Ask HN: What are your best “soft skill” resources?

Harvard's Program on Negotiation.

'Any meeting, discussion, or human contact, is basically a negotiation.' is their stance, with a real emphasis on role play. Position vs. Interest, Group vs. 1-1, etc.

The role play exercises can be downloaded from http://www.pon.harvard.edu/store/ * Free for checking / testing with detailed notes for the trainer / post-exercise * Low price for use (around $3 dollars/copy licensed use - super low for what they bring)

What do they bring? Really accelerated understanding of behavior (yours and theirs) in any interaction you have. This is be done via role-play and reflection, not a reading and 'know it' resource, so download a few and play them with colleagues.

Reading your website now. All the more exposure, all the more to learn.

I do disagree with your assessment of Myers-Briggs and DiSC, however; perhaps that's because of my exposure to them differs:

I've always seen Myers-Briggs as an example of self-discovery, rather than putting others into a box. i.e. "Are you aware you do these things?" with the answer often "No" or "Actually, I thought I was the opposite." My first company did it for everyone in the on-boarding 2 weeks training/induction period. It was useful for self reflection.

DiSC: Every training I've been exposed to started really clearly with a line like "This is a tool for understanding people and their environment. Your home and work environment, for example, are probably different, and so is your communication in these environments. Likewise, your work environment changes over time and role. DiSC types are not about putting people into a box, and people are not a single type, but a combination of types with stronger weightings in some areas."

I urge technical people to explore non-technical subjects and general "well roundedness". I've gotten immense relaxation and satisfaction from community art classes, martial arts, yoga, etc. There's a powerful argument that technical work is inherently creative, but creative work without the technical is something else entirely.

I also urge technical people to study history, language, speech, public performance and public speech giving. All of those things give a sense of perspective, and abilities to confer with partners and customers on a level that most technical folks don't understand.

Public performance in particular enables one to overcome lots of fears and be able to talk in front of both crowds and executives. This capability is often rewarded in important ways that build one's career...and the only way to get good at it is to do it.

Unfortunately, as Pericles said, "Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you." (Sometimes also attributed to Trotsky)

Let me make a post about training empathy.

The book Search Inside Yourself by Chade-Meng Tan is one of the best books I know. It describes scientifically validated practices of the mind that you an do by yourself that will boost your empathy and other parts of your emotional intelligence. So reading the book is part 1, part 2 is performing the exercises.

In my experience I got to amazing levels of empathy by doing these exercises. I felt like I had godlike skills. My intuition could immediately signal me if a woman liked me (I was single at the time). I could spot feelings that my friends had that they were not aware off. I could feel subtle emotional cues in my own face very consciously.

But the moment I started to stop practicing, my level got down a bit above baseline before I started, so structural gains are hard to keep. It goes about the same rate as any other skill, e.g. if you never play guitar anymore then five years from now you'll be a lot worse in playing guitar. Another downside is that everything you see has a bigger impact on you. So when you'd go to an action movie, you'd feel like you're right in it. When you look at a rose you feel like you're a rose, that sort of thing. When you drink one sip of alcohol you feel the effect of it already on your perception in very subtle ways.

The reason I stopped these practices is because I didn't know how to combine it with studying, which is a real cognitive endeavour, while this is being very aware of how your visceral sensations of your body feel. That's why I'm going back at it after I graduate and seek a way to combine cognition with being very aware of the feelings in my body.

One final thing: I believe books train deliberation aka the slow system. Exercises, mental or physical, train the fast system. Checkout Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. I believe it's a useful approximation myself to how thinking works.