"If you see someone without a smile, please give him one of yours." (proverb)
What are life skills?
Does everybody have them?
Why are they so important?
Life skills are those natural or acquired abilities which are essential to man's day-to-day smooth functioning."
From the dawn of civilization, man has been a social creature, who learnt to get along with himself and others by means of life skills.
In the modern era, man has learnt to specialize,to think and to invent things, but unfortunately has neglected the field of elementary life skills, which are needed for smooth daily functioning.We often encounter gifted people (or children) with a higher than average IQ, who are isolated, frustrated and angry about their failings in the social -inter-personal field and don't understand why.This is the job of a life coach or educator, to locate the barriers to success and build a program to supplement life skills.
Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences opposes the narrow and confining approach of the classical intelligence test (IQ).The classic. narrow approach only takes into account logical-mathematical skills and verbal skills -which are needed at school.
Gardner ( a professor of education at Harvard university) observed special groups like the highly-gifted and those with disabilities, and noted that while they displayed amazing ablities in some areas, they lacked basic day-to-day life skills.He concluded from the way man develops skills to help him succeed in daily life,that there were many more life skills than those needed for formal education.
Garder's definition of intelligence : the ability to solve problems or create products that are valued within one or more cultural settings
Life Skills include muliple intelligences and everone of us has a different set of resources.(which is not necessarily balanced). As a result, we may have high musical ability but a poor sense of direction (low spacial intelligence ).
Gardner identified seven intelligences:
* Verbal-Linguistic
* Logical-Mathematical (IQ)
* Bodily-Kinesthetic
* Spatial-Visual
* Musical-Audio
* Interpersonal
* Intrapersonal
Lately.additional kinds of intelligence have been added:
* Survival
* Sexual
* Naturalistic- Ecological
* Moral
* Spiritual (SQ)
Interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences are extremely important life skills and we can regard them as dimensions of Emotional Intelligence.
Likewise, Moral and Spiritual Intelligence relate to essential an central life skills such as the ability to find direction, meaning, values and vision in our lives.
We can use life coaching to locate our strengths - our strong life skills, and our blockages that result from weak life skills.A new strategy can be designed for the client to achieve his objectives by bypassing the blockages or, alternatively, choosing to treat the blockages by NLP and other techniques for strengthening life skills (e.g. learning dialogue skills).
