Life Skills

Life skills are the abilities for adaptive and positive behaviour that help you deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life. Your ability to cope depends on how well you are prepared to handle daily demands and keep equilibrium in your life. The good news is that these skills can be learned and improved. Key life skills include assertiveness, time management, rational thinking, improving relationships, self-care, and overcoming unhelpful habits like perfectionism and procrastination.

Assertiveness is a behaviour or skill that lets you communicate your feelings, needs, wants, and thoughts clearly and confidently. It means being able to say no to a request, state an opinion without feeling self-conscious, or express emotions like love or anger openly. When you are assertive, you feel confident, have high self-esteem, and a solid sense of your own identity.

Time Management is crucial because the way you spend your time determines the quality of your life. Learning to plan time and delegate tasks can relieve pressure. The major way to reduce time stress is to change your perception of time. The central principle is to spend your time doing things you value or that help you achieve your goals. This depends on being realistic about what you know and must do within a certain time, knowing what you want to do, and organising your life to achieve a balance between the two.

Rational Thinking addresses the fact that many stress-related problems come from distorted thinking. Your thoughts and feelings are closely connected. When stressed, you have an inbuilt bias to attend to negative thoughts and images from the past, which affects your perception of the present and future. Principles of rational thinking include challenging distorted thinking and irrational beliefs, driving out intrusive negative anxiety-provoking thoughts, and making positive statements.

Improving Relationships relies on communication, which has three essential skills: listening to what the other person is saying, expressing how you feel and what you think, and accepting the other person’s opinions and feelings even if they differ from your own. It also requires avoiding misplaced jealousy and sulking behaviour.

Self-care means keeping yourself healthy, fit, and relaxed so you are better prepared physically and emotionally to tackle stress. Your breathing patterns reflect your state of mind. When stressed or anxious, you tend toward rapid, shallow breathing from high in the chest with frequent sighs. The most relaxed breathing is slow, stomach-centred breathing from the diaphragm. Environmental stresses like noise, pollution, space, light, and colour also influence your mood and ability to cope.

Overcoming Unhelpful Habits such as perfectionism, avoidance, and procrastination are strategies that help in the short term but make you more vulnerable to stress. Perfectionists need to get everything just right, have difficulty varying standards, feel tense, find it hard to relax, are critical of themselves and others, and may avoid challenges. Avoidance means putting the issue under the carpet and refusing to face it. Procrastination means putting off what you know you need to do, deliberately avoiding confronting fears of failure or rejection.

Resilience is a dynamic developmental process referring to the maintenance of positive adjustment under challenging life conditions. It is the capacity to bounce back in the face of stress and adversity. Resilience reflects feelings of self-worth and self-confidence, autonomy and self-reliance, finding positive role models, seeking a confidant, cognitive skills like problem solving and creativity, and a belief that life has purpose and meaning. Resilient individuals overcome trauma and learn to live psychologically healthy lives. Resilience has been defined in terms of three resources:

• I HAVE – social and interpersonal strengths (people around me I trust and who love me no matter what)
• I AM – inner strengths (respectful of myself and others)
• I CAN – interpersonal and problem-solving skills (find ways to solve problems I face)

For a child to be resilient, they need more than one of these strengths. For example, a child with plenty of self-esteem (I am) but no one to turn to for support (I have) and no capacity to solve problems (I can) will not be resilient.

Diet – A balanced diet lifts mood, gives energy, feeds muscles, improves circulation, prevents illness, strengthens the immune system, and helps you cope with stress. The key is eating three main meals a day with a varied, well-balanced diet. How much nutrition you need depends on your activity level, genetic make-up, climate, and health history. When stressed, people often seek comfort foods high in fats, salt, and sugar.

Exercise – A large number of studies confirm a positive relationship between physical fitness and health. Regular exercise plays an important role in managing weight and stress, and reduces tension, anxiety, and depression. Stretching exercises like yogic asanas have a calming effect, while aerobic exercises like jogging, swimming, and cycling increase arousal. The health benefits of exercise work as a stress buffer.

Positive Attitude – Positive health and well-being come from having a positive attitude. Factors leading to a positive attitude include having a fairly accurate perception of reality, a sense of purpose and responsibility, acceptance and tolerance for different viewpoints, taking credit for success and accepting blame for failure, being open to new ideas, and having a sense of humour with the ability to laugh at oneself. …