32. Soft Skills | Andrew Murphy

Andrew Murphy, soft skill expert, with a combination of over 13 years of professional software engineering experience and a passion for leadership and communication skills.

Andrew, originally from the UK, is Australia based and has a consulting business on communication and leadership skills.

Main Points

• Andrew and I start with a brief definition of soft skills and the benefit of honing soft skills
• Then we follow by Andrew’s self-introduction and his career history with both IT hard skills and soft skills
• We talked about step 1 of learning soft skills – acknowledge that we all need to learn it and are willing to dedicate time to learn it.
• Andrew also shares that everybody CAN learn soft skills
• Andrew answers my question about how I should start after being convinced?
• How can I get true feedback about my soft skills? Andrew gives very good tips
• Where should I put the learning-soft-skills task into my to-do list?
• Why software engineers should also emphasize on this?
• Andrew also shares a list of resources that he considers great
• In the end, Andrew shares the top 5 important soft skill points: communication, giving feedback, influencing, conflict resolution, resilience. 

Links

• Andrew’s LinkedIn
• Andrew’s company website
• Simon Sinek’s book – Start With Why
• Simon Sinek’s book – Leaders Eat Last
• Andrew’s talk about communication model
• Book: The manager’s path

Video Teaser

The YouTube Video URL

My Takeaway for Soft Skills

The awareness about soft skills is already out there on the internet. There are even very successful podcasts talking about soft skills for developers, such as Soft Skills Engineering.

I learned from our guest Andrew that there is no magic to hone soft skills: prioritize it, spend time on it, rinse and repeat.

In addition, as discussed in this podcast, recording, and replay is a great way to gauge and improve.

At last, Simon Sinek’s books are epics, which I have already read before.

The book – The manager’s path, I’m halfway done after the chat with Andrew. I confirm that it is a REALLY REALLY good book targeted for IT technical people. you won’t regret reading it.

If you enjoy this episode, you might wanna check Personal Branding episode from David Liu.

Transcript

AI-generated, unedited.

[00:13] Hey everybody! This is Xi Xiao. This is yet another episode of Salesforce Way podcast. Today I'm sitting with Andrew Murphy from Australia. Hello, hello, Andrew. Hi, Xi. How are you? I'm good. I'm good. How about you? I'm good. I'm good. It's a little bit rainy in Melbourne right now, which is unusual, but enjoying the cool weather. It's a sunny day here in Finland. Usually, I always complain my weather. You know, it's the end of the summer. Yeah, so Andrew, I'm really excited to get you here. The main reason you are the first one, actually, you're not part of Salesforce ecosystem at all. I'm not. No. Yes, yes. So you are the really the first one from outside of the Salesforce world. And today, I understand you're gonna teach me the soft skills for the software engineers. Yeah, I'd love to. It's it's it's interesting because I've been I've been a developer for fifteen fifteen years at this point, but Salesforce isn't isn't it isn't something I've really learned a lot about. But I think the the the kind of that's the power of soft skills they transfer across all industries and all types of technology and and that's kind of how I like to define soft skills you know a lot a lot of people ask me to say you know what is what is soft skills and for me for me that definition is. A skill which transfers between the different

[01:43] industries. So you know, if we if we think about a hard skill like how to write code, how to structure a SQL query, how to you know understand Go, how to understand you know Liquid forms, like these these things are are hard skills because we need them in our industry. But the soft skills are the things that transfer across all the industries. I love that definition. But before we step into the details, would you mind to still introduce yourself? Sure. Yeah. So I originally from the UK. Started writing code when I was eight years old. I started with a ZX Spectrum. Have you ever used a ZX Spectrum? No. No. So this is. I mean, that's your generation. This is back in the days when you didn't have computer monitors. You'd plug your computers into your televisions. And and you'd you'd like code directly on your TV, and I I got into coding back then, and it's something that I've always used as a hobby, and then it became my career, and it became my passion, and it became something that you know I really really love doing. Started off as a VB6 developer. My very very first paid job was Visual Basic six, and then I moved into C sharp and .Net and did that for about ten years, and then moved into front end stuff with. Vue JS and you know React and Angular,

