Definition, Examples, & Skills to Build

• ​Before getting started, we thought you might be interested in our free well-being quiz. ​
• And if you’re a well-being entrepreneur, coach, or consultant, check out our free Wellness Business Growth eBook to get expert tips, tools, and resources to grow your wellness business fast.

Life skills can be defined as abilities that enable humans to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of life. They may also be called psychosocial skills, as they are psychological in nature and include thinking and behavioral processes. Others define life skills as behavioral, cognitive, or interpersonal skills that enable individuals to succeed in various areas of life (Hodge, Danish, & Martin, 2013).

To clarify, life skills are often broken down into three types (​​Prajapati, Sharma, & Sharma, 2017):

Research suggests that developing life skills may help reduce drug, alcohol, and tobacco use. It may also reduce aggression and violence (Botvin & Griffin, 2004). In addition to these bigger outcomes, life skills can just make life a bit easier. When we can regulate our emotions effectively and develop enduring, supportive relationships, we’re happier and healthier. This is why developing life skills is key not only to being successful in life, it’s key for our health and well-being.

Let’s talk a bit more about the basic life skills mentioned above. What exactly do they involve and how do we build them?

Self-awareness
Self-awareness is conscious attention directed towards the self (​​Wicklund, 1975). To cultivate self-awareness, we may engage in reflection or introspection. When we have this life skill, we often find ourselves pondering why we are the way we are or why we do the things we do. 

Critical thinking
Critical thinking can be defined as reflective thinking that focuses on deciding what to believe or do. It may involve organizing facts, analyzing ideas, and evaluating arguments. Overall, having this life skill means we use disciplined thinking to make the best judgments we can and take actions that make the most sense given these judgments (Huitt, 1998).

Creative thinking
Creativity involves the ability to understand a problem and also to redefine it, transform thoughts, reinterpret information, and ignore existing boundaries to find new solutions (​​Kim, 2006). Creative thinking involves fluency, originality, and elaboration. Fluency is the number of relevant ideas that you can come up with. Originally is the number of rare or infrequent ideas you come up with. Elaboration is the number of added ideas you can come up with to build on existing ideas. This life skill may also include ‘resistance to closure’—or in other words, keeping an open mind (​​Kim, 2006).

Decision making
Decision making can be defined as identifying and choosing from alternatives. Our decision making process depends on our values, beliefs, goals, etc… This life skill involves tasks such as defining a problem, determining the requirements of an effective solution, establishing the goals of the decision, and identifying alternatives (Fülöp, 2005).

Problem Solving
Problem solving may be defined as a thinking process where we use our knowledge, skills, and understanding to manage an unfamiliar situation. But keep in mind that problem solving is not like an algorithm. A problem simple enough to be solved with a series of “IF-THEN” statements (as is done in an algorithm) has no need for the life skill of problem solving. When it comes to the human mind, it is capable of much more complex problem solving (​​Carson, 2007).​

Effective communication
Communication might be defined as the act of disclosing, unmasking, or explaining something in detail (Rowan, 2003). Researchers suggest that we can improve our communication in four ways:

• Use common, everyday words
• Use “you” and other pronouns
• Use the active voice
• And use short sentences

This life skill also involves achieving a goal with our communication. For example, we might wish to inform, persuade, or communicate assertively (Rowan, 2003).

Interpersonal relationships
To have successful, healthy relationships, we need a variety of social skills. These life skills might include things like sensitivity to nonverbal cues, low fear of rejection, and the ability to easily adapt when moving from one social situation to the next (Riggio, 1986).

Empathy
Empathy refers to our ability to understand and share the feelings of another. When you are empathetic, you put yourself in another person’s shoes, make an effort to see the world from their perspective, and feel the emotions that they feel. 

Coping with stress
​Our ability to have resiliency in the face of stress is another key life skill. This might involve developing healthy coping skills, engaging in stress management strategies, and using self-care.

Coping with emotion
Coping with our emotions—for example by tolerating distress and regulating emotions—is another type of life skill. This is especially important for our well-being but skills of this type also have important impacts on our relationships. 

