 Welcome to episode 233 of the Engineering Career Coach podcast. The first podcast dedicated to helping engineers and technical professionals with both their personal and professional development. In this episode, I'll be talking to Dennis Durand, a leading expert in the construction industry with more than 30 years of experience and the author of the highly praised book, Soft as Steel, which focuses on the vital importance of developing and valuing soft skills. But in this episode, we'll be talking to him about the importance of developing and valuing soft skills to build relationships and succeed in business and life. I'm your host, Jeff Perry, the new host of this podcast. I have a background in mechanical and software engineering and now serve as a leadership and career coach for engineers. I provide engineering and software pros with professional coaching to help develop soft skills like leadership and mindset to unlock hidden potential and remove self and coach roadblocks for career and life. I also founded More Than Engineering to bring together my love for engineering and technology with my passion for helping people improve and live more fulfilled lives. Now let me tell you a little bit more about our guest today, Dennis Durand. Dennis has successfully served the construction industry for over 30 years as a contractor, consultant, strategic trainer and facilitator, development coach and public speaker. He brings a multifaceted perspective to people and organizations and there are two words that have continued to follow Dennis and capture his passion, people and service. His message on the vital importance of developing and valuing soft skills is the leading topic of his seminars and the very essence of the message in his highly praised book, Soft as Steel, written to equip readers with the tools to be successful not just in business, but in life and relationships. With his unique, entertaining and dynamic style of presenting, Dennis invites audiences to ponder the fundamental strategic importance of soft skills or people skills to building relationships and making a substantial profit as a business. Everyone inside and outside of the construction industry has areas in need of improvement. Dennis is dedicated to helping them understand this truth and more importantly guide them to a plan of action. And now, let me bring you into our main segment with a quote that is applicable to today's topic from Jim Rohn. Take advantage of every opportunity to practice your communication skills so that when important occasions arise, you will have the gift, the style, the sharpness, the clarity and the emotions to affect other people. Alright, now it's time for the main segment of our episode. Today's topic is about developing your soft skills as an engineer. I'd like to welcome our guest, Dennis Doran. He's the author of Soft as Steel. Dennis, welcome to the Engineering Career Coach podcast. Jeff, it's really a pleasure to be with you today and to talk about soft skills. Now, Dennis, before we jump into the topic for today, can you tell our listeners a little bit about your career path and how you got to where you are today? Sure. My career began after I completed a bachelor's degree in accounting. So my education is as an accountant. And as you might be able to discern as you listen to me over the course the next little bit, I learned after a couple of years that I'm anything but an accountant. From the very beginning, one of my strengths was the fact that I seemed interested in people. That sometimes translated me talking too much or asking too many questions, but I seemed to have an interest in people even when my task was simply to ask them to provide me the backup for an invoice or something of that as an auditor. So that's where I began my career and within a few years I began to engage with the construction industry first as an accountant and then later as a consultant for a fairly large consulting and accounting firm. So my entree into the world of construction came after a brief career as an accountant. And so my journey then continued on. I was involved in starting a number of companies in the construction sector and also opening doors and closing doors as the cycle of businesses go. And I continued on my journey. I filled roles with general contractors as a project manager. I spent some time working for a company that did safety related consulting and audit work in the construction sector. And I was also the vice president of professional development for one of the major professional associations again in the construction industry. So that's kind of my journey. And then a few years ago I left the company that I was with and decided it was time for me to follow my calling. And my calling is to inform, educate, motivate and hopefully inspire people in our industry and others about the importance of developing, valuing and developing soft skills. Well, that's excellent. And I'm excited to dive in to talk more with you about this. So can we start off? Can you just tell us what are soft skills exactly and why do they even matter? Yeah. So the simple description of what soft skills are is to start by saying that soft skills aren't really skills. What they really are are your qualities, attributes, behaviors. They're an indication to those that you come into contact with in your day to day life of what your values are. So they're really those things rather than skills. Some people when they talk about soft