LeDoux, Founder of Sourced™ and Author of the books Shift The Field and Retreat and Grow Rich

I run a business helping magical people access their soft skills and use them to lead their companies and change lives. 

Becoming a transformational coach wasn’t a predictable path for me. As an engineer, I was used to using numbers and logic to help me make my decisions.

As a kid, I was always more interested in soft skills. I was a peer helper at school. We mentored younger students to feel confident and self-expressed. In elementary school! It came naturally to me as a part of my expression. 

However, I went to school for engineering because I was good at math and science, and my math teacher said to me once, “If you can, you should become an engineer because you will make a lot of money.” 

I wanted to make a lot of money. 

I grew up in a small town, I didn’t have many opportunities or see many people with many resources. I needed to get out of there to find resources to do what I wanted. So I heard to “use math and science and make a lot of money.” So I went on to become an engineer at Proctor and Gamble. 

At one of my reviews (a positive review; I even received a promotion to Senior Engineer), my supervisor said, “Your soft skills are great, Darla, but they will only get you so far here.” 

There was a part of me that thought, that’s bullshit. My soft skills were what got me promoted! I was doing consumer research and was out in the field interviewing customers about what they liked/disliked about our products. I could feel the energy behind what they were saying about the product (Compassion Magic). I could connect the threads between what I would observe in the field to create the insights that were driving our innovation (Recognition Magic). 

Those were soft skills, and they were not valued. 

He said, “to continue to get promoted, you need to work in a lab as a chemical engineer.” (my degree). So to be the leader of the people, you have to tone down your soft skills and amp up your ability to work in a lab. It could have made more sense, but that was the company line. 

“Your soft skills will only get you so far here,” he said. There was a part of me that thought, “Bullshit,” but another part of me believed him. 

Even when I left corporate and started working in the coaching field, a part of me thought that coaching was less valuable than the technical stuff I had been doing. I was sure I would have to cut back on my spending and live in poverty to do what I loved. 

Does anyone feel that way? 

It has been 13+ years of business for me marketing my soft skills and helping others develop and market their soft skills. 

 As we get to a place where media is so fragmented, and there is no one central source that everyone trusts to tell us what we should or shouldn’t do, our ability to hear our inner knowing and our intuition and to discern what is right and true for us is only going to become more and more important. 

If you have ever thought that your soft skills are not enough, know that it has taken me a few transformations to get to where I know that there is nothing more valuable. 

Please take the Sourced Magic Quiz to find out how your magic works.