Although all of the life skills we’ve discussed so far are important for people of all ages, we may have an easier time learning specific life skills (and benefiting from them) at different ages. It all has to do with the kinds of challenges we are facing at different times in our lives. A teenager, for example, is dealing with changing hormones, peer pressure, and identity formation. Here are some life skills that might be good for teenagers to focus on:
​

• Learning how to say “no”
• Setting a schedule
• Allotting time for adequate sleep
• Time management
• Learning to communicate with adults
• Tolerating rejection
• Managing peer pressure
• Making their own decisions
• Expressing their true feelings
• Being authentic
• Stress tolerance and reduction
• Making new friends

Unlike adults and teenagers, kids are just beginning to develop social and emotional skills. Therefore, their focus should be on more basic and fundamental processes that aid the development of more complex life skills later on. Here are few life skills that kids need:
​

• Taking the perspective of others 
• Communicating their needs and feelings to others
• Making connections between things (e.g., knowing that the word “ball” represents an item that is a ball.)
• Making decisions (e.g., choosing what to wear)
• Self-management (e.g., keeping track of their backpack and keeping their room clean)
• Creativity (often developed through gameplay)
• Resilience in the face of challenges (e.g., getting back up on the bike after they fall off)
• Intrinsic motivation (doing activities simply for enjoyment rather than a reward)

It is difficult to build life skills simply by reading about them. Building life skills often involves engaging in activities that require the skill. With time and practice, these activities help you get better at the given life skill. So, here are a handful of activities that can help you build life skills that lead to well-being.

Try loving-kindness meditation. Loving-kindness meditation is a type of meditation that focuses on imagining sending love to the self and others. It can help cultivate life skills like compassion, kindness, love, and other important relationship skills. You can try several loving-kindness meditations here.
​
Write a gratitude journal. Writing a journal with lists and stories of the things you’re grateful for is a great way to build your emotional coping skills. And, gratitude is one of those skills that actually sticks (Davis et al., 2016). Once you’ve built this skill, your brain can find it easier to be grateful even when you’re not trying. Learn more about gratitude journaling here.

Use affirmations. Affirmations are when we say a positive statement, usually about ourselves, out loud. This can help us develop more positive feelings about ourselves, boost our confidence, and improve our sense of self-worth. You can learn how to do positive affirmations here.

• Botvin, G. J., & Griffin, K. W. (2004). Life skills training: Empirical findings and future directions. Journal of primary prevention, 25(2), 211-232.
• Carson, J. (2007). A problem with problem solving: Teaching thinking without teaching knowledge. The mathematics educator, 17(2).
• Davis, D. E., Choe, E., Meyers, J., Wade, N., Varjas, K., Gifford, A., … & Worthington Jr, E. L. (2016). Thankful for the little things: A meta-analysis of gratitude interventions. Journal of counseling psychology, 63(1), 20.
• Fülöp, J. (2005, November). Introduction to decision making methods. In BDEI-3 workshop, Washington (pp. 1-15).
• Hodge, K., Danish, S., & Martin, J. (2013). Developing a conceptual framework for life skills interventions. The Counseling Psychologist, 41(8), 1125-1152.
• Huitt, W. (1998). Critical thinking: An overview. Educational psychology interactive, 3(6), 34-50.
• Kim, K. H. (2006). Can we trust creativity tests? A review of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT). Creativity research journal, 18(1), 3-14.
• Prajapati, R., Sharma, B., & Sharma, D. (2017). Significance of life skills education. Contemporary Issues in Education Research (CIER), 10(1), 1-6.
• Riggio, R. E. (1986). Assessment of basic social skills. Journal of Personality and social Psychology, 51(3), 649.
• Rowan, K. E. (2003). Informing and explaining skills: Theory and research on informative communication. In Handbook of communication and social interaction skills (pp. 421-456). Routledge.
• Wicklund, R. A. (1975). Objective self-awareness. In Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 8, pp. 233-275). Academic Press.