LESSON 8

LIFE MANAGEMENT SKILLS

Learning Objectives:
Upon completion of the Lesson 8 you MUST be able to:
1. 1.Discuss importance of life management
2. Explain the 5 Life Management skills.
3. Appreciate the 5 Life Management skills.
4. Make use of the Seven (7) ways to manage life.
5. Develop Life Management Skills

Life Management
Life management doesn’t need to be boring. In fact, it can feel like one big game. How you
manage your life is how you manage your time, money, weight, relationships, work-life balance,
and more. It’s all connected. Learning what works best for you in one area can immediately be
implemented into many other things you’re trying to achieve or improve about yourself. And just
like you get better by practicing and making mistakes in anything, you can master life
management.
Life skills education contributes to: basic education; gender equality; democracy; good
citizenship; child care and protection; quality and efficiency of the education system; the
promotion of lifelong learning; quality of life; the promotion of peace.
10 Core Life Skills
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:
1. Self-awareness
2. Empathy
3. Critical thinking
4. Creative thinking
5. Decision making
6. Problem Solving
7. Effective communication
8. Interpersonal relationship
9. Coping with stress
10. 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 behavior, 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 behavior 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.
Five (5) Life Management Skills
1. Find Purpose.
What do you want from your life? What is your ultimate outcome? The answer isn’t buying
a nice car or fancy house. Your true goal is something deeper and the life management skills you
cultivate need to reflect that. What objective, when you think about it, brings you a sense of joy,
fun and freedom? What does it mean to you to unlock an extraordinary life? That’s what you’re
working for. It could be providing for your family or being the best in your field, but it isn’t about
material things.
All too often you lose sight of your end goal when thinking about what you want to achieve.
This results in creating meaningless to-do lists instead of tapping into life management resources.
You get swept up in the short-term tasks you’ve listed instead of pursuing your higher purpose.
The more clarity you have regarding your end goal, the more likely you are to achieve it. Once
you know what you really want, you start making progress to achieve it.
With a clear vision in mind, you can use life management services such as a Massive Action
Plan to determine your actions with purpose and make true progress toward your goals. As Tony
Robbins says, “One reason so few of us achieve what we truly want is that we never direct our
focus; we never concentrate our power. Most people dabble their way through life, never deciding
to master anything in particular.” Decide to become a master of your life. Take control of your
time and make your actions count.
2. Rely on Chunking.
You’re not failing at reaching your goals because you’re incapable of success — you’re
failing because you’re trying to focus on too many things at once. Changing the way, you think
about your goals is one of the life management skills that will help you focus. Don’t think about
the things that you need to do to achieve your goal — think about and visualize the outcome.
Say your goal is learning how to cook. You’re dreading going to the grocery store, finding
recipes, purchasing kitchen appliances and cleaning up the mess at the end of the ordeal. Instead
of focusing on your desirable outcome — becoming an amazing cook — you’re caught up in all
the intimidating details.
 Now think of something you already know how to do really well, like working out. You
know you need to drive to the gym, then exercise when you get there. These two manageable tasks
seem much easier than the many steps it takes to learn a new skill because you’ve done it many
times before. But in reality, cooking and going to the gym aren’t that different in terms of difficulty
— you’re just thinking about them in a completely different way.
If you change your mindset and think about the outcome instead of the steps to get there,
you’re more likely to pursue your goal. Chunking is the understanding that when you’re first
learning a new skill or trying to get something done, like cooking, it can feel like you’re trying to
accomplish 100 things. But after working on your skills in the kitchen enough, it becomes a couple
of manageable tasks — going to the store and cooking.
Once you master this skill, you can chunk activities with similar outcomes together.
Empower yourself to get things done by grouping together information into manageable-size
chunks that you can use effectively to achieve your goals.
3. Utilize N.E.T Time
One of the important steps to achieving any goal is to continue learning at every
opportunity. However, it can be difficult to access the books, podcasts and videos that will further
your knowledge when you feel like there’s no time left in the day. Feeding your mind during
downtime is a life management skill that will take your expertise to a new level.
This is where life management skills like utilizing N.E.T. time come in. N.E.T. stands for
“No Extra Time” and it’s based on the concept that you always have time during your day that you
can fill with learning. This could mean listening to a podcast during your morning commute or an
audiobook while you’re shopping for groceries or reading a book while you wait for an
appointment.
4. Spend Time on Relationships.
Life management skills are not all about achieving peak physical health and getting ahead
at work. You should also make sure to take time every day to cultivate relationships with those
you love. Planning for date nights and opportunities for deeper connection is crucial to creating a
healthy relationship with your partner. Reserving time to play with, read to and talk to your kids
about their day is vital to developing bonds with your children. Don’t view the time you take to
relax and connect as wasted time. Instead, see it as an important life management component that
adds to your overall well-being.