skills, they immediately say, well, what you're talking about is communication skills or problem solving or negotiating. Well, and the answer is yeah, because again, negotiating and problem solving are two specific forms of communication. And depending on how you approach those two structured communications from a behavioral standpoint, from a quality standpoint, you can either enjoy more success or less success in completing those kinds of basic activities. Communication is a skill in and of itself. And there are a range of forms of communication. And as it relates to soft skills, using communication is the principal skill that you need to develop and improve upon every day, regardless of whether you're an entry level engineer, a partner in a firm, working for an owner, whoever you are, your communication skills are vital to not simply getting the job done as an engineer, as a consultant on a project, but also to simply get to know the people that you're doing business with, that you need to build relationships with over time so that you can enjoy the success of longstanding relationships. Your words, coupled with your actions, are how people also get to know you. And again, if you're going to build a relationship with someone, you need to get to know that person. And you can't do it by just simply just closing your mouth and looking and looking them in the eye until they say something. It involves communication. And why do soft skills matter? As you take the journey of your career path from entry level all the way through the leadership of large organizations, large firms, large corporations, in terms of the importance of your qualities and how you use those qualities to your benefit and building relationships, they become much more important as you progress in your career. At the entry level, for me as an accountant, what I need to learn was how to use a 10 key adding machine because that was fundamental. But again, as you go further and further, it's increasingly more important that people are able to get to know you so they can learn to trust you over time. And it takes time. It doesn't happen instantaneously. And that's a valuable commodity in the world of business is to be trusted by the people that buy your services, buy your customers, and also to be trusted by the people that work for you. Yeah, that's fabulous. I love your real focus on communication and trust and how that builds. So over the course of your career, how did you learn and experience the value of soft skills as you went through your career? Yeah, yeah, that's a great question because the answer is almost I want to slap myself in the face when I start answering this question because I really didn't focus on this notion of soft skills. And other books have been written about them. I've got one here that's entitled What Are Soft Skills is the title of the book. Now, when you open the page of the book, they talk about communication, they talk about negotiating, talk about a whole bunch of stuff. And it's all relevant. It's all useful. It's all valuable. But the way I describe what soft skills are, that being what people see in you, in your words, in your actions, that's what soft skills are. I never really focused on them until I was probably 50 years old. And which has still been a while ago, I must say in all honesty. In fact, I can't remember when I was 50. But I came to begin to focus in on those two words and why it's so important to understand what they mean. When I myself was a participant in a one week leadership program, during which I took a series of assessments and other kinds of evaluation tools to gather some facts about myself in behavioral terms. Also in basic kind of how my brain works. I learned as an example that I'm a prolific idea generator. Well, I didn't really, if somebody said, Dennis, do you think you're a prolific idea generator? I would say, I don't know. But I had the opportunity to learn something about that. I learned something about my behavioral style. I learned about how I deal with conflict. So I gathered all these facts about myself and what is central to all of that is this notion of how people see you. Because if you're going to progress in a career and move in a truly fulfilling way into a leadership role, it's all about how people see you. So there's the, I call it the mirror question. If a leader wants to get a sense of what's really going on, they can ask themselves two questions. And they're both relative to their qualities or soft skills. How do you describe, how would you describe yourself to someone? Write down your answer. And then after you finish that, say, now, if I were to ask someone who's known you for several years, how they would describe you, what would they say? That's the mirror question because it really isn't a mirror. You know, your mirror is are you self-aware? Can you be honest with yourself? Can you write down something that represents a weakness that you may possess and not simply say that I'm the best at this and the best at that, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah? Inevitably, when you ask someone else a question about you, their answer is going to be to address, they may say just top-notch civil engineer, just incredible expertise. But the preponderance of the things they will say about you, if they really know you, relate to your qualities, relate to your soft skills. So again, for me, I experience them as soft skills, calling them soft skills only from