What are the essential life skills?

7 essential life skills

1. Focus and Self-Control

Children need this skill to achieve goals, especially in a world filled with distractions and information overload. This includes paying attention, exercising self-control, remembering the rules, and thinking flexibility.

2. Perspective Taking

This involves understanding what others think and feel, and forms the basis for children’s understanding of the intentions of parents, teachers, and friends. Children with this skill are less likely to get involved in conflicts.

3. Communicating

Much more than understanding language, reading, writing, and speaking, communicating is the skill of determining what one wants to communicate and realizing how it will be understood by others. It is the skill teachers and employers feel is most lacking today.

4. Making Connections

This Life Skill is at the heart of learning: figuring out what’s the same, what’s different, and sorting them into categories. Making unusual connections is at the core of creativity and moves children beyond knowing information to use information well.

5. Critical Thinking

This skill helps children analyze and evaluate information to guide their beliefs, decisions, and actions. Children need critical thinking to make sense of the world around them and to solve problems.

6. Taking on Challenges

Children who take on challenges instead of avoiding or simply coping with them achieve better in school and life.

7. Self-Directed, Engaged Learning

By setting goals and strategies for learning, children become attuned and better prepared to change as the world changes. This helps children foster their innate curiosity to learn, and helps them realize their potential.