Life skills, such as communication skills, interpersonal skills, decision making, persuasion, work life balance, problem-solving and emotional intelligence, help us in leading more fulfilling and productive lives. Most of us pick up life skills through others, especially our family and friends, but many times we find ourselves unequipped to get what we want to get out of our life and work.
Professional development of life skills teaches us the methodologies, techniques and skills that makes us control and handle situations and people successfully. The three life skills discussed below can help you get more satisfaction and success from your work and your life.
Building Balance between Work and Life
It is important to decide how much time, energy and resources you want to spend for work and how much for life. This decision must be reached after recognizing your priorities and those of the family members you live with. It is important to consider the priorities of family members because their behavior affects you every day, and vice versa.
Professional training in work-life balance will help to:
- Analyze the present life-work balance and recognize signs of imbalance when they appear
- Manage time better
- Prioritize effectively
- Manage stress
- Communicate and persuade successfully to achieve goals
- Use effective techniques to improve life at home
- Increase productivity without working more
- Build a fulfilling life and a successful career
Both life and work are equally important and fuel each other. Therefore, both need to be given equal priority. Once you have recognized the importance of both, you need to learn the techniques to make them more fulfilling and rewarding.
Building Skills in Communication
Communication is one of the most important life skills because it is used to communicate feelings, thoughts, to persuade, influence, understand and interact. Whether the communication is verbal, written or non-verbal, developing skills in communication helps to be in control even in difficult situations. It also helps to:
- Clearly, calmly and confidently express our thoughts and feelings
- Understand others’ thoughts and feelings, and respond appropriately
- Adjust your communication style according to need
- Listen actively
- Convince and influence others
- Handle difficult people and situations confidently and efficiently
Enhancement in communication skills leads to improvement in personal and professional relationships. It makes you more confident, assertive, understanding and influential.
Building Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence is often neglected because it is thought less important. Every one of us uses both emotions and thoughts to make decisions, choose our lifestyle, choose our profession, our life partner, and so on. Almost every decision of ours is influenced by emotions. Developing emotional intelligence makes us recognize our emotions, and regulate and use them to achieve our goals. Recognizing and accepting emotions help us to make the right decisions and prioritize correctly. It also helps to:
- Self-manage emotions
- Prioritize and plan goals effectively
- Self-regulate
- Self-motivate
- Understand others by reading verbal and nonverbal communication
- Use emotional intelligence to strengthen personal and professional relationships
Building these life skills impacts life and work positively, and provides new capabilities to achieve personal and professional goals smoothly, efficiently and quickly.