[03:13] but the thing the thing that always kind of I enjoyed most about the development was less so the technology, which you can probably see by the fact that I changed technology quite a lot. What what I enjoyed most was understanding business problems and working out how we can solve. Issues that customers are having and understand the things that can help the customer, and technology for me was always the way that I did that. But the thing that really got me excited was understanding the business that the customer was in. So you really have solid foundation on the hard skills, the programming skills, the computer science skills. But now, definitely, yeah, you you're more kind of like training people. I think you have your own business as well to to coach people. That's right. You know the soft skills. It's it's also important, right? Definitely, definitely. You know, I I always loved writing code, and I still still do it as a hobby. But for me, my my main focus now is to work with companies and individuals to find out how we can better use their hard skills. You know, because the a lot of people spend a lot of time focusing on learning. How do I learn this new framework? How do I implement this new this new technique? This new library? This new language? But at the end of the day, the thing that allows you to use that the best is your soft

[04:43] skills. You need hard skills to be at a certain level, but once you've reached that level, to go beyond that level, you've got to be focusing on your soft skills instead of your hard skills. I got it. So, let's step back. You said we are gonna talk a lot about the soft skills, but I think a lot of our listeners are like me. You know, we know we've heard about soft skills is important. But it's like the teenage sex, you know. Again, the same knowledge. Everybody talks about it. Nobody really knows what it really is and how to practice this stuff. That's the reason I try to bring you here to talk and to coach me. So how how do we start? Where from? Where should we start from? It starts from awareness. It starts from recognizing and and you know really being honest with ourselves that it's not something we've focused on in the past. And just being totally honest with ourselves that we need to start doing more of it going forward. And you know, there's lots and lots of great resources out there. You know, there's there's there's people that I'm sure everybody knows about. You know, you and I, see, have talked about Simon Sinek, and you know, these great people out there who put lots and lots of great content about these things. And you know, I think it's a case of balancing. Between making sure we keep our hard skills up to date, but also trying to get in some of those soft skills trainings, learnings,

[06:13] and mentorings. One of the questions that I get asked a lot is. Can I learn this? You know, is it is it something that is part of me? Am I never going to be able to learn these things, or can I actually learn these things? And you can. I remember back when I first got my first job in leadership, I made lots of mistakes. I made lots and lots of bad mistakes, and I learned a lot of these lessons the hard way. Back then, when I was learning these lessons, the internet didn't really exist in the way it exists now. You know, YouTube didn't exist when I had my first job as a leader. So the the people these days that are making those steps into learning soft skills, they've got resources available to them, which means they can accelerate their journey so much quicker than people like I could. That's that's excellent. You mentioned Simon Sinek. I'm going to put the link to his website just for our listeners to check his content. And I definitely like what he mentioned. And he got this why book, right? That was the first like made a really big blast in the internet. But yeah, yeah, it's it's a it's a book that's probably caused me to have more people annoyed at me than anything else. Anybody that works with me for a long time knows that my favourite question is why. And I think you know that that kind of delving into the fundamental reasons why

[07:44] we do what we do is really really powerful to what to to making best use of our hard skills. You know, at the end of the day, if we wrote software that didn't help anybody, didn't solve anybody's problems, then we would lose our jobs very quickly. So our software has to be helping somebody. Our software has to be providing value to somebody. And really and truly understanding who that person is and the value we're adding to them is the best way to keep building great software. Hmm. And I remember you also mentioned that for the soft skills, these are like. How would I say they are not changing all the time? So it's about communication, about the people to people. You know those skills. So you don't need to all the time to refresh and jump between different technology stack, right? Exactly. You know the the same soft skills that you learn as an Angular developer, they're the same skills you learn as React developer. You know they they transfer all the way across. When I do trainings with companies, you know we don't separate the trainings out by you know Angular developers and Vue JS developers. You know we we have everybody in the same room because these skills are the same. And you know we we quite often will do trainings with BAs and QAs and devs all in the same room together because it's the same skill set. There's you know there there's certain intricacies and there's certain