the age of 50. And then so as I continue my journey, I finally reached a point where I said, you know what? We don't value soft skills in the construction industry. We value certifications and licenses and expertise in using equipment and tools, etc., etc. Same in other industries. We value a person who knows all the law on this particular area of interest, that a person who's a great mathematician. We value their expertise and their competency in the job or the role they fill. But we don't value how they are as a person sharing that expertise, serving customers, working with the team, because it's more difficult, frankly, to deal with that. But the simple question that kind of exposes this whole thing is to say that, you know, people have often heard someone say, you know, Johnny Smith, boy, he was the greatest structural engineer that I've ever worked with. But he was really hard to get along with. What they're talking about is his soft skills, his qualities. And that's why they matter, because they're the difference maker. Because in building a career, you build a career, one relationship at a time, doing a job, delivering the product, serving the customer, but all the relationships you build inside your organization. And then obviously, most importantly, with those who buy your services, if you're in a business setting, you do that over time. And those relationships are what cements a great future for you and success professionally. And also probably a pretty successful personal life as well. Man, that focus on building relationships is so critical. And I've seen that be true and true over and over in my career for sure. So if soft skills, Dennis, are really this important for us to build and grow, why isn't everybody talking about the value of these soft skills in really building these relationships? Well, because if they're in my generation, they say, we don't need those soft skills. I mean, it's just they just kind of, they dispose of it. It's, and also because in a fundamental way, what really getting handle on the importance of soft skills is all about is getting a handle on yourself, about looking in that mirror and doing it honestly so that you can understand and having it expressed in words. Honestly, what are your behavioral considerations? What is your style of behavior? Those are the words that used to describe it are all soft skills. They're all qualities related. And it's sometimes it's hard to look at yourself honestly. I mean, it's, you know, again, a lot of people can go through their entire lives and really never develop honest self-awareness. And self-awareness is part of that body and knowledge around emotional intelligence, which is another term that I that I talk about quite a bit because it's all about soft skills. Again, being self-aware. If you say this to someone says to you, Jeff, you know, you clearly demonstrate that you are very self-aware. That's give that's a quality you possess. That means that you that you are aware of, in this case, you're aware what's going on with you emotionally, you are aware of it. And if you're aware of it, then you can do something about managing it so that in terms of your interactions with other people, you don't damage relationships. You don't not get to the result that you want from a conversation because you're aware that, you know, I had a bad drive to the office today, but I got this really important conversation. And I just kind of need to put that aside and focus on the conversation so that me and Joe have an outcome that we're both going to be happy with. So again, and that's all much difficult to talk about than to talk about again, the latest tablet application, which again, my generation is still kind of like pushing this way on some of that stuff, but it's happening. Here we are on, you know, I'm talking you through a Zoom platform and we're going to be doing much, much more of that. It's the newest method of communication. I would say that the telegraph is probably pretty much gone is method of communication. Is that Jeff, does that make some sense? No more telegraphs. All right. Okay. So you're good with that. All right. But Zoom is here to stay. And every one of us needs to embrace it just as we need to embrace a new application, a new tool, all those kinds of things that relate to the hard skills part of what we do every day. Because that's more tangible to, you know, qualities are about, about intangibles, but they're really not because people see you. And as you grow in, in statue in an organization as you have, take a more responsibility, move into leadership roles, they not only see you, but they're always looking at you. Even if you're not in your presence, they're always looking at you as the leader. So they're looking for what's going on with your facial expressions. They're looking for, for what's going on with, whether or not you're paying attention to what they're saying, whether you demonstrate a genuine level of interest. And for people who have just kind of bulldozed through a career of 20, 30, 40 or more years. And, and with the attitude is we don't really need no soft skills. What they really are saying is that, you know, I don't really want to focus on, on, you know, the things that I don't necessarily like about myself, because to this point, I've managed to get where I am without really focusing on those things too much. Got it, got it. So let's really dial this in here, Dennis. What would you say is a single