What are basic life skills?
Basic life skills are a set of psychosocial and interpersonal skills that help people have fuller lives both professionally and personally. They make it possible, among other things, to think critically and creatively, communicate effectively, solve problems, build healthy relationship, understand others by empathizing with them, understand and manage oneself, make good decisions and lead productive lives.
Basic life skills can be used when making personal decisions and with actions directed towards others, as well as towards changes meant for the surrounding environment in general. According to World Health Organization (WHO), The Basic Life Skills Curriculum developed by UNICEF in cooperation with The Ministry of Youth and Sport of Azerbaijan, provides young people with emotional, social and intellectual tools needed to lead a successful life.
Why are basic life skills important?
The Basic Life Skills Curriculum provides readily available tools to deal with the demands of everyday life. First of all, life skills help people manage themselves, for example, deal with their emotions, manage stress, think positively and build self-esteem. Secondly, they enable them to build strong relationships by teaching them how to develop empathy, listen effectively, handle disputes, communicate assertively and manage relationships. Lastly, they help develop thinking skills; namely, how to set goals, make informed decisions, solve problems, be a leader and build resilience.
Basic life skills are divided into three sets of skills: self-awareness, interpersonal skills and cognitive, or thinking skills.
Self Awareness
Self awareness means being able to live with and know oneself. It helps people understand their thoughts, feelings and behaviour. Self awareness deals with:
- Stress management: it teaches specific techniques to recognize the signs of and manage stress effectively
- Emotional regulation: It is about either increasing positive emotion, decreasing negative emotion, or both. It teaches how to change one’s thoughts or behaviours, sometimes in conscious, and sometimes in unconscious ways.
- Positive thinking (optimism)
- Self-Esteem: it stems from living consciously, practicing self-acceptance, self-responsibility, self-assertiveness, living purposefully and practicing personal integrity.
Interpersonal Skills
Interpersonal skills help people know and live with others. Having these skills enables building and keeping good relationships with people on a personal level as well as at work. Interpersonal skills include:
- Empathy: being able to ‘walk in somebody else’s shoes.’ It means that you are able to understand other people’s emotions and can imagine how they feel.
- Listening skills: you are able to effectively listen to understand what the other person is trying to communicate.
- Interpersonal effectiveness: the ability to interact with others. It includes skills we use to tend to relationships, balance priorities and wants and build self-respect. It also teaches how to get things done without seeming selfish to others.
- Managing relationships: skills that we use to maintain good relationships with others.
- Confident Communication: teaches active listening skills, how to express opinions, give and handle criticism, etc.,
Cognitive (Thinking) Skills
Thinking skills teach people how to be creative and think critically, how to set smart goals and making informed decisions.
Thinking skills include:
- Goal setting: setting smart goals and sticking with them.
- Decision making: identifying and choosing from alternatives based on our values and beliefs.
- Problem solving: a thinking process where we use our knowledge, skills, and experience to manage a new situation
- Critical and creative thinking: Critical thinking is using the knowledge and experience that we have to evaluate things and ideas. Creative thinking is the ability to comprehend an issue and find new solutions for it.
- Executive function skills: Understanding what it takes to be a leader.
- Resilience is bouncing back from failures or problems.
How to acquire (learn) life skills
Many basic life skills are acquired from parents or teachers and through interacting with other students at school. They can also be learnt later in life. Here are some ideas on how to develop them:
- Talk about your feelings: identify and talk about your feelings. Be sure to start your sentences with ‘I’ and avoid blaming others. Talking about feelings has an additional benefit of developing language skills connected with emotions.
- Collaborate with others whenever you can: work on and complete projects with other people. You will learn how to complete the various steps, give and get feedback positively, regulate emotions and express opinions.
- Do empathy exercises: try to imagine what it is like to be in someone else’s shoes. Pretend to be a person in a picture or book. What are his/her thoughts? How might he/she be feeling? Engage in a role play with your kids in which you pretend to be the characters in the pictures or by writing a story reflecting on the other person’s experience.
- Become aware of what you don’t know: there is always something we don’t know and it is okay. It is important, however, to identify those things and create a plan to acquire the skills we need.
- Allow yourself to make mistakes: it is okay to be wrong and make mistakes, but you must learn to bounce back from failure and keep working on becoming the best version of yourself.
- Set goals and stick to them: create SMART goals for yourself and create small steps to achieve them. Give yourself a timeline to accomplish each step and reward yourself for your achievements.
- Manage stress: do guided meditation to control your mind.
