That You Need To Learn!
“Just as treasures are uncovered from the earth, virtue appears from good deeds, and wisdom appears from a pure and peaceful mind. To walk safely through the maze of human life, one needs the light of wisdom and the guidance of virtue.” -Buddha
Some Of The Most Important Life Skills You Need To Learn
Life skills are the skills that help you to live successfully.
We all need to learn skills for a better life. And in this post, we will go over this topic and know ‘why’ we need to get involved in the most important life skills. And ‘how’.
What Are The Most Important Life Skills?
As we all know this: the basic human skills, are the skills that will help you stay alive.
There are skills that have helped us in our evolution as humans and made us understand each other up to some limits, or know our needs, and the we have learned new skills that helped us know know more about the society, as we came closer to the age of technology, we and our skills grew and then the skills we developed and learned helped us live a better life.
The previous human generations helped us make a list of important life skills which has helped them a lot in their life which were mainly based on survival and their own experiences and knowledge about life, as they never had access to the resources and knowledge or the experiences that our generations have. Most of the important skills that has been passed to us are from those generations are still limited to some point where we still can learn much more about. But they are mainly related to the following skills:
- Decision making and avoiding threats.
- Creative thinking and critical thinking.
- Interpersonal and social skills.
- Selflessness and empathy.
- Managing emotions, feelings and stress .
These skills all are synchronized with the life that they had and their ways of life and learning them was very crucial for them. And one of the most important skills that they have passed to us were the verbal skills, which we later gave it the name of human inter-communications. One of the most important life skills that provides the emotional, social and other tools needed for success in the social humans life, both at the personal and interpersonal levels.
But each of these skills can be seen as arts, and can play an important role in personal, interpersonal and social life.
Nowadays, with the high-speed phase in human beings evolution in technology and science, there are new horizons that we need to see, and many of us will need to have a more futuristic view to life ahead, which will be needing new skills that are related to them. But there are other skills that we all need to know about, in order to live a better life.
Let us get more familiar with some of the most important life skills of todays world:
Life Skills According To The World Health Organization:
You may have noticed that there is no ‘definitive list’ of life skills that each and every person needs to follow to live a life, and the UNICEF has emphasized this.
Because life skills, are skills that vary from culture to culture, and from society to society. These factors make life skills, flexible concepts that are not fixed.
It is therefore very difficult to develop a list of life skills that are useful to the majority of the world’s population.
But the list published by the World Health Organization or ‘WHO’ has almost most of these conditions.
What Are These Important Life Skills?
1.Decision-Making Skills
Decision-making is an important and a very necessary skill for all of us.
But some people get so nervous when making important life decisions and many people find it very challenging to make decisions due to the lack of the decision-making skills.
But this skill is a cognitive process that helps you make decisions in any situation and according to the circumstances, and we all can learn it by practice.
Decision-making skills can be divided into: Time factors, their complexity and the amount of thinking and evaluation it takes to make the decision.
There is a 7-step decision-making process that can help you make better decisions.
This process involves the following steps:
1. Specify the decision
2. Collect relevant information
3. Specify alternatives
4. Weigh the evidence
5. Choose one of the options (The best possible option)
6. Act accordingly
7. Examine your decision, and evaluate its consequences, make changes if necessary
Many people don’t make decisions this way, and that’s what causes the complications or decisions that do not produce desired effect in some cases, which may make them face some complications or problems in life.
2.Problem Solving Skills
One of the most important life skills is problem-solving.
This skill is part of thinking and occurs when you don’t know which path to take, to reach to point B from point A. Or how to move forward in a direction.
Learning this skill will help you deal with the problems you have in your life more effectively and better. Because these problems are not resolved, it can cause anxiety, stress and depression in you or make you loose direction and decrease your level of satisfaction in life.
There are several ways to identify problems, face them and find appropriate solutions to each of them.
You can use the following steps to find the right solutions to face various issues:
1. Analyze the problem
2. Find different solutions
3. Evaluate the solutions
4. Implement a solution
5. Check the impact of the solution (Repeat the process if necessary)
3.Creative Thinking Skill
Another life skill is creative thinking.
Creative thinking means thinking outside the box and the ability to think realistically or understand the logic between ideas.
Learning this life skill is very important because it helps you identify, analyze and ultimately solve problems systematically. It also helps individuals and organizations to be more productive. That is why organizations are looking to hire creative people and these people have found a valuable place in organizations. (Read this article to know more about creativity.)
