Life skills are interpersonal skills that help individuals build a productive life by empathising with others, communicating their thoughts effectively, making informed decisions and thinking rationally. Through life skills, students can cope with the fast-paced world and overcome the challenges that come along their way.
Some essential life skills for students are:
1. Problem-solving skills
Problem-solving skill is the ability to identify or encounter problems, research and analyse answers, and implement the best solutions. The student with good problem-solving skills gets insights of a problem and can work with a team to figure out a wide range of solutions before deciding how to move forward. This is one of the most essential skills that students need. This encourages students to focus on real-world problems that require rational thinking and problem-solving skills to be tackled. In order to face the highly competitive world, students need to build critical thinking to analyse the problem and come up with a solution quickly.
Problem solving involves 3 steps:
• Research:
Research is crucial to understand the context of the problem and why the problem has occurred. It broadens the scope of reasons that caused the problem and it makes it easier to get the solution
because one gets to know the problem-causing areas.
• Analysis
Analysis is a thorough understanding of the problems and the potential solutions to solve the problem. To get the relevant solution, it is important to analyse the problem through the lens of impartiality.
• Decision-making
Deciding the best solution from a list of relevant solutions is the next step in problem-solving. It helps you prepare the action plan and accumulate the resources available to proceed with the solution.
2. Communication skills
Communication skill is the most beneficial and valuable skill in molding a person’s career. Three parts of communication skills are speaking, listening, and writing. Schools organise various reading and writing presentations, speech, and debate competitions for instilling communication skills in young kids. The students require regular interaction to set up healthy social-emotional skills, including the ability to communicate and understand others. Importance of good communication skills are:
• Raise self-esteem
Effective communication skills increase children’s confidence to communicate with people, and set boundaries, and this results in raised self-esteem.
• Develop creativity
Good communication skills result in the efficient expression of thoughts. Children can express themselves in other artistic ways like story narration, arts, inventing games, and participating in plays. Verbalising ideas and thoughts enable children to develop and unleash their imaginations which develops their creative side.
3. Positive Thinking
Positive thinking and resilience are life skills that are very helpful for a student’s present and future. Student life is full of stress regarding exams, assignments, and other issues which sometimes leads to anxiety. Therefore, it is important that students develop a positive attitude and learn to bounce back from failures by not letting failures define them and decide their life. These skills help them keep going, encourage themselves, achieve goals and look for the good in situations even when they face challenges