core competency that is vital to all that you do in work and life? It's, it's, it's got it. Then I've talked about it already because that's how important it is. It's communication. Again, when you, when you think about communication, just the idea of, of information and messages going back and forth between two individuals, you know, the single greatest reason for conflict, both personally and in the workplace, because it's equally as important is poor communication, which means that the two people communicating with each other or a group of people don't understand each other because conflict arises out of misunderstanding. All right. So even if you just want to think about, you know, what, what, what's the most important skill, you know, to, to understand is a skill and that you can there, if it's a skill, we get the idea that, you know, in the old days, we used an architect's rule to take measurements off a drawing, and then we advanced to a wheel that rolled across the drawings. And now we have other, you know, so again, tools have progressed and we've, we've learned how to use them and we get more proficient at using and get better at using them because we practice them. You know, I could ask the rhetorical question, when's the last time the average listener to your podcast practiced with someone else how to be a good active listener? I, you know, what, what did you say? Again, demonstrating there was an active listening. The point is that active listening is a critical component of good communication. And it's not, it's not just the absence of talking. Because I'm talking doesn't mean necessarily, Jeff, that you're listening to me, but I believe you are. But sometimes you can look at a person and say, I don't, you know, I'm talking and I don't know what he's doing, but what he may be doing is thinking about what he wants to say next. But he's not listening to me because I see nothing in his face. I see no body language. I see no nodding of head. And he hasn't asked a single question to even like, because I went over this spec and I could tell by the look on his face that there was something in that spec he didn't understand, but he didn't ask me a question about it. So communication and most specifically then the listening part of communication. Now, depending on our behavioral style, just in one spectrum, which is introverts versus extroverts, if we're, if a person is an introvert and many engineers are, which doesn't make them bad people, just means they're all about the task. They love to do the calculations and do them again and do them again. And I get a little funny about this part, but they love all that stuff. The people part, that's how they refer to soft skills and even the communication. They call it the people stuff. I'm not into the people stuff. Well, as you grow in stature, as you continue your life's journey in your career and otherwise, you need to think about the people stuff because you live a life, not in a vacuum, but you live a life among people. And so building relationship people personally, professionally is what it's all about. And in particular, one of the ways that you can demonstrate that you really are interested in or maybe even more strongly that you care about what the other person is saying to you in a business setting, in a personal setting, is to use active listening. To ask a simple, let me make sure I understand that and you just paraphrase what they just said to you. Or just if you're just going to check your understanding about some elements in a specification or a document or a letter or whatever it may be, say Jeff, these are just quick yes or no questions. I just want to make sure I understand. And again, so that's a skill and it's a skill that can be approved upon by practice. And Dennis, you must have known a little bit more about me and my struggles with listening just to kind of use a quick personal story. I one time did one of those 360 reviews with my team when I was in the corporate world and leading a team. And the theme that came over and over again from everyone, they were anonymous feedback, but the theme that came over and over again for me was listen. I wish you would just listen more. And that was an eye-opener for me just how important that my team valued that. And so I had a lot of work to do it and I continue to work on it because I can find myself detaching from the active listening all the time and thinking about what I'm going to say rather than what the other person is really trying to tell me. And we've got two ears in one mouth and maybe we ought to be using those ears a little bit more, right? Yeah, I can't see your ears right now because they're covered with these big headphones. But I know you have them. I'm sure you do. But let me just comment about that. The notion of the 360 assessment, there's a terrific book entitled Influencing. And it talks about, answers the question, what is the most powerful way to influence someone? And the answer is with facts. That's the most powerful way. Give them facts. Don't make stuff up. Don't give me your opinion. Don't be vague. Don't be comfortable. Give them facts. And that will influence them in the most strong and direct fashion. So if we're trying to improve ourselves from a soft-skill standpoint, from a quality standpoint, why not gather some facts? The 360 assessment is a valuable example of gathering facts because since the feedback is given anonymously, at least a big chunk of the fear