[09:14] kinds of things you might want to focus on slightly differently, especially especially when you go into leadership. The way that I always explain it is that these skills are important to everybody at every level in every organization, but leaders especially need to be so good at this. Because you know your own personal soft skills as a leader, they not only impact you, but they impact your team and they impact the end customer. Yeah, so good. Now I get the awareness. You know, in my mind, I understand it's important. How should I start? What should I do? Sure. So, you know, spending time going, I'm gonna, I'm gonna dedicate a certain part of my life to learning these things is is important. You know, next time you're going, I want to go to the to the conference and I want to, you know, learn about TypeScript and I want to learn about Dart and I want to learn about Go and Kotlin. Go, okay. Well, I'm here for a one day conference. I'm gonna make one of the things that I go to a soft skills workshop. Like you know, it's it might not seem fun and exciting as the other things, but it's going to get you more impact in the long run to your career. So just go into these things and practice, practice, practice. The the fact is that the way that our brains are structured and the way that we learn, we've got to keep reinforcing these things over time. It's it's there's kind of like a natural

[10:45] degradation. You know, we learn something. And then a week later, we've forgotten it. But if we reinforce that learning two days later, then it takes us two weeks to forget it. And if we reinforce it a week later, it takes us a month to forget it. So you've kind of got to keep reinforcing these things, and it's it's especially important as leaders that you know we practice these things in safe ways. You know, I'm not advocating. You know, for example, if the first time you're practicing your ability to give feedback is when somebody has just broken production. That's probably not the best time to to do your first ever piece of feedback. You know, practicing these things in safe ways is is important, and kind of building up and and slowly increasing the range at which we we feel comfortable. For example, communication. Like communication is a big one for me. the The ability to communicate technical concepts to non technical people, that's something that's so powerful in your career, especially as a leader. But you know, the first time you practice this shouldn't be to the CEO of your huge corporation.

[12:01] Finding a way to do it, whether the the kind of risk is is small, is the best way to do it, and then just build from there. I like what you mentioned—the communication skills to non tech technical people, and. If I put myself into the shoes, I would choose one of my peer. For example, maybe a salesperson. We go for a lunch. Then we select a topic. I explain him to make sure he can get the things that the you know that I I try to explain to him. But um, is there some good resources? How should I really practice? I I need to get some you know steps or practical guidance. Right? It's it's hard for me to say. Just communication. Sure. There's there's plenty of of models out there for communication. I can I can share a link to the talk that I do on communication with you, which which breaks down you know a model that I use for communication. So whenever I'm going to do a presentation or an email or I kind of have a model that I use. But there's there's there's there's great models and great things out. And again, I really, really love that taking somebody out for lunch or a coffee and explaining a complex technical idea to them. I love that, and I think you know doing that in safe places with people who you trust and people who trust you is is a great first step. And then you know, writing blog posts, writing LinkedIn articles.

[13:31] You know, I don't know what the the meetup scene is is like in Finland, but here in in Melbourne, the meetup scene is huge. You know, there's thousands and thousands of people that get together on a weekly basis and talk about technical topics. And there's there's great meetups which kind of are cross-discipline meetups. So there'll be a meetup that has UI people and UX people and PO people and devs and project managers and all of these people in the same place. So they've got to learn to speak a common language and they've got to learn to understand each other. And that's a great way to practice those skills. I like that. I can also search the local meetup sessions here. Hi,

[14:21] here's a quick note. Don't forget to check the show notes of this episode, where you can find short video teasers, the guest contact information, the important complementary materials, and my own learning points, among many other useful information. In addition, I have also started a YouTube channel to share important stuff I learned from my guests. If you are serious about your Salesforce developer journey, you should definitely consider subscribing to this channel. And obviously, the name of this YouTube channel is Salesforce Way. Now let's get back to the show, shall we?

