We live in an ever-changing world which puts various demands on us. The new world is defined by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. If we go back a few years and think of the time that COVID-19 ravaged the world, we will realize how managing uncertainty is the most significant skill one needs to have to tide those times. Think of young people and learn how they face several pressures, including but not limited to academics, peer pressure, pressure caused by relationships, social media, and more.
A set of skills that help you navigate life is most needed in these times. The 3 most important skills that are recognized as being important in the 21st century include:
- Learning Skills: In the 21st century, you need to be a learner for life. Learning agility involves picking up new concepts and learning, unlearning, and relearning models.
- Literacy Skills: These are the skills that we widely recognize as they aid in gaining knowledge through traditional reading as well as skills aid in gaining knowledge through reading, media, and digital resources.
- Life Skills: These skills are necessary for successfully navigating everyday life.
While we place a lot of importance on academic skills, sports, extracurricular activities, and more, effective life skills are probably the greatest marker of success in today’s world.
WHO defines Life skills as adaptive and positive behaviors that enable individuals to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life. Essentially, life skills are abilities that help promote mental well-being and competence and help people face the vicissitudes of life.
Table of Contents
WHO lists the ten core life skills as:
- Self-awareness
- Empathy
- Critical thinking
- Creative thinking
- Decision making
- Problem Solving
- Effective communication
- Interpersonal relationship
- Coping with stress
- Coping with emotions
A comprehensive list covers several aspects, beginning with being aware of your strengths and weaknesses to be able to make informed decisions. If, on the one hand, life skills involve an awareness of yourself; they also involve having empathy for others. When faced with difficult challenges, some other important life skills include critical thinking, problem-solving, and decision-making. Essentially, these life skills help an individual tide over tough circumstances by enabling them to make objective decisions. Another key aspect of these life skills involves coping with one’s own emotions as well as coping with imminent stress in the face of uncertainty. Let us look at each of these skills a little more in detail:
1. Self- Awareness
Self-awareness is an essential prerequisite for many actions and decisions in life. With the right knowledge of our strengths, weaknesses, desires, goals, likes, and dislikes, we can make mindful decisions that help us achieve our goals. Self-awareness is also an important aspect of developing strong interpersonal relationships.
2. Empathy
Close to the importance of self-awareness comes the importance of being empathetic to other people. If we want to build successful relationships, we need to understand their point of view. Armed with empathy, we can accept others, no matter how culturally different they may be.
3. Critical Thinking
Simply put, it is the ability to objectively analyze information and experiences. When faced with an issue, this life skill can come in extremely handy. It allows one to make sense of the variables at hand and make a rational decision without feeling overwhelmed.
4. Creative Thinking
We are often told to think outside the box. This is where the concept of creative thinking comes in. Creative thinking emanates from four broad areas: fluency, or generating new ideas; flexibility, or being able to look at things from various perspectives; originality, the ability to conceive something new; and elaboration, the building of ideas.
5. Decision Making
This ability follows through with the ability to think critically. It is after analyzing all the available information, recognizing patterns, and joining the dots that we can come to an effective and efficient decision.
6. Problem-Solving
Faced with many challenges in life, this life skill enables us to resolve problems. Some of the tools and techniques involved include breaking down a problem into its constituent parts, thinking about possible solutions, and then choosing the best solution given the constraints.
7. Effective Communication
As social beings who depend on each other for our well-being, effective communication plays an important role. This life skill, therefore, allows us to express our views and thought processes to other people and understand theirs. Effective communication takes several forms, verbal and nonverbal. It also helps us recognize the barriers to effective communication and how to overcome them.
8. Interpersonal Relationship
It may sound like a cliche to reiterate that man is a social animal; however, forming interpersonal solid relationships is a critical aspect of our overall well-being. This life skill allows us to bond with our fellow mates on this journey of life and mutually contribute to it.
9. Coping with Stress
To say that we will try to eliminate stress in today’s world is to aim for the impossible. Instead, we need to improve our coping skills so as to deal with stress effectively. Ever so often, stress may not be the result of an external situation but our own limiting beliefs and subliminal programming. By working on all these factors, we can reclaim our joy and well-being.
10. Coping with Emotions
Remember a time when you were faced with a challenging situation and encountered some huge emotions? So much so that these emotions were debilitating and rendered you dysfunctional? A meaningful life skill, therefore, is the ability to cope with emotions, big and small. This is something that we can begin learning from a young age. From being taught an emotional vocabulary to being told that all emotions are acceptable, even though every behavioral manifestation of an emotion may not be, is critical.
Teaching Life Skills in Schools
Needless to say, these life skills are a way of life, and they cannot be imbibed in a day. It is important, therefore, to teach these skills at the school level. A great way to do it is to integrate it into the school curriculum, whereby learning these life skills becomes a daily affair. It is also easy to understand that while life skills can be theoretically learned, the key lies in being able to practice them. Experiential learning is, therefore, significant. Done right, it can help students with:
- Making responsible decisions and solving problems effectively
- Positive social behavior as well as improved relationships with teachers and peers.
- Less behavioral challenges
- Even improved academic achievement
At Pragyanam, one of the top CBSE schools in Gurgaon, we firmly believe that the ultimate goal for a child is to lead a fulfilling life that offers happiness and satisfaction. To this end, we ensure that life skills are integrated into the curriculum to empower our students to become well-rounded individuals who are equipped to face the challenges that life throws at them.
Age-appropriate life skills
In fact, we believe that age-appropriate life skills need to be a part of education right from the stage of early childhood education. This belief is rooted in research since it is scientifically proven that 90 percent of brain cells develop by the time a child is five years old. It is the stimulation and learning opportunities that are offered in this period that play a significant role in the development of brain cells. To this end, at Footprints, a chain of preschools that has become a preferred parenting partner, we follow the HighScope curriculum.
The HighScope Preschool Curriculum is based on more than 50 years of research on early childhood development. Active learning is at the center of the HighScope Curriculum. The strength of the HighScope curriculum lies in the fact that it is designed not only to offer a rich academic foundation but also to empower children with essential life skills such as decision-making, creativity, problem-solving, and more. Some of the goals of the HighScope Curriculum include:
- Ensuring that children can independently make age-appropriate decisions and solve problems.
- They improve their socio-emotional quotient.
- Ensure that they have self-regulation skills that last them through adulthood.
Here’s to raising a generation of resilient learners
