1. Learn to Take Responsibility

The cornerstone of emotional intelligence and soft skills is responsibility. Everybody has met the manager who is always looking for someone to blame, who micromanages or who condescends. These folks lack the most foundational tool at your disposal — taking responsibility, says Christopher Avery, Cutter Consortium senior consultant and author of Teamwork Is an Individual Skill. Responsibility is not simply paying your bills on time or managing a staff of 10. It is, in Avery's terms, the internal process of taking ownership to the extent you can for the situations in your life and creating the best from that.

Why, you may ask, in this age of layoffs and mergers, would you want to take ownership of situations you likely had no hand in? In a word, power. In the 1959 classic Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl wrote: "Everything can be taken from a man but the last of human freedoms — the ability to choose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances, to choose one's way." The act of becoming responsible capitalizes largely on that mind-set.

Being in denial, blaming, justifying, feeling shame, quitting or feeling obligation are all ways of abdicating responsibility, but they are also what humans are hardwired to do when something goes wrong, says Avery. Recognizing this gives power, because it means that although those reactions might be natural, you have the choice to move away from them and on to ownership. So when your brain flashes: "It's all her fault", "This place isn't fair so I give up trying", or, "I'll do it because I have to", you simply recognize these thoughts for what they are and move on to a more powerful position.

Becoming responsible is quite simple, but that doesn't mean it's easy. Avery has a three-step model: commitment, awareness and situation examination.

• Commit to operating from an outlook of responsibility. Each morning determine that you will take responsibility throughout that day and remind yourself at scheduled times, especially before entering what you suspect may be a difficult situation. Creating a new habit must be constantly encouraged and reinforced to become second nature.

• Practise noticing when you are blaming, feeling shame or in other ways acting, thinking or feeling irresponsible. This can be difficult, says Avery: "The ego doesn't want us to see all the parts of our character."

• Examine each difficult situation objectively — what is happening and what your role is in it, and determine how you can act more responsibly.