[15:04] Um, I pay personally. I pay attention to the soft skills and communications. I think I have a good level. But I never really to measure that, and you know it's hard to get people to give you true feedback. You know, constructive, and people will say, "Oh, you just did fine." Especially the culture here in Finland. So, is there a good way to really get, you know, get the feedback? You've hit upon a very a very difficult problem to solve. This is the the people around you know how good your soft skills are. You can't hide it. But you know, if they, if they, if there's kind of a culture or of not sharing that feedback, it can be quite difficult. There's there's really no way to to for you yourself to judge what your soft skills are kind of objectively, because a big part of soft skills is self awareness and you know an understanding of yourself. And if your self awareness isn't very good, then any any self judgment about yourself is just going to be completely off. So honestly, the best way is is what you said, which is to ask people. You know, it's to to take people out for coffee. It's to you know take somebody you trust and say, you know. Jessica, I'm I'm really wanting to learn and I'm really wanting to improve and this is something that

[16:35] I think is really important for me and my career. You know, I'm looking at making the next step. I want to become a leader. I want to become a senior, and this is something that I know I need to focus on. I would really really appreciate your feedback. That that's to be honest, that's that's the only way. Some companies we do some work with some companies where we do 360 retrospectives. Have you have you heard of that? Yes, I heard that. Yeah, the people around you give you feedback online, right? Exactly, exactly. So it's it's you know rather than just asking your boss for your performance review, you ask your boss, you ask your peers, and you ask the people under you. And it's it's a really really effective way of getting feedback. But it's got to be anonymous. If it's not anonymous, it doesn't work. Yeah. Also, I think it depends on the person. For example, me, since I'm I'm really keen to learn this stuff, so. In the in the past, we did the 360 for me, and even by reading those texts, I know who wrote those texts because you know just those people around me. Yeah, you get to learn their way of writing. Yeah, I sincerely really you know appreciate to those people give me the the real feedback. I I love that. Yeah, yeah. I think I think you know it's it can be it can be confronting. You know, it can be scary.

[18:05] It can be something that challenges your view of yourself. Yes, but I think it's it's a really really important thing to do. And something else that that you've just reminded me what what I started doing. So I'm not a natural public speaker. It's something that I've had to work very very hard at. Even though I do a lot of public speaking, a lot of training now. The when I first started doing it, I recorded myself. So the very very first talk that I ever did in public, I have on video somewhere. Dare you put it on the internet? It's not on the internet. But that that

[18:49] is really really hard to watch, but it was so useful. I noticed so many things about what I did. I noticed that I I move around a lot. I noticed that I move my hands a lot, and I noticed that I kept saying the same word over and over and over again. And you know, if you if I'd have asked, because I did, my girlfriend was in the audience, and I said, you know, how did I do? She oh, you did really well. You know, don't worry about it. You you did really well. And it's like, no, I want to know. I want to know. Yeah, actually, I did exact the same thing as you did. It's like last week I had a presentation for our company folks, and I recorded in the video. And people say you did a fantastic job, but when I watch back, then I notice like my my hand gestures isn't so natural, and sometimes I stop there, and I wasn't like how to say keep the the energy and the emotion really high to engage people. I can't do that for for a long time. So those things are are so priceless that you can later focus on the practice. So recordings yeah are powerful definitely. Definitely, and and I think, sorry, go on. Yeah, I mean, I just want to add that, like, I'm doing podcasts, I'm doing the Skype things, I'm doing YouTube things. Those things are all recorded, so it will be really comfortable the first time for you to listen to your own voice and look at your own face. But it's just getting smoother and smoother.