factor for the person responding honestly is taken away. So they can try to give honest feedback. And because it's coming from a number of people, it's factual. If it was just one person saying that, you might have brushed it off when you read through the results. You might have just brushed that off. That's just so-and-so. And you would say something about their soft skills as the reason why they said you weren't good at listening. All right? So that's a set of facts. When people say, what do I need to do in order to improve my soft skills, my simple answer is something we'll talk about a little bit later on. But you've got to learn more about yourself. That's all there is to it. Yeah, totally. So Dennis, many of the listeners of this podcast want to become or already are great leaders. So what would you say that great leaders really need to know about soft skills? Yeah. Well, I would say that good leaders are folks that are competent, have a valid experience, are good communicators that can communicate. That's a good leader. Great leaders understand, embrace, and value things that differentiate them. They don't, great leaders don't talk about leadership. They just lead. And that means their words and their actions demonstrate important things, which align themselves with the people they lead. In a corporate setting, corporations that do a good job of focusing on things like what is the vision for this company, the mission for this company. There were times where that was just a tried exercise that companies went through. What you see more, but not necessarily, it's not necessarily fully operationalized, but it is something that should be, are the expression of a company's core values. So the leaders, let's say the CEO of an organization, whether it's an engineering firm, a corporation, whatever it may be, the company's expression of their values need to be reflected by the leader. There needs to be alignment between those values. And then whatever the leader does has to be done every day. Again, the trite phrase is walking the talk. So if one of our core values is we are a caring community, well, then the leader needs to demonstrate what caring is all about. And right now, we are in a period in our lives, as we're having this conversation, we're in the middle of a last time, it was 100 years ago crisis. In fact, it's really a once in a lifetime crisis because all those years ago, the economic piece, the social justice piece may not have been as visible and significant as it is during the time we're having this conversation. But so those great leaders, they want to learn as much as they can about themselves on a current basis. So if they haven't gone through doing 360, if they haven't done a disc profile or a Myers-Briggs or a conflict mode instrument, there are a number of very valid instruments that have been developed over decades. And again, the disc profile was initially developed by a psychologist decades ago. And there's a great assessment related to emotional intelligence. A great leader would say, you know what, this is a good reminder. I want to do some of those things. Or if I've already done them, I want to look back over those results again. And here's the important difference. I want to sit with someone that has a mentoring relationship with me. And if I'm the CEO, that doesn't mean you can't be mentored. That doesn't mean you can't be coached. If you're the CEO, if you're a Fortune 500 company, you're likely being coached by someone externally your company. But the process is in place because left to your own devices, you may do all that good work, but you may not be able to maximize the benefit of that increased self-knowledge to strengthen your leadership so the people looking to say, he or she is a great leader because they care. He or she is a great leader because their word is their bond and they prove it over and over and over again. He or she is a great leader because right now and this time we're going through, they're bending over backwards to do whatever they can for us. That's what great leaders do. But they do it because they understand what those qualities are. They align with them and therefore that's what people see in them. That's what great leadership is. And lastly, I see on the cake, great leaders really serve the people they lead. That's the attitude they take to their role. That's excellent stuff, Dennis. So you mentioned the crisis that we're in kind of a three-dimensional crisis of health, the economy, and social issues that are going on right now. Are soft skills even more important than ever during times of crisis like we're experiencing right now? The short answer is absolutely. For obvious reasons. Again, I was in a seminar earlier today and one of the questions that was asked is, what's kind of sour in your life right now? And my response was, I wrote down one word, uncertainty. We're in a period of, and again this is the trite way of saying it, but we're in a period that you and I have never experienced in our lives since from birth to this day. Now you've been on this earth a few years less than I have. So I look back over a much longer time frame. We've never experienced this. It started with a pandemic with a health-related crisis. And that health-related crisis then precipitated an economic crisis that we're still experiencing, but coming out of, I mean, the U.S. economy is incredibly resilient. And lastly, it added fuel to the fire of an ongoing crisis which