The Skills That Matter Most Right Now (And They're Not What You Think)

The Skills That Matter Most Right Now (And They're Not What You Think)

A 3-step actionable playbook to become antifragile — and outperform amid constant change and ambiguity in the AI era

Richard Hua

Apr 09, 2026

Hi, it’s Ethan & Jason from Level Up: Make career breakthroughs with AI-proof leadership skills.

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This special edition of Level Up is a guest post from Rich Hua, Founder and Chief EQ Officer of EPIQ Leadership Group, which works with leaders to harmonize their EQ and IQ (EPIQ). As Chief EQ Evangelist and Worldwide Head at Amazon, he built and scaled the largest corporate-based EQ community in the world, reaching 1.5 million people.

In this article, Rich shares specific actionable guidance for thriving amid change and ambiguity (practices used by Olympic athletes and special forces operators) — and outlines your 3-step playbook to move beyond resilience and become antifragile.

To dive deeper into EQ skills to boost your performance, check out his upcoming EQ course which is offering a 20% discount exclusive to Level Up readers, use code: EQLEVELUP

The smartest leaders I know are struggling right now.

Not the ones who coasted or got lucky, but the ones who can architect systems of mind-bending complexity, the ones who built their careers on being the most technically astute person in the room.

They’re burning out or quietly plateauing.

And the reason isn’t what they think it is.

It’s not a talent problem or a work ethic problem.

It’s that the skills that made them exceptional yesterday are insufficient for today.

The ground has shifted—and it’s still shifting.

The CTO of a multi-billion dollar global company told me recently, “I used to plan out the next three years. Now it’s difficult to plan out the next three quarters because it’s so unknown.”

He’s not alone.

We are living in what futurists call a “BANI world”: Brittle, Anxious, Non-linear, and Incomprehensible.

A voltage miscalculation blacks out Spain and Portugal in seconds. A hurricane in Florida threatens global chipmaking because a small North Carolina manufacturer is a critical supplier of one essential chip material. DeepSeek releases an ultra low-cost AI model matching frontier performance, and global markets shed over a trillion dollars in a day. These are not hypothetical scenarios from a disaster-planning exercise; they all happened in the last fourteen months.

Brené Brown, best-selling author and organizational researcher, recently said what many of us are feeling: “It’s the weirdest it’s ever been.”

On top of the instability, a growing list of companies--Amazon, Dell, Block, Atlassian, and others--are cutting 10% to 50% of their workforce in the name of optimization and “AI efficiency.” The returns from AI are still uneven, but the direction is clear. Everything that can be automated will be. McKinsey projects that automation will replace half of human work activities by 2030.

So what do you do with all of this? What skills will actually differentiate you in an AI-powered world? It’s not just about keeping you employed, but enabling you to thrive and deliver high performance in a world where the only certainty is uncertainty.

Most people would say technical skills are what set you apart, things such as AI literacy, data fluency, and agentic orchestration. And yes, those matter. But what the research is telling us is different, and the data might surprise you.

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that seven of the ten most critical skills for success today are social-emotional, including resilience, flexibility, agility, creative thinking, and leadership. LinkedIn’s “Skills on the Rise in 2025” report identified conflict mitigation and adaptability as two of the top three fastest-growing skills needed for professional success.

Here’s what makes this even more striking: a recent study of 70 million job transitions found that workers with strong “durable skills” (e.g., adaptability, collaboration, critical thinking) land better jobs and evolve more quickly when their industries are disrupted.

Currently, 76% of all job postings request at least one durable skill. Meanwhile, the shelf-life of many technical skills is collapsing. The skills you prioritized twelve months ago may already be facing obsolescence (prompt engineering, anyone?)

Put those two facts together, and the picture becomes clear: over the next five years, everything that can be automated will be. Thus, every job in the future will index more heavily on our uniquely human skills—the skills that cannot be replicated by a machine.

The most critical skills for your career right now are adaptability and resilience.

And both of them require something that most high-performers dramatically underinvest in: emotional intelligence.

Why EQ is the foundation of adaptability and resilience

I want to clear up a myth before we go any further.

When most people hear “emotional intelligence” (or EQ) they picture something soft, warm, and fuzzy. It’s something appropriate for a wellness seminar but not for the real world of high-stakes leadership.

That is absolutely not EQ.

Put simply, EQ is knowing how to have emotions work for you rather than against you.

Or even simpler, it’s the intelligent use of emotions.

And since people experience emotions 90% to 100% of their waking hours, it is definitely advantageous to know how to leverage them intelligently.

Here’s why this matters for adaptability and resilience specifically. Marc Brackett, founder of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, discovered that emotions influence five pillars of life and work: attention and learning, decision-making, relationships, performance and creativity, and physical and mental health.

Think about what adaptability actually requires:

Now flip it.

Curiosity sharpens your focus and helps you process information faster. Joy and calm produce objective, rational, balanced assessments. Empathy builds trust, connection, and a collaborative spirit. Contentment unlocks flow state and big-picture thinking. And optimism lowers stress hormones and strengthens immunity.