[20:20] It is, it is, and and you know you get to a point where, um, you know you're watching it back and you're you're not even it doesn't even feel like you anymore, you know it feels like another person and that's the point where you've kind of emotionally distanced yourself from the recording and you can start looking objectively at did this person on that screen perform well. You know, it's not me; it's somebody on the screen, and therefore I can objectively think about did Did that person perform well? Another question. I have is that nowadays we have so many things to learn the hard skills and we need keep it up for our work. We need to get the salary paid. We need to satisfy our customers, you know, and our peers. So there are so many those things usually in our software engineer's to do list. I need to learn Angular and into this and soft skills are not part of that list. So now I need to put soft skills onto the list. I need to drop off something. So it's kind of a painful process, you know. I need to focus on these smaller uh zone instead of just focus on the hardware skills and it's kind of a habit changing. So do you have any recommendation for for that? I want to kind of tackle that in two ways. The first one is companies are starting to recognize that these skills are important to their employees, and they're starting to recognize that it needs

[21:50] to be. Part of the way that they teach and develop and improve the people in their organizations. So I do a lot of great work with companies here in Australia that recognise that investing in their people is actually the best thing to do. I think there's a there's a lot of issues with and and I hold my hand up I have been this person you know the new the new leader who doesn't understand the difference between being a senior role model software developer and being a technical leader of people they're two fundamentally different roles and if you if you make that transition and don't understand the difference then you end up being less productive. If you learn soft skills, you actually become more productive. So companies are starting to recognise that, and they're starting to recognise that training these skills actually gets more output from the same person.

[22:53] So that's the. That's the kind of company focus of of you know when I because you know the the the stuff we're talking about now is the stuff that I do as my day job now you know I do this training with company and and and that's the kind of discussions that I have with companies is you know these things lead to increased increased retention so people stay at companies longer if they if they're getting improved in their soft skills and they are actually more performant in what they're doing they perform better. So that's that's the company angle. Now you selfishly, as you as a as an individual thinking about your career, when you look at the statistics, there's a huge difference between the people who the people who are great at soft skills and the people who are just great at hard skills. So when you look at the the kind of top level performers and you look at why they're top level performers. Two thirds of the reason is their soft skills, and only one third of the reason is their hard skills. And that's just a fact. That all top performers, they're top performers because their soft skills are better. And this actually changes and increases the higher up in leadership you go. So once you're kind of in senior leadership, eighty percent of the difference between a high performing senior leader and a low performing senior leader is their soft skills. And and you you can you can see why because you

[24:23] know when you're when you're a senior leader the people underneath you there's there's dozens of them hundreds of them and you've got to deal with all of those people and that becomes the main focus of your job you know the higher up in leadership you are the more the focus on your soft skills is important and the focus on your hard skills reduces because more and more of your day is dealing with people rather than dealing with code and servers and you know languages and frameworks. I I like what you just mentioned, so, I I didn't know how exactly I started to pay attention to soft skills, but I just kind I maybe because I'm a people person, you know, I always enjoy talking with people. I always love to talk with people. And we talked a little bit about this before recording that software engineers we are just normal people. We thought we are kind of special, but we still we're human beings. So these soft skills, yeah, the same thing for everybody. Yeah, and I think I think there's so much we can learn from other industries, especially you know the the way the way that I always define soft skills is they're the skills that transfer across industries. So you know, if we define it that way, then we should we shouldn't be afraid of looking at other industries and going, okay, well, how is manufacturing dealing with difficulties? How are sports dealing with people difficulties? How is marketing dealing with people difficulties? Because the same kinds of issues come up. You

[25:53] know the the the ability to translate something complex in your domain of experience to somebody that doesn't have that knowledge. That isn't a tech tech specific thing. Doctors do that all the time. Chemists do that all the time, engineers do that all the time, and so you know these skills are skills that lots of other industries have, and and we should be looking at how they do that. Tech is we're still a new industry, you know tech. The way it is has only been going for you know a few dozen years. Engineering, medicine, these have been going hundreds of years, and there's there's no doubt things that we can learn from them, as well as things they can learn from us. Okay. And one more thing, I think we should be aligned. Is that when we talk about soft skills, fundamentally, we do need to care about people, the other people, instead of yourself. So that's something hard to transform. I mean, originally, you know, everybody is selfish. You know, we that's part of our gene. But you have to denote yourself when you are a leader. Then you start to care people more than yourself. So I think that will also help you to improve yourself skills, right? Yeah, definitely, and you know, it's not that you should stop caring about yourself. There's a lot of

