What is life skill?

Life skill is defined as the ability to cope with stresses and challenges of daily life, especially skills
in communication and literacy, decision making, occupational requirement, problem solving,
time management and planning.

W.H.O has defined Life skills as "the abilities for adaptive and positive behaviour that enable
individuals to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life.

Aspects of life skills

It pertains to areas of skill, eg; listening skill, presentation skill

Skills based on level of competence-strength or weakness

Skills related to knowledge and sequence of choices

Communication and action skills

Five main ways of sending messages:

• Verbal communication:- messages sent with words.

• Vocal communication:- messages sent through one’s voice.

• Bodily communication (Body language):- messages sent by the body.

• Touch communication

• Taking action communication:- eg. Letters, follow up notes

➢ VERBAL COMMUNICATION:

1. Language:-

- Formal language (NEWS)

- Informal or colloquial language (friends)

2. Content:-

- Topic area, problem area or task being discussed

- Focus of talk

- Evaluative dimension of talk

3. Amount of speech:-

- Coach may talk more

- Giving clients sufficient space to say what they want.

4. Ownership of speech:-

- ‘You’ messages focus on the other person and can be judgmental

- ‘I’ messages are centered in a person as the sender.

➢ Vocal communication skills: [VAPER]

1. Volume:-

- Loudness or softness

- Messages should be disclosed at a level of audibility that is comfortable and easy for the
clients to hear.

- Not too loud and not too low

- A firm and confident voice is a good starting.

- Variations are made as the sessions continue.

2. Articulation:-

- Refers to the clarity of speech.

- Well enunciated words are easy to understand.

3. Pitch:-

- Refers to height or depth of one’s voice.

- Optimum pitch produces pleasing voice.

4. Emphasis:-

- Emphasis should be given when responding to clients’ feelings and nuances and when
sharing feelings.

- Emphasis should be given at the right place.

5. Rate:-

- Words per minute.

- Speaking very quickly, coaching trainees appear anxious and clients may have difficulty
understanding them.

- Too ponderous speech rate can be boring.

- Pausing and being silent at the right time is important.

➢ Bodily communication skills (Body language):

- Coach can actually see and experience how the client communicates.

1. Facial expressions:-

- The main vehicle for sending body messages.

- Provides vital clues, often unconsciously, revealing attitudes, moods and opinions.

- One has to be alert all the time in order not to miss these micro-momentary facial
expressions.

- These expressions are difficult to hide.

- They are so quick and instinctive that they reflect one’s true feelings.

- We should not forget to smile.

2. Gaze:-

- Looking at other people in the area of their face.

- Is a way of showing interest and collecting information.

- Speakers look at listeners about 40% of the time .

- Listeners look at speakers about 70-75% of the time.

- Gaze is useful for coordinating speech.

- Women are more attentive than men in all measures of gaze.

3. Eye contact:-

- Eye contact is a more direct way than gaze of sending messages, be they of interest, anger or
sexual attraction.

- Establishes our relationship with the other person.

- Helps us keep our mind on the message.

- Encourages the other to continue interacting with us.

- Reflects our self-confidence.

- Eyes express the emotional elements.

• DO’S and DON’T’S of Eye-contact:

Do’s:

- While speaking, look at everyone in the group.

- Look at key decision-makers or those who hold power.

- Look at reactive listeners.

Don’t’s:

- Do not look at bad listeners. They may distract you.

- If you have trouble looking at someone’s eye, simply focus at something on his or her face.

4. Gesture:

- Physical movements that can frame or illustrate words coming before, during or after what is
being said.

- May also illustrate shapes, sizes or movements.

- Gestures may vary according to the sex.

- Men’s gestures are more forceful.

- Women’s gestures are smaller and inhibited.

- To be effective, all gestures must be appropriate to our purpose and natural to our personal
style.

• Avoid,

- Pointing at others.

- Touching others to emphasis a point.

- Being too familiar.

- Entering people’s personal space.

- Conveying obscenities (indecency)with the fingers, hands and other body parts.