Every one of those five pillars is essential to adaptability and resilience.

And every one of them is shaped by your emotions.

When the world is throwing constant change at you (e.g., RIFs that make job security lower than it’s been in decades, leaders trying to drive massive transformation across their organizations, geopolitical upheaval, macroeconomic uncertainty), your ability to manage your emotional response to all of that IS your ability to adapt and be resilient.

They are not separate things.

EQ is the operating system that adaptability and resilience run on.

Daniel Goleman, psychologist and best-selling author of Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, makes a distinction between threshold abilities and distinguishing abilities. In an interview with him, he told me that IQ and technical skills are “threshold” abilities–they get you through the door.

In contrast, EQ is what he calls the “distinguishing” abilities–they make you a star performer. For leadership roles specifically, EQ accounts for upwards of 85% of what distinguishes the best from the rest.

Here are Daniel Goleman and I doing a podcast interview. He told me, “Rich, you have built the largest emotional intelligence community I have seen in the world.”

The good news is that EQ is flexible.

It’s a skill more than a trait.

You can literally rewire your brain to be more adaptable, more resilient, more emotionally intelligent.

But you have to do the work.

The two keys to thriving in change and ambiguity

Through years of teaching these skills to over 1.5 million people at Amazon and other Fortune 100 companies, I’ve distilled the approach to thriving in uncertainty down to two keys: regulate your stress response and embrace an adaptable mindset.

Let me unpack each one.

Key #1: Regulate your stress response

When a stimulus enters your brain, it first goes to the amygdala. It’s the oldest (and fastest) part of the brain, the alarm system that evolved to keep us alive. It quickly screens stimuli and decides if there’s a threat. When that threat response is moderate, it actually helps your performance.

A healthy level of stress is fuel, pushing you to what Goleman calls “maximum cognitive efficiency.”

You’re focused, engaged, calm, operating just at the edge of your capabilities.

That’s the zone where your best work happens.

But when stress gets too high, the amygdala can override the prefrontal cortex (the part of your brain responsible for rational thought, judgment, creativity, and reasoning), and you have a heightened emotional reaction.

This is what psychologists call an emotional hijack. It takes six to ten seconds for your prefrontal cortex to come back online after one. (Remember your mother telling you to count to ten when you’re angry? Turns out there’s actual neuroscience behind that.)

The problem is that most of us are not waking up wishing for more stress. We’re already in the high-stress zone, and the BANI world keeps pushing us further. So a critical skill is learning to modulate your stress response downward so you can stay in that optimal performance zone.

I saw this play out at massive scale.

My day job at Amazon was Global Business Development leader for Aurora Postgres database. On the side, I’d started delivering EQ sessions in our San Francisco office because I saw colleagues with sky-high IQs making avoidable mistakes under pressure. Word spread. I got a big stage at Sales Kickoff 2019, delivering an EQ talk to a thousand people.

…Then the pandemic hit, and overnight, the skills we’d been teaching (e.g., emotional management, resilience, stress regulation) went from “those will boost my success” to “I need them to survive.” Entire divisions of five to ten thousand people were requesting sessions. People weren’t just interested anymore; they were desperate. During the pandemic, I scaled my impact from reaching 5,000 people to 150,000 people. I did this by collaborating with a team of a dozen EQ Evangelists worldwide whom I had certified to deliver these talks. The world was proving in real time that emotion and stress regulation weren’t a wellness perk; they were a mission-critical capability.

Here are 3 simple, research-backed ways to regulate your stress response:

1. Positivity. We have a negativity bias, which means we notice and remember negative things much more easily than positive ones. (Have you read the news lately?) Thus, we need to be intentional about maintaining a positive outlook. Navy SEALs call this “attention control.” They actually teach this skill because they found that negativity degrades performance and weakens both mind and body. One of the most effective techniques I’ve seen is what I call the 3x3: write down three things you’re grateful for each night for three weeks. It sounds almost too simple, but neuroscience shows that this practice literally rewires your brain.

2. Connection. When you’re stressed, talking with a friend (anyone with whom you have a positive relationship) reduces cortisol in your body in just a few minutes. This is called co-regulation, and it’s one of the most powerful stress management tools available. The conversation can be about anything (it doesn’t have to address the problem) as long as there is genuine sharing and listening. I encourage people to make friends at work (after all, you do spend a large part of your week at work) and participate in some sort of community. Loneliness is a life-or-death issue. Research shows it’s worse for your health than smoking fifteen cigarettes a day! Senior leaders can be some of the loneliest people in an organization, and I often advise them to join a peer mentoring group or get a coach so they have a place where they can let down.

3. Mindful breathing. One of the most helpful techniques I’ve taught around the world is box breathing, which was popularized by military special forces operators and olympic athletes. It works like this: breathe in for a four count, hold for a four count, breathe out for a four count, hold for a four count. Just four to six cycles of this breathing pattern activates your parasympathetic nervous system, which downregulates intense emotions (like anger, fear, or anxiety) and lowers heart rate and blood pressure. It also brings more oxygen to your brain, which improves cognitive function. I have led this exercise with hundreds of thousands of people around the world, and I know it works. One senior leader recently told me, “I used to take aspirin multiple times a month because of stress headaches. Then I started doing box breathing after I learned it from you. I haven’t taken an aspirin in four years.”

