Day 38 Assignment

Question 1- What do you understand by life skills.

Life skills are any skills you need to manage the activities and challenges of everyday life
effectively. Mastery and development of these skills can improve all areas of your life, from your
work to your relationships. They allow you to handle almost everything better, from processing
your emotions more effectively to interacting with others. Necessary life skills can vary
according to a person’s age or even their culture.
Life skills are behaviors that enable individuals to adapt and deal effectively with the demands
and challenges of life. There are many such skills, but 10 core life skills laid down by WHO are:

 Self-awareness
 Empathy
 Critical thinking
 Creative thinking
 Decision making
 Problem Solving
 Effective communication
 Interpersonal relationship
 Coping with stress
 Coping with emotions
Self-awareness - includes recognition of ‘self’, our character, our strengths and weaknesses,
desires and dislikes. Developing self-awareness can help us to recognize when we are stressed
or feel under pressure. It is often a prerequisite to effective communication and interpersonal
relations, as well as for developing empathy with others.
Empathy – To have a successful relationship with our loved ones and society at large, we need
to understand and care about other peoples’ needs, desires and feelings. Empathy is the ability
to imagine what life is like for another person. Without empathy, our communication with others
will amount to one-way traffic. Empathy can help us to accept others, who may be very different
from ourselves. This can improve social interactions, especially, in situations of ethnic or cultural
diversity.
Critical thinking is an ability to analyze information and experiences in an objective manner.
Critical thinking can contribute to health by helping us to recognize and assess the factors that
influence attitudes and behaviour, such as values, peer pressure and the media.
Creative thinking is a novel way of seeing or doing things that is characteristic of four
components – fluency (generating new ideas), flexibility (shifting perspective easily), originality
(conceiving of something new), and elaboration (building on other ideas).
Decision making helps us to deal constructively with decisions about our lives. This can have
consequences for health. It can teach people how to actively make decisions about their actions
in relation to healthy assessment of different options and, what effects these different decisions
are likely to have.
Problem solving helps us to deal constructively with problems in our lives. Significant problems
that are left unresolved can cause mental stress and give rise to accompanying physical strain.
Interpersonal relationship skills help us to relate in positive ways with the people we interact
with. This may mean being able to make and keep friendly relationships, which can be of great
importance to our mental and social well-being. It may mean keeping, good relations with family
members, which are an important source of social support. It may also mean being able to end
relationships constructively.
Effective communication means that we are able to express ourselves, both verbally and non-
verbally, in ways that are appropriate to our cultures and situations. This means being able to
express opinions and desires, and also needs and fears. And it may mean being able to ask for
advice and help in a time of need. Coping with stress means recognizing the sources of stress
in our lives, recognizing how this affects us, and acting in ways that help us control our levels of
stress, by changing our environment or lifestyle and learning how to relax. Coping with emotions
means involving recognizing emotions within us and others, being aware of how emotions
influence behaviour and being able to respond to emotions appropriately. Intense emotions like
anger or sadness can have negative effects on our health if we do not respond appropriately.
Coping with stress: Wrong beliefs like “I’m not good enough” or “Something is wrong with me”
cause up to 95% of all illness and disease. The membrane of the cell is the brain of the cell, not
the nucleus. Our beliefs are stored in the membrane of our cells. Unless we are fully aware of
what we are doing and why we are doing it at every moment, we are always acting on our
unconscious programming stored as beliefs in our cells. Scientific research has established that
stress is the core factor in physical, mental, and emotional disease. Discovering how
unconscious physical, mental and emotional habits create stress, aging, addiction and disease,
through awareness and simple lifestyle changes reclaiming youthful vitality, joy and well being.
Coping with Emotional: Our feelings are a wonderful barometer of our well being. When we
are not caught up in negative thinking, our feelings remain positive, and we feel joyful, loving
and peaceful. When we are feeling fearful, angry, or depressed it is a sure sign that our
thoughts have become negative and dysfunctional. Developing this awareness and making the
decision to eliminate negative thinking can be dramatically life changing.

Question 2- Write your own stress coping strategies.

Life is getting busier and complex as we are progressing. There are events, persons or things
which cause certain thought process or transitions within us. If we respond negatively to these
events , persons or things it leads to a condition where we feel our resources are less than
demand leading to stressful situation. Stress has been part of human life and where much in
modern human life. It would be wrong to expect stress free life as little amount of stress is also
required to perform at optimum level. Once we accept stress as part of our life, then we have to
think about “how to deal with it?” Following are few strategies I use to deal with stressful
situations –
 Acceptance – First thing is accepting the stressful situation without much projections about
the results. Such situations are bound to come in everyday life. This allows us to cool down
a little bit.
 Ways of human brain to respond – Our frontal cortex is designed to alert us of various
situations especially negative situations and project the consequences in much exaggerated
way. Of course this helps in safety of humans. But many times we get carried away by the
analysis so much that we get stressed by imagining the outcome. So understand how brain
works and responds.
 Critical analysis – analyze both positive and negative outcomes of the stressful situation.
Many times when we think of extreme negatives and have aplan to deal with that, it helps in
reducing the stress.
 Think about gains from the situations – even negative situations give us a lot of learning.
That why they say “failure is first step towards success”
 Regular exercise – Regular activity helps keeping body and mind sound to cope with
stressful situations.
 Proper diet – avoid junk food to the extent possible and ensure proper bowel movement and
clean gut.
 Breathing exercises – Breathing exercises help in keeping cool mind as coping strategy.
 Its not end of life – Avoid thinking negatively “ as if it is end of life”. We can always bounce
back.
 Quality family time- spend and discuss issues with family, spouse or any close friend to feel
lighter.