- Holding someone’s hand longer than a few seconds during a handshake.

5. Posture:

- Turning one’s body towards the client is more encouraging than turning away from them.

- Whether the trainee leans forwards or backwards may indicate interest or disinterest.

- Sitting with arms and legs tightly crossed suggests being emotionally as well as literally
uptight.

6. Physical closeness:

- Intimate zone (btw. 6 to 18 inch.)

- Personal zone (btw. 18 to 48 inch.)

- Social zone (btw. 4 to 12 feet)

- Public zone (over 12 feet)

7. Clothes:

They reveal

- Social and occupational standing.

- Sex-role identity.

- Ethnicity

- Conformity to peer norms.

- Rebelliousness and how outgoing they are.

Coaching trainees need to dress appropriately for their effective training.

8. Grooming:

- Provide information about how well people take care of themselves.

➢ MIND SKILL
central mental processes

- creating rules
- creating perceptions
- creating self-talk
- creating visual images
- creating explanations
- creating expectations
- creating realistic goals

1. Creating Rules Skills

Rules are the ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ by which people lead their lives.

Influences from the past and present have helped to create and to sustain everyone’s rules:

for example, family, religion, gender, culture, race, peer group, age, exposure to the media
and so on.

Demanding Rules

• I must be the perfect trainee.

• I must be liked by everyone.

• I must always be in control of my family.

Preferential Rules

• I’d prefer to be a highly competent trainee but I’m learning and am bound to make some
mistakes.

• I’d prefer to be liked but it’s also even more important to be true to myself.

• I’d prefer to influence my family in ways to attain important goals

2.Creating Perceptions Skills

Aaron Beck emphasizes propositional thinking, based on testing the reality of perceptions
about oneself, others and the environment.

This section focuses on how accurately one perceives oneself rather than on how accurately
one perceives others.

A principal skill of learning to perceive more accurately is being able to distinguish fact from
inference.

Self concept

The self-concept is one’s picture of oneself; what one thinks of as ‘I’ or ‘Me’. It consists of a
series of different perceptions of varying degrees of accuracy.
 Areas of one’s self-concept: It include perceptions regarding Family of origin, current
relationships, body image, age, gender, sexual orientation, culture, race, social class, religious
beliefs, health, work, study activities, leisure pursuits, tastes and preferences, among others.

Dimensions of self concept

- Centrality :- ‘What is really important to me?’

- positive and negative evaluations of personal characteristics:-‘What do I like and dislike

about myself?’

- How confident one is:- A person may accurately perceive their level of confidence or may
over- or underestimate it.

3.Creating Self-Talk Skills

Self-talk goes by numerous other names, including:

▪ Inner monologue,
▪ Inner dialogue,
▪ Inner speech,
▪ Self-verbalizing,
▪ Self-instructing
▪ Talking to oneself.

- In any relationship of more than one person, there are at least 3 conversations going on:

- the public conversation (one)and each person’s private self-talk( two)

specific areas of self-talk

- Coaching :- coaching clients in instructing themselves in order to handle specific

situations better. Coaching self-talk is no substitute for possessing the skills to perform a
task but it can assist performance.
- choosing alerting :- It can alert a person that they need to take something into account.
The basic alerting self-instruction is ‘STOP … THINK’.
- Calming :-Self-talk can also perform a calming function. Sample calming self-statements
include ‘Keep calm’, ‘Slow down’, ‘Relax’ and ‘Breath slowly and regularly’.
- coping :-Coping self-talk . which is the opposite of negative or destructive self-talk, can
perform various functions.
- affirming self-talk :-Affirming self-talk, which focuses on reminding oneself of realistic
factors in one’s favor.

4.Creating Visual Images Skills

When experiencing any significant feeling or sensation, people are likely to think in pictures as
well as words. Those whose most highly valued representational system is visual tend to respond
to the world and organize it in terms of mental images (Lazarus, 1984, 2005).

As with self-talk, visual images can be alerting, calming, coaching and affirming. Often
appropriate self-talk can be combined with appropriate visual images.