Key #2: Embrace an adaptable mindset

Your mindset determines how you approach uncertainty, ambiguity, and complexity.

It has an outsized impact on your ability to innovate and navigate change.

An adaptable mindset can go by many names: Carol Dweck’s “growth mindset,” the Japanese concept of shoshin (beginner’s mind), Amazon’s “Day 1 mindset.” They all describe a powerful approach to thinking and learning. With an adaptable mindset, challenges are opportunities, feedback helps you improve, failure is part of learning, you can gain new skills, and you are a learn-it-all.

With the inverse, aka a rigid mindset, challenges are threats, feedback is personal criticism, failure should be avoided, it’s too late to change, and you are a know-it-all.

The first mindset fosters excitement and creativity.

The latter, anxiety and resistance.

Think about how this applies to AI adoption right now.

Some people see AI as a work-enhancer; others see it as a job-destroyer.

Some believe they can learn new skills and stay relevant; others believe they will become obsolete.

It’s all about mindset.

And being adaptable is how you successfully navigate complex and chaotic environments.

Here are two practices that strengthen an adaptable mindset:

1. Think like a scientist. Our brains are wired with a giant concoction of biases and preconceived notions. We are all prone to the Einstellung effect, a phenomenon where we get tunnel vision and perceive fewer options when we think we already know the answer. We also get a rush of dopamine when we find information that confirms our existing belief.

The antidote to these biases is intellectual humility. Wharton professor and best-selling author Adam Grant says that people should think like scientists rather than preachers, prosecutors, or politicians. This type of thinking treats every opinion “as a hypothesis waiting to be proven wrong.” As new data arrives, be willing to rethink your hypothesis.

You can develop this muscle by consistently asking yourself a few questions:

  1. What do I believe where I may not know the whole story?

  2. What would convince me that my current thinking is wrong?

  3. If I were an outsider evaluating this decision, what weaknesses would I see?

As a bonus exercise: challenge one of your opinions by listening to the other side–with a curious and open mind. Note that you don’t need to change your opinion. Just being willing to listen and consider the other person’s perspective is exercise enough… as long as you aren’t only listening to refute. I recommend starting with a topic that isn’t too emotionally charged.

2. Reframe your perspective. Reframing is looking at a situation from a different angle than your initial one. It is one of the most powerful tools for self-management and adaptability. Research from Dr. James Gross at Stanford shows that reframing (aka cognitive reappraisal) is one of the most effective tools for self-management when emotions are high. It doesn’t remove stress, but it helps you bring your best thinking self to the situation.

There are four main ways to reframe:

  1. Reinterpret: remove the threat from the situation. If you’re not proficient at something, change “I am an idiot” to “I’m not good at this... yet.” When other people do or say something unhelpful, try to use the human API = Assume Positive Intent.

  2. Reposition: consider this from a different point of view. One of the most powerful is finding gratitude in difficult situations. Asking, “How can I possibly be grateful for this? How can this make me better?” improves your resilience.

  3. Reorder: assess the actual importance of something. A great trick is the 10/10/10 method. When something triggers you (e.g., a rude email or remark), ask yourself, “Will I care about this in 10 days / 10 weeks / 10 months?” More often than not, the answer is “no,” so just move on.

  4. Normalize: acknowledge that others are experiencing this too. It’s a form of self-compassion. It’s saying, “It’s okay to have a bad day (or week or whatever); I am human.” A VP at Amazon with over 20 years at the company once told me the secret to his career longevity: “Accept that it’s okay to have bad days. You can’t perform at the highest levels all the time.”

These practices have made a big difference in my career.

For 23 years, I served as a missionary and evangelist. That formed the earlier foundation of my professional experience.

When I pivoted back into tech, I interviewed for a role as a Solutions Engineer at Oracle. I did have a degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Berkeley, but I hadn’t done anything with it in over two decades. I had zero enterprise sales experience, zero corporate experience, and zero experience with database technology. But I knew I could learn quickly, and I had excellent communication, influence, and problem-solving skills.

In preparing for my interview (which consisted of delivering a presentation on a specific Oracle technology), I studied vigorously, rehearsed intensely, and consumed candid feedback voraciously from my more technically experienced friends. During my presentation, I demonstrated that I had the chops to learn technology quickly and communicate powerfully, and I addressed the obvious objections head-on.

The result: I got a job offer on the spot.

Six months into my role, my manager told me I’d progressed twice as fast as anyone he’d ever seen.

That wasn’t because I was necessarily smarter than everyone else.

It was my adaptable mindset.

Going beyond resilience: becoming antifragile

Here’s where I want to push beyond the standard advice.

Most people think of resilience as bouncing back.

It’s withstanding adversity and returning to where you were.

That’s valuable, but there’s a better option…

Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls it antifragility: not just surviving challenges but actually getting stronger because of them.

Here are some keys to building your antifragility.