" As you know, I'm of the belief that soft skills can (and already have been) broken down into specific physiological components, cognitive strategies, and mental attributes -- and having been identified and broken down into chunks, can be trained in the same way we teach hard skills.
For instance, *telling* someone to "Punch harder" -- if that someone has no *experience* of what "punch harder" means might help them some; *showing* them (or modeling it) might help them some more; giving them the break down of the attributes (plant your feet so, snap your hips this way, tense your core this way, shape the angle of the punch this way) and walking them through so they have *ownership* of the technique may be the best approach, in my opinion.
I've found over the last (dang, when did we start this stuff, Den? 87 or 88?) whatever many years, that taking terms like "alertness" "vehemence" and so on and breaking it down into the physiological components makes it much easier for people to experience it, rather than have an intellectual understanding of it. And creating that experience, and empowering the learner with that experience is, in my opinion, the way to go.