Life Skills – Do you have them?

Life Skills

It’s not just life coaches and spiritual gurus who are raving about Life skills; even the contemporary education system has acknowledged the importance of life skills and the vital role they play in a person’s life. Life skills impart to you the required knack to deal with the most inevitable challenges life confronts you with. Other than helping you grow on a personal front, life skills bring in dynamism to your personality.

Ten Core Life Skills

From self management to social competencies, Life skills encompass a range of psycho-social competencies.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the ten core life skills are:

  1. Self awareness,
  2. Empathy,
  3. Critical Thinking,
  4. Creative Thinking,
  5. Decision Making,
  6. Problem Solving,
  7. Effective Communication,
  8. Interpersonal Relations,
  9. Coping with Stress, and
  10. Coping with Emotion

It is commonly believed that life skills education is for the young, but one look around the world will make us wake up to the desperate need for basic life skills in adults as well. From road rage to divorces to financial crises, adults cannot be considered to have mastered life skills.

Every day of your life is another lesson. If you learn the lesson well and apply it, whether positive or negative, you determine what happens in your tomorrow. ~ David Kofi Awusi (Tweet this)

Our world would be a very different place if everyone inhabiting it would work towards acquiring and refining these skills. Grades, Scores and Talents are all very nice but a person can suffer greatly if he is lacking in basic life skills.

The Startling Difference

The critical difference that the presence or absence of life skills can make to a person’s life can be illustrated by looking at the case studies of the lives of four celebrated sportsmen of our time: Mike Tyson, Michael Schumacher, Sachin Tendulkar and Mahendra Singh Dhoni.

Mike Tyson is a former world heavyweight boxing champion. He rose to fame and earned millions. Michael Schumacher, Sachin Tendulkar and Mahendra Singh Dhoni excelled in comparative situations of mega-sporting success and ended up offering contrasting case studies of the impact of possessing or lacking life skills.

All reached the top of their respective professions in competitive international sports and thereby earned millions of dollars (Schumacher in F1 racing, Sachin and Dhoni in international cricket and Mike Tyson in Professional Heavyweight Boxing).

However, Schumacher, Tendulkar and Dhoni (apart from being cult figures in sports) are also role models for youngsters and all are running a string of successful profitable businesses, while Mike Tyson (owing to a spectacular lack of life skills) is on the verge of bankruptcy today. He splurged his multi-million dollars in drunken binges and excessive shopping sprees.

In a winning World Heavyweight Boxing Championship bout, he actually bit off his opponent Evander Holyfield’s ear. Tyson was also convicted for crimes against women and ended up spending a sizable part of his wealth in fighting legal battles or trying to negotiate out-of-court settlements with those that he had been violent with.

Read more about this at Life Skills – What are the Basic Life Skills?

Conclusion

Life Skills are not  just good to have, they are a must-have to lay the foundation of a good life. If no one spent time inculcating them in you while you were growing up, take the time now to work on them yourself as an adult. You will live the difference for the rest of your life!

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About the Author

Richa is a writer and a life skills coach with seven years of work experience in training corporate professionals. She has trained employees in Soft skills, Sales and Business English.

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