Over the next few months I am going to post regular sections about life skills in this blog. As a university lecturer I am astounded to find people that lack the qualities that make for a good life. I am not talking about reading and writing I am talking about being able to succeed in life. Have a look at this quote:
“You grab a challenge, act on it, then honestly reflect on why your actions worked or didn’t. You learn from it and then move on. That continuous process of lifelong learning helps enormously in a rapidly changing economic environment.” John Kotter (American Academic at Harvard Business School in Fortune, 22 August, 1994).
People I meet at University couldn’t grab a sandwich let alone challenge. I am not speaking only of undergraduates but people
who have been working for many, MANY years. These people are the ones that seem to think it’s okay to sit back and let things come to you
without having any idea what to do about it. I encounter this kind of victim mentality’ all the time. So what’s missing?
Life skills are those essential qualities we need to possess in order to have a reasonably successful life. Without them all we have is empty vein ideas
about what works and what doesn’t. At University all we do is teach people how to remember facts without actually imparting any of these skills
to the people that will be the managers of the future. I am speaking about generic skills like: problem solving, time management, creative thinking and the ability to learn and grow over the course of one’s life. People I meet in graduate and undergraduate circle generally lack these kinds of skills. Oh, they are good are knowing what to write and how to put the words to make it sound appealing to their tutor but they are these people the next generation of world leaders and problem solvers? I think not.
As a personal response to this problem I want to introduce the topic of building a skill set for life. These are the skills I see our graduates are missing and are in desperate need of attention. What are some of these basic skills:
- Learning: Being able to think for oneself
- Strategic Thinking: Understanding the diversity of views and opinions available and the inherent complexity of social things
- Problem Solving: Being able to solve problems by offering better solutions to previously ill-defined problems
- Communication: Being able to send a message clearly and understand not just what is being said but what the sender means
- Managing relationships: Understanding the roles relationships play in our lives and how this works
- Creative Thinking: Making use of lateral thinking and out of the box ideas
- Perspective Shifting: Moving between different points of view to come up with ideas that match the problems faced
- Bridge Building: Knowing how to take steps forward to improve problems rather than make excuses for living with them
- Reflection: Thinking back on what’s happened, milking mistakes for learning purposes and planning future action to take advantage of it
Life skills to me are not being able to read so much as knowing what the writer means. It’s not being able to add up endless reams of mathematical equations as it is
the applicability of ideas to problems. It’s not knowing who to step over but understanding the chain of relationships in any environment and where you can go from there.
You see, the stuff of life is not like what we teach at Universities. It’s real. Really real. We need to move towards understanding these things if we are to get
serious about the future of our planet.
Technorati Tags: life skills, problem solving, time management, creative thinking, Learning:, Strategic Thinking:, Problem Solving, Communication, Managing relationships, Creative Thinking, Perspective Shifting, Bridge Building, Reflection
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