I have been teaching life skills recently and have some thoughts about them. By life skills, I mean those basic soft skills that we are supposed to learn during our childhood from our parents and the community around us. Some of us have learned more of them than others because we all come from different families and communities. They are culturally relative skills and may vary a lot depending on our specific cultural associations. Also, they are truly qualities rather than actual skills if we are precise. That is, learning them requires truly internalizing them to the point that they change our behaviors in a permanent manner. Memorizing them or just cognitively understanding them is not sufficient.
There is no consensus on what exact types of skills are included in the basic life skills. In my research, I ended up with sixteen different but very interrelated topic areas. They include skills like communication, interpersonal skills, decision making, problem solving, creative thinking, and critical thinking. They also include qualities like self-awareness, empathy, and flexibility, that are all part of emotional intelligence. Additional subject areas that I found important are time management, assertiveness, resilience, handling criticism, self-management, and cooperation. There are probably many more skills and qualities that could be added to the list and in some ways the list is endless. However, I am certain that these skills and qualities are essential in our personal lives as well as in our careers. They form the very essence of our human interactions with each other. Some of them are not easy to learn, and we may struggle with some of them depending on our circumstances. I find myself discussing them with my executive clients when I do leadership coaching. I also talk about these topics with my university students and even with homeless youth at a homeless shelter. I talk about the same topics at different levels of depth. Mastering these skills requires several cycles of exposure and experimenting with them. We spend our lifetimes mastering them. It is never too early or too late to start.
While we often learn the basic life skills from our childhood, these basics are often not sufficient. I am a big fan of philosophy and psychology and have found my readings on these disciplines to be very beneficial in my own journey of acquiring better life skills. Indeed, all social sciences can guide us about the way people live. Reading masterpieces of literature is also a very good way of seeing examples on how people navigate life. The sad reality is that our K-12 school system is not very good at teaching these skills, and neither is higher education. Mathematics is taught for sake of itself rather than being framed as being taught to improve problem solving and decision making skills. English composition is taught so that students can write academic papers rather than to intentionally improve communication skills. Because the school system does not teach life skills explicitly, students often miss them. In addition, our society seems to favor hard skills rather than soft skills while we also know that soft skills are essential for our success. We are sort of left on our own to learn these soft skills. Somehow it is assumed that we will learn these things as we go. Luckily, there are TED Talks about them and many books by countless writers in the self-help aisles of the bookstores. One can also find many workshops by experts and motivational speakers highlight these skills. The opportunities to learn these skills are available for those who are willing to take the time and invest on themselves.
As I think deeper about life skills, I realize that I have been teaching them my entire life as a therapist, trainer, consultant, professor, and a leader. I even wrote my dissertation on these issues. It is a passion of mine to help people to live better and to be successful.