[27:23] a lot of soft skills that are focused on yourself. So you know your ability to deal with stress, your ability to to deal with you know being disengaged personally and a bit of apathy. These are all important things on ourselves. But you know you're writing that a lot of the soft skills we tend to think about are focused on our interface with other people. And you know it's the the the days of a software developer being able to lock himself in a room and solve a problem by himself. For a week, just don't exist anymore. You know we're teams. We've got people. We have to work with other human beings, and you know that human-human interface is much more important than the human-computer interface. You know, the it used to be the case that you know there'd be a software developer focusing on one problem by themselves in isolation, and now we have ten, twenty, thirty, a hundred people solving the same problem because the software is so much more complex than it used to be, and that additional complexity in software means we've got additional complexity in people. Okay, I got it. So since Andrew, you are in this industry, software skill, and you are doing trainings, would you mind to share us some really good resources? You know, just like a table of content, so that people later could look into those stuff in details.

[28:53] Definitely, I'll share. I'll share some resources with you. There's the one of the the best books I can recommend for people who want to go in leadership, and this this will be in the list. But just to call it out especially, there's a there's a book called The Manager's Path. And it's all about the difference and understanding the difference between being a senior engineer, you know, being a role model, emulating what other people should do, and being a technical leader of people and what that transition looks like. But then going from senior to leader, from leader to leader of leaders, and what that transition looks like. You know now the people under us and individual contributing developers. Now the people under us are other leaders. And how do we develop them? And and the kind of transition in soft skills that's needed between all those three different phases. I think it's a really really good book that I recommend everybody to read, even if you're not a leader. Exactly exactly. Because reading book actually, you don't need to only read the the book that you are doing daily. You need to open your eye views, right? You need to understand those things. You don't need to practice. Maybe some something you don't need to practice now, but be aware of those. Points is super important in our life. I think. Yeah, yeah. Especially if, especially if you know you have ambitions of becoming a leader, like being aware of these skills and techniques. Um, the next

[30:24] time that your leader says something to you, you can go, Oh, I recognize the technique that they're using. Um, and you can go, Okay, I see, I see why they're doing this. And not only do I understand why they're doing it, it's actually working. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, like giving giving feedback, especially is one of those you know recognizing the the patterns and the structures and the different ways of giving feedback. You know, but quite quite often because the people I work with were all very highly skilled with with soft skills. You know, we'll we'll quite often go, Are you using SBI on me? No, I'm using SIW.

[31:03] Yeah, I don't know these terms, but I know there's this like seventy thirty, right? Yes. Yeah, exactly. It's it's that kind of thing. Okay. Okay. Um, another thing just came into my mind is that since I'm listening to podcasts, a lot of podcasts, so there are the podcasts focus on the software skills for developers, software engineers. How do deal with your burnout from? On your work, how to deal with like a toxical working environment? I I recommend to our listeners to find some of those also to listen to. Right, definitely, definitely. I I think I think what's really really important to remember is that these are things that can be learned, and they're things that you know help us be more individually productive. Even if we have no ambition to be a leader, even if we just want to stay on the tools for the rest of our careers and focus on making really, really good code, learning these things are still important because you know we all suffer from burnout, we all suffer from imposter syndrome, you know we all suffer from you know our lack of confidence in the things that we're doing, and even if we don't want to manage people. These things can still help us individually contribute more and individually stay at our peak performance level as much as possible. Excellent, excellent. I think we can draw end here, Andrew. Do you still have something else

