LIFE SKILLS TRAINING.

Any skill that is useful in your life can be considered a life skill. For us at Compass Treatment Centre, the term ‘life skills’ is used for any of the skills needed to deal well and effectively with the challenges of life.

It should therefore be clear that everyone will potentially have a different list of skills they consider most essential in life, and those that they consider unnecessary. Certain skills may be more or less relevant to you depending on your life circumstances, your culture, beliefs, age, geographic location, etc. However, in 1999, the World Health Organization identified six key areas of life skills:

• Communication and interpersonal skills. This broadly describes the skills needed to get on and work with other people, and particularly to transfer and receive messages either in writing or verbally.
• Decision-making and problem-solving. This describes the skills required to understand problems, find solutions to them, alone or with others, and then take action to address them.
• Creative thinking and critical thinking. This describes the ability to think in different and unusual ways about problems, and find new solutions, or generate new ideas, coupled with the ability to assess information carefully and understand its relevance.
• Self-awareness and empathy, which are two key parts of emotional intelligence. They describe understanding yourself and being able to feel for other people as if their experiences were happening to you.
• Assertiveness and equanimity, or self-control. These describe the skills needed to stand up for yourself and other people, and remain calm even in the face of considerable provocation.
• Resilience and ability to cope with problems, which describes the ability to recover from setbacks, and treat them as opportunities to learn, or simply experiences.
• By learning new skills, we increase our understanding of the world around us and equip ourselves with the tools we need to live a more productive and fulfilling life, finding ways to cope with the challenges that life, inevitably, throws at us.
• Most people associate learning with a formal education, but learning can, and should, be a lifelong process that enhances our understanding of the world and improves the quality of our life.