has been going on in this country for a long, long time, and that's the social crisis. So soft skills include things like caring. They include things like being tolerant. They include the things like being trustworthy. So all those qualities are, because if you're the leader and you're saying things like, well, this pandemic thing, there's not really much to it. It'll be over in a few months. At best, you're not being honest. And so when you think about, are soft skills more important in a time like this? Is it more important in a crisis for people to think you're honest and ethical and possess integrity and integrity quite simply? I love my simple operationalized term for integrity. If you say you're going to do it, you do it. That's integrity to me. And again, I think in very simple terms. If you take the sum of all those things, those are the three qualities of a person that renders them to be someone that you would trust. So you will believe what they say. You will believe there is a path out of this. You will believe that we need to learn more about the reality as we get to that last piece of it, which everything, it's kind of, and they each kind of exacerbated it. When you get out to the social crisis, then we're in the world of dealing with, again, a soft skills or qualities thing. And that is this notion of acceptance of people for their difference. Because I like to say, and I'm sure someone else has said it, but these are my words, that there's one thing that every living, breathing human being has with every other living, breathing human being that they encountered during their lives. One thing that it's undisputable. And that one thing is, they're different from one another. So in my generation, differences for some are a problem. If you don't act like me, if you don't look like me, if you don't have this experience, if you didn't live in this neighborhood, if you weren't this religion or this or that, that's all problematic. Rather than the view that millennials possess and the younger generations. And that is, okay, that's not a bad thing. That may mean, that may be good things. So it's an opportunity. There's, it's not a bad thing. It's a good thing. But we have to have a mindset. And again, so I get to mention one of my other favorite authors, a woman by the name of Carolyn Dweck, who wrote a book on mindset. And she quite simply says this, I mean, it's a very detailed book, but I'm going to give you the quick dichotomy. And that is there are two mindsets. One is a growth mindset, which says that regardless of your age, regardless of your experience, regardless of your education, regardless of any other thing about yourself, you can continue to change, improve, learn more, et cetera, et cetera. That's a growth mindset. Everybody should have that mindset, but everyone doesn't. Now, some people have that mindset and the more social aspects of who they are. And they're much more fixed in their mindset around the dogma of their profession. And one could argue that engineers, lawyers and accountants and maybe doctors, as doctors as well, might fall into that. But to fix mine says, I know everything I can know. I've done everything I can do. And so I can't know more and I can't do anything else. What an interesting way to go through life. So yeah, it's more important in this crisis. Yeah, 100%. And I'm a big fan of growing and developing mindsets. I would highly recommend that book by Carol Dweck. And there are many other great books about mindset and how we can grow that that people can use. So Dennis, can you please just kind of sum it up for us? Why would you say, put it all together, that soft skills really matter? Because we're people. We live our lives with other people. We do business with people. There's, I have a meta person who said to me, my name is John and I really don't want to be liked by anyone. I don't want to be around anyone. And I mean it. And then just kind of walk away. We're human beings. And so it's at a very basic fundamental level that this notion of recognizing that fact and that every person you encounter, it may be transactional. You may meet a person on a particular job site or a particular trip somewhere on a vacation. You meet a couple and you kind of hit it off. So you have dinner with them two or three nights. And maybe you say at the end of a trip, let's stay in touch. You exchange information. And you never make contact again afterwards. That doesn't mean that you're a dishonest person. It just means that at that time, that it was fun. It was comfortable. There was a mutual satisfaction out of the relationship that was built for a period of days. And then you go back home. But there are other relationships, starting with your family and your friends, and then going on to your business associates. And then in the business world, some people have what I call the EPS syndrome, that they focus on the bottom line. And I like to remind people that the bottom line is produced by the efforts of people. If you just focus on the bottom line, you're going to miss people in the equation. You're going to fail to recognize that everybody has skills and abilities. And the way those skills and abilities get applied to the common purpose of a business enterprise is to make sure that people understand one another and that they value each other as people. And recognizing that we're all different from each other. If someone's very quiet, an introvert, some people may say, well, I think