[32:33] you want like to to share? I'd love to just. Somebody once asked me. I had a conversation with somebody yesterday, and they asked me what what are the if I was to pick the top five soft skills that I think people should learn. Okay, what what what would they be? So I'd I'd love to share that. That's because you know that. It's it's a bit it's a bit like technology. You know, if if a developer came to me and said, you know, what technology should should I learn? It's like the world is out there. There's so many to learn, but there's certain ones which you would say, you know, you definitely need to spend some time looking at this. You definitely spend so that this is kind of my list. So the first one is is what we've already talked about, which is communication. Like that's my number one. Learning about how to communicate effectively is really, really crucial to helping you in your career. The translating of tech to non-tech, which we've already talked about, but even even understanding how to communicate between different tech people and how to get people to understand what's going on in your head. So that's number one for me. Okay. Number two is how to give really excellent feedback to people. You know, getting people to understand what they did and the impact what they did had on you and the rest of the team. And this doesn't have to be a leadership skill. You know, you can I can observe something you're doing as a peer and give you feedback on it. I think to me that's really really important. And then the the kind of the combination of those two things is influence.

[34:03] So your ability to influence somebody else. So this is how do I structure my words so that I can encourage you to move towards a particular action or idea or thought. You know, this is something. How do I how do I spend the time structuring my discussion with somebody so that they will do the thing I want them to do? And that doesn't have to be a bad thing. You know, it's it's like with any skill, you can use it for the good or you can use it for the bad. You know, influence to me is how do you get somebody to understand your point of view in a way that makes sense to them. This could be you know you you need to give me more budget for this project because if we don't get another developer, it's not going to end on time. Like those kinds of discussions, and that to me fits under influence. And then, kind of building on top of that is conflict resolution. Like, you know, we love a good argument as developers, but it's it's making sure that the the conflict we have, the discussions, the arguments we have, are productive conflict. You know, the the the differences between arguing and complaining about a person and arguing and complaining about an idea. Those are two fundamentally different things. You know, if you're if you're having conflict about somebody, that's unproductive. If you're having conflict about an idea, that's a productive conflict,

[35:34] and kind of the differences between those two things. Thanks. Is fourth or is it already fifth? There's one last one. That was number four. Okay. And the last the last one is resilience. Resilience is your is what we were talking about before. Burnout, stress. Like, how do I deal with the fact that life is tough? You know, how do I deal with the fact that being a coder is hard? That is is the the kind of turned in on yourself soft skill that I think is the most important. Because if if you can't if you can't stay productive, if you start can't stay calm and you get stressed all the time and you get angry all the time, you are not going to have a successful career. Thanks, thanks Andrew. Just to give you a little bit the comment here is, I didn't expect that the feedback skill is part of the five, uh, you know the top five list. But but after you explained to me, I think it's important. I think I yeah it's important. Yeah. Yeah. To me, it builds on top of communication. It's part of communication, but it's a specific type of communication. I enjoy that. I I think I will pay more attention to that. And also, what you mentioned is the resilience—the last one, right? I think different people might need to find a different ways to to be resilient. Maybe some somebody use religion, for example. You know, yes, trust—that's a powerful way. Some somebody follow some can be some some psychol psychological.

[37:05] I don't know books or principles. So you definitely need to find your way, in my opinion, to to have a balanced life. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think so. It's for me, you know, it's kind of like being a sports player. You know, you can you can be the best kind of physical sports player in the world, but if you don't have the mental ability to stay in the zone and to stay performing, it doesn't matter how good physically you are. And that's that's kind of the analogy that I draw to software developers. It doesn't matter, you know, if you're a this mythical ten x coder, but you're angry all the time and you go off the handle all the time. Doesn't matter if you can sometimes be ten x. You might only be averaging a two x. I got it. Thanks, Andrew. That was a great lesson from you. So, how do people find you? You have Twitter, right? I don't have Twitter. You can you can look at me on on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is where I spend most of my time. Um, so you can look at Andrew A Murphy on LinkedIn. I'm sure we can put that in the show notes. Yes. Um, the the the company website PillarLeaders. dot com. That also has some good resources on it. Um, you know we've got free free ebooks and information on the events that we do. Excellent. I will put all this information in our share notes, and our listener definitely know they will check the share notes and the link to your. Information,

[38:35] your resources, perfect, excellent, Andrew. It was a great chatting with you. Thanks for sharing. Yeah, thank you, C. Okay.

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