Essential Skills
Essential Life Skills
There is no definitive list of life skills. Certain skills may be more or less relevant to you depending on your life circumstances, your culture, beliefs, age, geographic location, etc.
Different life skills will be more or less relevant at different times your life, for example:
- When at school or university, you’ll need study skills
- When buying a house, negotiation skills may be needed
- You’ll need to work on your employability skills to get a job
- When you have a job, leadership and presentation skills may be useful, along with a whole host of other skills.
- When you start a family, time management and organising skills are likely to become important.
- There will be times throughout your life when you’ll need conflict resolution, stress-management and problem solving skills too.
However…
Perhaps the most important life skill is the ability and willingness to learn.
By learning new skills we increase our understanding of the world around us and equip ourselves with the tools we need to live a more productive and fulfilling life, finding ways to cope with the challenges that life, inevitably, throws at us.
Life skills are not always taught directly but often learned indirectly through experience and practice.
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Essential Personal Skills
Personal Skills are the essential life skills we need to help maintain a healthy body and mind.
How we recognise, manage and cope with emotions. Our page Emotional Intelligence demonstrates how important it is for us to be aware of our (and other people’s) emotions. You can find out more about your personality type on our page Myers-Briggs Type Indicators (MBTI) and our page, Keeping your Mind Healthy is worth a read.
Anger and Stress can both be detrimental to our personal relationships and our health. Learning about anger and stress, recognising what may trigger them (in ourselves and others), what the symptoms are and how to control or manage such emotions can greatly enhance our the quality of our lives.
Managing Stress is a key modern life skill. You will find an introduction to stress on our What is Stress? page and then a series of further pages designed to help you avoid, reduce and manage stress in your life: Avoiding Stress , Stress in the Workplace and Tips for Dealing with Stress.
Find other ways to help you cope with stress by reading our pages on Time Management and Minimising Distractions so you can make the most of your time.
We also have sections on anger, including What is Anger? and Anger Management, to help you.
Many people battle with low self-esteem and confidence which can cause stress and prevent them from reaching their full potential.
Our pages: Improving Self-Esteem and Building Confidence provide practical ways to overcome these issues. Improved confidence and self-esteem are also linked with how we present ourselves to others see: Personal Presentation and Personal Appearance for some additional guidance.
And let’s not forget our body since we are what we eat.
We should all be aware of the benefits of a healthy diet and our pages on nutrition can help you understand why our diet is so important.
Discover the easy-to-follow articles:
To learn more about the basic food groups. Our page: Stress, Nutrition and Diet explains some of the ways that stress can be managed through what, and when, we eat.
Alongside diet, exercise can play an important role in improving our sense of well-being and maintaining a healthy body and mind. As well as improving muscle strength, exercise can help you to maintain a healthy weight, increase your energy levels and improve your brain function.
