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25.04: Upgrading the hardest skills
📅31 Oct 2025
by Sharon Torres
A skill-osophical take on hard versus soft skills, and how Platinum Pivot helps you upgrade the hardest skills.
Introduction
Introduction
So it's 2025, and I still low-key bristle when anyone (even people I admire!) says "soft skills."Â *shudder*
Srsly? Lol sigh.
I'll spare you the salty rant.
Would I love to evolve our language & culture to stop diminishing the value of "soft," or to use a label that creates real parity for human relational skills along with "hard" technical skills in STEM fields?
Absolutely. Working on it.
In the meantime, I cringe at hearing the hardest skills being called "soft."Â
Which is why I'm reclaiming them with a super nerdy pun. Lots of them.
The hardest upgrades for soft brains
The hardest upgrades for soft brains
We know from physics that two things can be true at the same time. I recklessly allude to the quantum superposition principle in the context of human skills:
TRUE: Technical skills can be hard.
AND
TRUE: Human socio-emotional relational skills can be hard. So hard, in fact, that many people deny they matter as much, or actively run away from them. 😱
Ooooh, spooky action at the distance between our ears! 👻
(That was a totally inaccurate and terrible quantum joke. On Halloween. You're welcome.)
Platinum Pivot is built on the idea that the next tiny pivot you might make for a better workplace interaction starts with awareness. It's a vital component to building the muscle memory that replaces old habits with better reflexes.Â
Remember: "muscle" memory actually happens in the brain.
The soft, squishy brain.
Essentially, we want to give willing users' brains a software upgrade for "soft" skills. Software for your soft awareness. Soft-aware. Get it??
Platinum Pivot empowers professionals with "soft-aware" upgrades, especially those of us in STEM where emotional fluency has been historically undervalued or omitted.
We can build better habits and have puns, too
We can build better habits and have puns, too
Over the last few years as a practicing engineer, I've identified a couple of soft-aware upgrade types. More may surface as the work continues. Also truly the puns wrote themselves…
Affirmware upgrades help us engage in more micro-affirmations and micro-validations, and have more affirming responses or initiative-taking.Â
Assertware upgrades helps us engage in more micro-assertions and have more constructive, curiosity-first assertive behaviors.Â
Collectively, micro-affirmations, micro-validations, and micro-assertions are the emotionally intelligent opposites of micro-aggressions: they are tiny ways to build someone (or yourself) up instead of putting them down.
Platinum Pivot is on a mission to share stories, practices, and tools that upgrade your soft-aware. Keep checking back for updates to the site!
Conclusion
Conclusion
If you're still reading this, your pun tolerance is admirably high. Bravo!
Whether you're looking to empower yourself or to improve your ally & upstander skills for someone else, upgrading your affirmware and assertware are fantastic ways to keep building your own "hardest skills" set.
May the platinum puns be with you.
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