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Life Skills blog is 'Celebrating 100th Article':



     Today the ‘Life Skills’ blog is celebrating 100th article of its blog. The Life Skills (LS) blog started in the year 2013 to educate people about life skills and its importance. This blog contains articles on various topics touching upon Life skills. Some articles have snippets (Headlines), which gives you hint about entire article, and then you can decide to read the entire article.

Life skills are a set of human skills acquired via direct experience, (and also through training) that are used to handle problems and questions commonly encountered in daily human life.

When we were in primary school we dealt with numeracy skills (numerals, ratios, formulas), literary skills (Reading, writing, and comprehension). When we went on to our higher classes most of us started memorizing the concepts and then writing back the same in the exams and securing good marks. Paulo Freire referred to this kind of education system as ‘Banking model of education’. The name refers to the metaphor of students as containers into which educators must put knowledge. Freire argued that this model reinforces a lack of critical thinking and knowledge ownership in students, which in turn reinforces oppression in contrast to Freire's understanding of knowledge as the result of a human, creative process.

The Life-skills framed by WHO (World Health Organisation) recommend four topics which revolve around a thinking, analyzing and decision-making practices. And which are qualities needed lifelong, They are,

Critical thinking,
Creative thinking,
Decision making, and
Problem solving

Critical thinking helps us to involve with the topic deeply. And think systematically.

Creative thinking helps us to think unique and also come up with alternative solutions to the problems.

Decision making helps us to evaluate various options and opinions while making a decision.

Problem-solving will help us to adopt a systematic and informed way to solve a problem.

One can get trained on skills, and when a person has to be master of the skills he has to practice it, very practically.

Next, when we move to the personal and interpersonal sphere of life, we need a lot of personality traits and skills to be happy and successful in life. The skills to understand why are we thinking the way we are thinking. What are my thoughts and actions telling about me; How happy people are around because of me; how do I perceive people and so on. To cater to these questions in life, the Life-skills has five segments.

Self-Awareness
Empathy
Interpersonal Relations
Coping with stress
Coping with emotion

Self-Awareness is being aware of who we are. Having a clear perception of your personality, including strengths, weaknesses, thoughts, beliefs, motivation, and emotions.

Empathy is awareness of the feelings and emotions of other people. It is the experience of understanding another person's condition from their perspective. You place yourself in their shoes and feel what they are feeling.

Interpersonal Relations refers to the bond between two or more people. Asking for pardon and Pardoning others before they seek for it, is one of the greatest qualities.

Coping with stress, stress is a many-faceted process that occurs in reaction to events or situations in our environment. Different people have a different reaction to the same event. Coping with stress refers to how people manage the situation to protect themselves from ills of stress.

Coping with emotion, Emotions are generated unconsciously. Usually, they are autonomous bodily responses to certain external or internal events. Coping with emotions means recognizing emotions in ourselves and others and how emotions influence behavior. Being able to respond to emotions appropriately is important because intense emotions (like anger or sorrow) can have negative effects on our health if we do not react appropriately.

The above skills help us to go towards a happy, fulfilling and balanced life. Life Skills help us to function as balanced individuals and to act as effective members of the society.

And lastly, Life skills also discusses the very important component i.e. ‘Communication’ which is helpful for success in both personal lives as well as professional life. Communication discusses critical skills such as, listening, speaking, reading and writing.

This ‘Life Skills’ blog has made an effort to collect research articles, expert talks, university publications and so on from multiple sources and make available on a dedicated blog.

Thank you all who have been reading the articles. We hope to bring even more interesting articles going further.

Thank you.

Maaz Mohammed A.Q
(Learning strategist @ Life Skills Express)

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