Clients can accompany their affirming self-talk with affirming visual images. They can tell
themselves they can cope and can picture themselves performing competently in specific
situations. Many sports people, such as Tiger Woods, use affirming visual images to enhance
performance (Woods, 1997).

5.Creating Explanations Skills

- Explanations of cause are the reasons that people give to themselves for what happens.

- These explanations can influence how they think about their past, present and future.

- explanations of cause influence how they feel, physically react and act

- . A client can strengthen or weaken their motivation to attain higher skills levels by how they
explain the causes of their successes and failures

6.Creating Expectations Skills

- Humans seek to predict their futures so that they can influence and control them.

- Consequential thinking entails creating expectations about the consequences of human

behavior.

- For good or ill, people can create and influence their consequences, including their own and
others’ feelings, physical reactions, thoughts and communications.

Expectations about positive consequences :-Clients can inaccurately expect positive

consequences by overestimating gain and by underestimating gain. Optimists may overestimate
gain, while pessimists may overestimate loss.

Expectations about negative consequences :- Clients can make the mistake of inaccurately
expecting negative consequences by underestimating loss and by overestimating loss. Both entail
inaccurately estimating the ‘downside’ of their communication and actions.

Expectations are mainly 2 types.

Expectations about competence :- Expectations about competence involve predictions about

one’s ability to accomplish a certain level of performance, for instance in listening.

Expectations about outcomes :- Outcome expectations involve predictions about the likely
consequences of one’s performance, for instance that if a client listens skillfully then she or he
will probably experience better home and work relationships.

7. Creating Realistic Goals Skills

- Goals can be short, medium or long term

- It is in various areas: relationships, study, work, recreation, health and finances.
- When in close relationships, goals may need to be negotiated so that they become
shared goals.

Errors in goal setting

- Reflecting values
- Insufficient realism
- Inadequate specificity
- Unclear time frames
8.Creating Realistic Decision-Making Skills

- Realistic decision-making can be viewed as taking place in two main stages:

- first:- confronting and making decisions;

- Second:- implementing and evaluating them.

- Clients may have skills weaknesses in either or both stages.

- An illustrative weakness when making decisions is failure to generate sufficient decision

options.

- An illustrative weakness when implementing decisions is poor planning.

9. Time Management Skills

- Coaches and coaching trainees can build clients’ time management skills.

- An important way to do this is to coach timetabling activities skills.

- Trainees may need to explain the value of timetabling and the negative consequences of
failure to timetable.

- Trainees may initially provide timetables but they should aim to get clients to be doing this
themselves.

- The idea is for trainees to help clients to develop

- their own timetabling and time management skills so that they can gradually step back from
assisting them.

- Trainees should check with clients on their progress in adhering to timetabled activities and
find out about any difficulties experienced.

- Often non-adherence to timetabled activities shows that clients have one or more poor mind
skills, for instance perfectionist rules about achievement.

- If so, trainees should help clients learn better mind skills.

➢ SELF AWARENESS
- It is knowing one’s personal characteristics and actions of a person which affect other
persons and identifying its result by the person.
- Self-awareness helps a person to understand how people perceive him/her and allows
him/her to identify his/her personal qualities that he/she would like to change.
- To develop the skill of self-awareness one should understand himself/herself in many
domains of his/her.

The 3 main DOMAINS are;

- Personality

- Values

- Habits
 - Personality :- Understanding of one’s personality can help him/her to find situation in
which he/she will thrive, and to avoid situations in which he/she will experience too
much stress.

- Values :- A person should know and focus on his/her personal values.

- Habits :- Identifying one’s habit which help the person to interact effectively and
decrease the effectiveness.

SELF AWARENESS HELPS ;

- To improve performance

- To manage oneself

- To develop interpersonal skills

- To accept his/her own tendencies

SELF AWARENESS is an ability to assess one’s personality, behaviors and skills, it should done
accurately.

To form accurate self-awareness, one has to;

- observe one’s own thoughts, behaviors and skills

- compare observations to a new information

- incorporate comparison into self-observation and subsequent behavior.