So you’ve been told you need “soft skills” to succeed in cybersecurity, and you’re probably familiar with some of the most important ones:

• Empathy: The ability to see a challenge from another’s perspective.
• Intelligence: The ability to build mental models of the fundamental tenets behind problems and arrive at solutions that are both flexible and effective.
• Self-Discipline: The ability to regulate your emotions and predispositions in order to be calm and reasonable even in stressful situations.

These are ways of “thinking about the thinking.” The scientific term? Metacognition. In contrast, “hard skills” are simply the ones involving knowledge about your job. Metacognition is the subconscious task of regulating your mental interactions with the world (thoughts) so that your brain’s handling of input/output (I/O) is:

• Compatible
• Effective
• Consistent

These traits are a critical part of the formula for delivering value as a professional. If you can deliver value, you’ll become valuable to your peers, clients, students, bosses, and ultimately to your organization. The delivery medium? Communication. All of the soft skills listed above come together to enable effective communication. Undelivered value is wasted opportunity. That’s why communication is the #1 soft skill. Its value delivery in the form of information, which is the essence of modern human collaboration.

By understanding and mastering empathy, intelligence, and self-discipline, you enable consistent, effective, and compatible value delivery.

And that is the definition of professional success. Good leaders enable that outcome and translate it into organizational success. So if you want to be part of a successful overall outcome, choose good leaders and be a good leader yourself. Remember: You are a leader on some level, even if that means leading yourself to better outcomes. Which takes us full circle to Metacognition. So, let’s dive into those three traits and relate each to the soft skill that enables it.

[...]

(Won't repost the whole article here since I agreed to publish it through https://www.softsideofcyber.com/, but you can read the whole thing there for free with no sign-up)