5. Learn How to Communicate Better.

How often do you lose valuable time at work or at home because of a miscommunication?
Maybe a project needs to be redone because the objectives weren’t clearly communicated or you
and your partner took the afternoon off work to handle a plumbing issue at home because you
didn’t effectively communicate who would take care of it. Communicating with your partner and
your team at the office leads to better relationships and streamlined schedules. Learn the
communication styles of those you frequently interact with and understand that life management
becomes easier when you slow down and take the time to truly listen.
Seven (7) Ways to Manage your Life
1. Take control of your habits.
It all starts with our behavior. It’s what we do daily and what gets us closer to success, or
keeps us away from it. It’s worth understanding the science of habit forming to know how to break
bad old habits and replace them with better ones. You’ll feel great once you learn how to start new
successful behaviors. All that will increase your willpower and confidence in your abilities. But
work on one habit at a time and start small. But if you don’t take control of your habits, they will
control you. You can’t afford that to happen if you want to get better at life management.
2. Keep failing but learn from each failure.
It’s important to understand something: Every successful person you’ve ever heard of has
failed more times than he has ever succeeded. We just don’t hear about the defeats that often. The
only way to actually see what works and reach success in something, is to fail enough times so
that you gain knowledge and experience and see what doesn’t work first. Change your attitude
towards failure too. Each mistake is a priceless lesson. It’s crucial to keep your hope alive after
each and make the most of it. You’re moving on better prepared. So be willing to try again after
that. There’s also another way to learn what not to do to manage your life – by studying the
mistakes of other people and making sure you avoid them. Read about the successful ones in your
field, see what they did wrong and listen to their advice on how to overcome such obstacles. Seek
mentors and ask them what no to do.
3. Hack productivity.
To hack productivity is to beat procrastination once and for all, to eliminate your
unproductive activities, learn to focus better and get more done in less time. Once you do that,
you’ll get better results, impress others with your efficiency, save time and have more of it for
yourself, and be action-oriented. That means you’ll achieve your goals much faster and will
develop the necessary life management skills. Being productive means being successful. Don’t
underestimate it. Work on that, build the right productivity habits and break the lazy ones.

4. Be a lifelong learner.
If you accept life as one big journey and a learning experience, you’ll save yourself a lot
of negativism and desperation on the way. Because that’s what it really is. We are all students of
life, know nothing in the beginning, make mistakes and learn from them, educate ourselves, learn
from others and grow while doing all that. So why not take care of the education process yourself,
instead of depending on other things (like school, university, society, authorities, information
overload, etc.) to do it for you. Life becomes so much more interesting once you dedicate it to
learning and growing. You expand your horizons, start seeing things from another point of view,
are more open-minded and accept what the average person can’t. Reading is a great way to do all
that. But so is traveling, having deep conversations with people, and even turning to your inner
self by analyzing your behavior and deepest desires, meditating and journaling your thoughts.
5. Turn your dreams into goals.
If you wanted to have a direction in life and actually live your ideal lifestyle, you have to
turn these into specific goals and follow them no matter what.
6. Be Strategic.
This means trying different techniques all the time and seeing which gives you best results,
then doing more of it. Living this way can turn into one big challenge, during which you’ll not
only have fun but be all about personal and spiritual growtTake care of your health.
You won’t perform better and think clearly (which are key ingredients of good life
management) if you don’t take good care of your health. First, start with improving your quality
of sleep. Learn to cure insomnia naturally. Then, start working out and excluding junk food from
your menu. Eating habits are hard to change. Give it time. Your health is important. Protect it.
Gradual change is what you need and it gives you the best results in the long-term.