Life skills is defined by the World Health Organization as "abilities for adaptive and positive behavior that enable children to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life."
In recent years, children have to be multi-faceted. They face severe competition in all spheres of their life. Peer pressure is extremely high and an expectation to succeed in all activities that one pursues like studies, sports, music, and so on. In some of the developing countries, young girls from economically weaker sections work harder as they are expected to give a helping hand in running the household along with their studies, thus putting their health at risk.
Children grow up in a mixed environment regarding violence, alcohol, and smoking. They are exposed to a wide range of negative issues. They are not in a position to decide what is right and what is wrong. Their thoughts and actions need to be channelized in the right direction.
The school curriculum enables a child to be academically strong, tests their memory retaining power. But, it does not train them to handle competition, fear of failure, interpersonal skills. While education gives one knowledge and literacy, it does not train one to handle the pressures of life. Life skill based education equips a person to handle challenging situations in a better way and see things in a better perspective. This is where Life Skill Based Education will play a good part.
With Life Skills based education, an individual can handle complexities of life in a better way, is adaptive to changes, arrives at a solution to problems by thinking rationally. In order to achieve success in any discipline (studies, sports, job, and so on), one needs to practice those skills as practice makes one a perfectionist. Similarly, to be successful in life, apart from gaining knowledge through education, one needs to practice the Life Skills described below to lead a happy and successful life.
The WHO has recommended the following TEN skills as the most essential skills
1. Self Awareness
2. Empathy
3. Communication,
4. Interpersonal Skill
5. Problem Solving
6. Decision Making
7. Creative Thinking
8. Critical Thinking
9. Coping with Emotions
10. Coping with stress
Though these skills are considered important, the choice of a particular skill or the emphasis given to a particular skill depends on the situation or the topic that we deal with at a particular time. The skills are inter-dependent and no skill can be discussed independently. For example, when we discuss decision making, it involves critical thinking, creative thinking, and communication. One needs to develop and practice all the mentioned skills so that it enables us to think positively, adapt to changes, learn to cope with stress and emotion and lead a happy and productive life.
1. Self awareness: is essentially trying to understand oneself better: to know who you are, your character, your strengths and weaknesses, your likes and dislikes. It is like watching oneself from a distance. Once you have this awareness, it is easy to achieve what you want from your life. It helps us recognize when we are stressed out or under pressure. It is a pre-requisite for interpersonal relationship and effective communication. Be honest when you analyze yourself. The benefits of understanding oneself are manifold:
• gives us better control over our actions
• approach life with more confidence
• cope with stress
• take better decisions
• flexible to changes
• cope with challenges positively
• develop good communication skills, interact well with others and develop good relationships with people around us.
2 Empathy: is the capability to listen and understand the feelings of another person. Empathy is essentially to put oneself in the other person’s shoe and experience the situation that is totally unfamiliar to us.
Empathy is distinct from either sympathy or pity. Sympathy is showing concern for the other person’s situation. For example, when a child is brooding over the defeat in a match, you sympathize his loss. Pity is feeling sorry for the other person. For example, when you see a person struggling and unable to fix his problem, you pity him.
It is essential that kids are taught to develop empathy as it enables them to understand the difficulties and problems faced by others and deal with the situation accordingly. Their ability to care for others gets honed. A good example is bullying.
The advantages of being empathetic are:
• improves social interactions
• helps us to understand and accept others for what they are
• helps us to understand their actions better
3. Effective communication: is the ability to express oneself both verbally and nonverbally in an appropriate manner. This means being able to communicate well our thoughts, desires, beliefs, opinions, fears, and seek assistance and advice in times of need.
Basic guidelines for effective communication are:
Listen carefully before voicing your views. By communicating well arrive at a solution that is accepted by both parties. There should be mutual understanding.
Be respectful to the other person’s feelings and actions. Even though you dislike the person show respect to the person.
4. Interpersonal relationship: is a skill that we develop to interact with people around us. It helps us to build a good relationship with family, friends, business associates, or any other type of relationship between two or more people. Relationship is a broad term. It can be a relationship between mother/daughter, father/daughter, brother/sister and so on. Each relationship is unique. Any relationship involves sharing of thoughts, feelings, and helps influencing each other’s actions. Not all relationships are healthy. There maybe hatred, animosity, jealousy, or any such negative forces ruining a relationship. Hence, it is of utmost importance to nurture any interpersonal relationship by laying a solid foundation of trust and faith. It is like bringing up a child with all the love and affection.
5. Creative thinking: Problem solving skills involve both critical and creative thinking. Both types of thinking are interdependent. In reality, they operate together and hence difficult to differentiate one from the other.
Creative thinking is defined as generation of new ideas by modifying or combining ideas from existing ones. Each one of us is born with significant creative talent. Children are more creative than adults as they do things without inhibitions. In adults, this is suppressed through many factors like peer pressure, circumstances, education et al.
Following these guidelines, one can develop good creative thinking process.
• Brainstorm all problems before arriving at a solution.
• Be open-minded. Get rid of all mental blocks from the mind.