he's dumber than a rock. He barely talks. Well, of course, that's not necessarily, but generally not true. It just means that the person is not very outspoken. Does that make him a bad person? If he's working for your company and he's in a job and he's doing the job specifically very well, that can mean a variety of things, but as long as he's not disrupting anything, then you as the person who's managing them needs to recognize that person is an introvert. So I need to put more effort into trying to engage with them. I may not change them in a dramatic way, but if I recognize that and I say things like, Jeff, I know you're all about the task and you do a great job, but now that you're going to get involved in leading some teams, I want to help you work on getting a little more comfortable with that because it's going to help you be more effective. And I know it's going to be challenging for you. That just means you need to put more energy into it. And I know you want to be successful personally and professionally. So therefore, I know that you're going to put the energy you need into adapting your behavior to fit the needs of the relationship or the task that you're involved in. So again, so they matter because they're important at every stage in your life. They don't teach them in colleges. There's no soft skills 101 class. There should be. You could take a communication class and it touches on a lot of the things because communication is the method, the skill that's used to let people see and hear who you are and allow you to see and hear them. So it's absolutely vital. So if someone is trying to learn how to be a better communicator, one of the things, and in fact, it's in the resource section of the book I released last November that you mentioned when we opened up Soft to Steel. I say, you know, go to Toastmasters. It's a low threat, low risk forum to learn more about how to speak to people because if it's really hard for you to do and it's going to be important for your success in building relationships and those relationships in the business world translate into business which translates into income, which translates into the opportunity to make a profit. So again, when I talk about soft skills and why they matter, the most important thing I like to say to punctuate, particularly for professionals like engineers and doctors and attorneys and accountants, is that I'm talking about them because those relationships that you have with clients and patients you've had for years are the reason that you're successful from a business standpoint. So this is a business issue. It's not simply a feel good issue. Thanks, Dennis. And I love the point that you made. It really comes down to just seeing other people as people in building those relationships. And that is a key point that can be so simple, yet so powerful in how we build those relationships. All right, now we're going to transition into the take action today segment of the show where Dennis will share with us a specific action that you can take to further embrace soft skills in your career and in your life. Now it's time for our take action today segment of the show. Today, I'm going to talk with Dennis Doran, author of Soft to Steel. Dennis, what's one specific takeaway that our listeners can get to really and an action that they can take to grow and develop soft skills in their life and career? Yeah, Jeff, it's pretty simple. Learn more about yourself. Be interested in learning specifically about your qualities, about your behaviors, about your strengths and about your weaknesses. And there are many tools that are available to help you gather that information and present it to you in a manner that you can make use of it to build your strategy and steps to improve yourself, to become better at who you are, better at how you are. And if you're moving into a significant leadership role, it'll make you not just a good leader, but a great leader. Thanks, Dennis. And thanks for a great interview. I think our listeners can take a lot of value out of many of the things that you shared here today. Dennis, where can people learn more about you and where can they find your book and anything else that you'd like to share with us as we end today? Sure. Well, they can learn more about me as they can learn about so many people on my LinkedIn page. I also have a website, which is Dennis Doran, D-O-R-A-N DennisDoranSpeaking.com. On the website, there's a variety of pieces of information, including a place where if you care to buy a copy of my book, you can order it online. And in the next few months, I hope your listeners will pay attention and look for the announcement of the release of my book in an audio format. I'm very excited about getting my message out in that format. And I really appreciate the opportunity to be able to say that and to be with you today, Jeff. Well, excellent. Dennis, thanks again, and I really enjoyed talking with you today. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please leave your comments and or questions in the comments section below this video. Also, if you'd like to view the full show notes for this episode, visit engineeringmanagementinstitute.org or see the link in the video description. There you will find the key points discussed in today's episode as well as links to any of the resources, websites, or books mentioned during the episode. Until next time, I wish you the best in all of your engineering career endeavors.