Everyday Canvas

Life Skills

Prompt: Life Skills
What does the term "life skills" mean to you? What life skills, hard or soft, have you developed that serve you the best?
Hard skills are education, certifications, money-making, etc. Soft skills are problem-solving, time management, patience, gratitude, listening ability, etc.

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For me, the term "life skills" refers to our competencies to live through the complexities of existence, daily and on a long term. Although I asked for hard or soft skills in the prompt, I think all life skills are interrelated and they can also be categorized in other ways.

As for what may be included in soft skills--which I think they are more helpful than hard skills--are communication, critical thinking, problem solving, resilience, adaptability, self-care, and emotional intelligence. These soft skills make it possible for the hard skills to succeed.

I think I learned about resilience first, adaptability second from the family, in the beginning of my life. Some psychologists claim almost all soft skills have their roots in one's original family.

The thing is, with those soft skills, we have to adjust them to us and to the circumstances, throughout life. Critical thinking, some emotional intelligence, and communication skills, I believe, came later for me while I was going through my education. Bouncing back from adversity or setbacks and adapting to change I had to learn the hard way throughout my life.

Also, my time management and organization skills developed over time and according to situations, but these two did help greatly with my hard skills such as occupation, digital literacy, and/or paid work. Digital literacy is the least developed of them all for me, but I wanted to include it, here, because it seems to become very important in the very near future.

As to conflict resolution, negotiation, and financial literacy, the way I look at them, these fall in between soft and hard skills.

I guess I can count creativity, empathy, and compassion among soft skills, but some of us are already born with an inclination for those. Time, however, teaches us how to be better at them.

Working on our life skills is an important part of living. Through perfecting those, we can enhance our lives, achieve goals, and go through the difficulties along the way, successfully and with confidence.

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