• Look at all ideas without being critical and evaluate all the ideas without being judgmental.
• Think of wild, unthinkable ideas. Do not follow the trodden path. Most times, thinking out of the ordinary leads to incredible solutions.
6. Critical thinking: is the ability to analyze and process information in a rational manner without emotion. Each one of us thinks, but our thinking is reactive, biased, prejudiced and. moreover, it is disorganized. Once you are aware of who you are, it is easy to analyze a problem and handle the condition unemotionally. Critical thinking involves analyzing a problem without getting emotionally attached and arriving at a solution.
7. Decision making: involves resolving a problem/issue by selecting a most suitable approach from the several alternatives placed before us. Any decision has its flip side always, like the two sides of a coin. We need to pick a solution that outweighs the negative aspect. Once a decision is taken, learn to face the consequences. In everyday life, we take many snap decisions. Some may work to our benefit, some decision we may be wrong and disappointing. Always think before taking a decision. Sometimes our intuition guides us in the right direction.
By following the basic steps enumerated below, you can expect to take reasonably good decisions.
• Get to know the purpose of your decision for solving the problem.
• Collect as much information as possible about the problem to be solved.
• Review the alternatives, list out the different choices and evaluate the pros and cons of each choice.
• Select the best option that can be executed.
• Ultimately, evaluate the outcome of your decision. This will help in future
8. Problem solving: Once a decision is made to resolve a problem, the practical application of the option chosen and the process used to achieve the desired output is problem solving.
All of us face problems in our everyday life. It may be at home, school, or in our work life. To effectively solve a problem one needs to be open-minded and flexible. Some people may achieve it without much difficulty, but some may have to develop the art of solving problems by constant practice, looking at other similar problems and improvising on the available solution. There are several ways of solving a particular problem. It is what is suitable at that particular time.
A few basic guidelines to follow while solving a problem
• Understand the problem. Stop for a while and analyze the problem. Look at it from different perspectives.
• Break down the problem into smaller units. Solving smaller units and achieving the desired output will motivate you to solve the entire problem. Looking at the smaller components will not make the problem in its totality look intimidating.
• Write down the problem and the different ways to arrive at the solution. Weigh the pros and cons and select the best option.
• Ask a few dependable people for their opinions. Compare these with your option and arrive at a suitable solution.
9. Coping with emotion: Emotions can be classified under four broad categories namely happiness, sadness, fear, and anger. We need to recognize our emotions with others. Each person reacts to these emotions differently under varying circumstances. We need to identify the cause of a particular emotion. One person’s happiness may be another person’s sadness. Similarly, one person’s anger may not necessarily bring anger to another person. We need to be aware of our emotions and how it influences our behavior. Intense anger or sorrow can have negative effect on our health. Too much excitement or happiness can also trigger ill effects on our body.
Happiness: is one of the foremost emotions that everyone wants to have. Happiness is defined differently by different people. For some, happiness is achieving success in studies, having good health, having good friends, acquiring wealth et al. If one wants to be happy, the responsibility lies within oneself. Instead of looking at external sources to make you happy, create happiness. Follow these simple activities and happiness is sure to favor you.
• The first and foremost step is to make up your mind to be happy.
• Be kind to everyone around you. It can be as simple as helping an old person crossing the road, a smile or a hello to a person on the street.
• Treat people the way you want them to treat you.
• Show gratitude to every little thing. Learn to appreciate the smallest blessing in your life.
• Be positive. This attitude will make you look beyond all the negative aspects of life.
• Project a happy demeanor even though you are feeling low. It is up to you to feel the change.
Sadness: is an emotion that each of us have experienced at one time or the other in the course of our lives. There are various reasons that trigger sadness in a person. It can be due to failure in studies, business, disappointment in one’s own self, low self-esteem, loss of a dear one and so on. It is essentially a mood swing, and as the situation changes one observes the sadness receding. But, depression is more than a mere emotion. If one does not learn to cope with this emotion, it can become a serious disease that can affect the individual’s health as well as hinder his daily routine.
Fear: is an emotion that can temporarily firewall us from achieving our goal. This emotion overrides our logical mind. Fear can be in any form; fear of failure, fear of flying, fear of displeasing a dear one and so on. Once the reason that causes fear is identified, you can develop techniques to overcome the fear.
Anger is a normal emotion. It shows us that something is not happening the way we feel it should. People express anger in different ways. Some may shout, throw things, use foul language, hurt the other person, talk ill of the person behind his back, or even go silent, bottling up the anger. It is important to manage and deal with this emotion in a conducive way. It is only through constant practice that one can develop the skill to manage this emotion.
10. Coping with stress: A pressure or force on the body and its reaction to the same is called stress. It is an emotion that is experienced by everyone several times in their lives. It need not necessarily have a bad impact on our body. It depends on how we handle the situation. Stress can be effectively used to achieve a desired goal. When you know the reason for your stress, learn to cope with the stress by practicing healthy coping skills. You can follow relaxation techniques like meditation, breathing exercises and so on. You can meet up with friends, listen to music. Decide on which technique suits you best and follow the regimen religiously to lead a healthy life.