4.Critical Thinking Skill
In the world we live in, you need to collect and analyze a lot of information every day, and that is why critical-thinking skills are important. This skill teaches you ‘how’ to think rather than ‘what’ to think. Critical thinking allows you to ask a variety of questions and consider a variety of answers to better perform, to find solutions, get better answers to your or your team’s problems.
(Reading Suggestion: Where to Start in Personal Development?)
5.Communication Skills
Among the life skills you have learned so far, communication skills, are one of the most important.
Because the ability to communicate is important in all areas of life. Learning it will allow you to express yourself and express your views and demands.
Communication skills are not just verbal. You must be able to communicate with others through writing or even put attention to the body language and make sure you don’t avoid thinking about their point of view, and situation, when you communicate with them. Miscommunications are one of the reasons that many relations, friendships and daily human interactions face issues, and by improving this skill you can gain many benefits in your private and social life, and sometimes even would help you solve unwanted issues, or misunderstandings that are there for this simple yet important reason with others.
Learning communication skills, includes active listening, public speaking, verbal communication, and written communication. And learning, practicing or improving these skills will help you grow in life.
6.The Skill Of Self-Awareness
Self-awareness is a life skill that helps you recognize your strengths and weaknesses. Self-awareness is one of the essential life skills that allows you to recognize when you are stressed, under pressure, etc. This skill is a prerequisite for communicating with others and empathizing with them. I can suggest you to read the book ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’, which is Viktor Frankl’s memoir of a Nazi concentration camp. This book can be very useful in getting to know yourself and identifying a purpose to each person’s life. (Read this article about self actualization.)
7.Empathy As A Skill
Empathy, is understanding and experiencing people’s feelings by putting yourself in their place. From a psychological perspective, empathy means understanding the emotional state of others. If you don’t care about the needs, desires and feelings of the others, your relation with other people will be completely one-sided, or it may in the long term, seem like a win-lose to the other person at times and it will change the shape of your relations slowly. The skill of empathy, helps you to accept others and know that they too have feelings, even if they are different from you. Once you understand this, your communication will expand even among diverse ethnic and cultural situations.
8.Emotion Management Skills
One of the life skills you need to learn and practice is emotion-management. Bad feelings are usually the result of negative thinking or experiences. You think you can’t do anything and you feel inadequate and weak, defensive or anxious about them. This can lead to problems such as depression and low self-esteem, or bring you to the point of facing complex social situations. But if you learn this life skill, you can deal with these emotions, know where they really come from, and how you can manage them in you. Even negative and unrealistic thoughts, and prevent bad feelings from occurring in yourself. You have to find answers that are true about the feeling itself and know exactly the real place behind them in you. You may be surprised to see how some emotions can be rising up in you because of your memories or experiences that are not even related to the current situation that makes you feel out of emotional balance, because at times your inner child would be still carrying thoughts and emotions in hidden, forgotten place to your consciousness, and sometimes your emotional imbalance may be the result of complexities, lack of clarity, lack of support, or lack of knowledge that you have been facing in your life, or it even can be the result of something unrelated, like physicals or scientific reasons. The importance of emotional balance and awareness is very high in our skills, and knowing about our own emotions and being in control, is very important. This does not mean that we should always bring up reasons or be too cautious about our ever action or thought, or try to come up with reasons and get into the over thinking side of it. But for sure if we face our reality and see that we are getting out of balance, we should and must do something about it.
By having emotional intelligence, we can be in awareness about how and why our own emotions are formed, how we can be observing them in the best way, and how to control them without getting out of balance.
This skill too, can be learned and improved by anyone. But mastering it requires true willingness, awareness and being in touch with your inner truth in a peaceful way, and knowing your true self very well.
9.Interpersonal Skills
Interpersonal skills are the skills we use every day to interact with other people. Learning and practicing these skills helps us to build better relationships with the people we interact with. Some people are naturally skilled, but they are acquired and can be learned with practice. Teamwork, negotiation skills, decision-making, etc. Are part of these skills.
10.Stress management skills
Various studies have shown that stress is the cause of many mental, physical and emotional diseases. That is why controlling it, is one of the most important life skills.
This skill is in direct connection to the ‘Emotion Management Skills’ that was mentioned earlier.
Effective stress management makes you happier and more productive while having enough time. And as a result, you experience a balanced and more calm life.
Why Learning Life Skills Is Important?
You have learned about some of the most important life skills and learned about each of them in this article. And now you know what these skills are.
But you may wonder why you need to learn these skills, or why everyone should learn them for a better life.
It is necessary for everyone, because without learning them, you are more likely to face challenges that can be avoided in life.
Some of these skills will help you regain your confidence and cope with life’s challenges. Other skills help you analyze situations and make decisions that can be helpful in making things better and not more complicated.
In general, you cannot learn one skill to succeed in life, you also can’t be perfect in every single skill in life. And it is ok! Actually we have to make sure that we don’t have the expectation of perfection from ourselves or others in real life, and we may call this a good human skill too!
Most of us learn as long as we are ‘still’ in this life, so, the idea of knowing and being perfect at each and every skill will not be a bright idea for us, we actually don’t need to be perfect in everything to be loved or successful in life.
But you have to make sure that you learn a combination of several skills in order to have a satisfying personal and social life. Learning, improving and growing will make you evolve, and evolution is the gift that our generation has in hand. The combination of the skills that has helped us reach such a high place in human life, has been given to us by our previous generations, and we have to make sure we use them in the best possible ways and even be willing to develop better skills for the coming generations when possible. This all can happen if we are considered a successful and skillful generation in history for the generations that are to come after us, and all good skills, including the skills in this article can be helpful to us for this goal.
Life Skills Training
Life is not the same for each and every one of us. Every one of us, depending on where on this planet we live may have differences in many things, and sometimes we may not even be aware about those differences, unless we learn more about other people, cultures, taboos, lifestyles and many other things. And many of us did not grow in environments that gave us access to the training, education or recourses to learn many of the skills that would be needed later-on in life, or even the skills that would be helpful outside those environments. Many of us did not have access to the learning facilities where we could learn more about life and skills in our communities. For sure, there are many other people who have lived in developed countries, but unfortunately, there are many more people who were not able to live in such countries, with access to many things that the children or people in developed countries do have. It is not to put the blame on anyone for being or not being from a part of the world, because non of us have the choice when it is about where we come from or how we live as children, but it is to know that at times, this single reason, may be the reason of many unwanted or unknown challenges that we may face as we grow to be adults later on in life. There may be many more reasons why a person would not know about the important life skills, or not be very good at some skills as an adult. Or why they may need to learn the skill in other ways in order to be understood, by other societies, than the one they have been used to, earlier in their life.
Many of us may lack some of these skills because of any possible reason, and many of us, may need to improve some skills in life. But as long as a person -lives- with a willingness in them, and has a learning desire, a healthy mindset, and wants to put the effort for it. They can learn and grow, no matter where they live on this planet, or what resources they have.
And the good news is:
There is not only one road to learning the life skills. They can be learned in many ways and in every language, without needing much resources!
-One of the ways to learn life skills, is to learn or relearn the skills that you have learned in the previous sections of this post. You can improve each of these skills by studying more about them and practicing them in real life.
-Another way to learn these skills is the ‘Head, Heart, Hands and Health’ way or the ‘4-H’. This system was developed in the United States by an organization of the same name:
In this system, important life skills are divided into four main categories: Head, Hand, Heart and Health.
- The skills which are related to thinking and management skills.
- The skills related to the heart are communication and attention skills.
- Hands-on skills are skills of forgiveness and work.
- And health skills are life skills. -According to this category, you can practice and improve in any area that you need to acquire skills or strengthen your life skills.
As you may already know, most of life skills are learned through motivation, study and practice.
So if you are looking to learn and strengthen your life skills or upgrade your current skills, never forget to ‘allow’ yourself to read more than you already know about them, read more than the social media, than the talks, or the previous knowledge you have about them, watch educational videos or trainings that can show you the other ways, and go beyond your current limits to reach the unknown in the field, specially in the field of personal skills development. (And don’t forget to keep the balance in your life, and enjoy life while you learn and grow your skills. As life includes these passing days too.)
From now on, it is up to you to evaluate, re-evaluate and learn new skills. Improve your previous skills if necessary, and use them in your work and life. As Thomas Jefferson mentioned “Wisdom is knowing what to do next. Skill is knowing how to do it. Virtue is doing it.”
Click here to read about ‘Inner Peace’.
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