By Volunteer Kratika Trivedi, FHI Lucknow
“In our lives, we have had many conversations with innumerable individuals, but have we ever really listened to them?”
This post emphasises on the essence of two underrated Life Skills – Conversating and Listening. Generally, when we converse, we listen to retaliate with our own statements rather than listening, understanding, empathising, and embracing the intellect other person are offering. I believe that every person we encounter in our life has a lot to offer in terms of their thought process, be it a random person on the street or maybe the founder of Joy of Drama. There is so much to embody within ourselves if we really listen to their perspectives.
We all are blessed with a life but it is not easy to lead it the way we want. We have to be dynamic to adapt to every situation in our lives and for this, we need to have a good hold on life skills. Now, what life skills really are? Life skills are basically the skills that determine our attitude when life bedevils us or throws a gauntlet at us! Our life skills differ because our experiences differ, our demands differ, our genesis differs and our approach differs!
I got an insight into a life skill pivotal to every existence, that is, Creative Problem Solving. This is a concept that tends to eradicate self-doubts, self-judgments, procrastination, blame-game (which is the current trend; no sense of accountability), and familiarizes us with the actual problem.
Firstly we need to identify the actual problem, study its cause and effect, and then work on that. Once all these negative factors are flushed away from the mind, self-confidence ratchets up, calm and composure sets in, which leads to clarity, creates responsibility, and hence leads to better decision making, and sound judgments. It is simply a detoxification of the mind. One more highlight was to empathise with the problems and willingness to solve them because these are the catalysts to generate a solution.
The limelight of the whole conversation was that life skills are not necessarily developed by education or awareness but also by our hobbies, passion or even day to day chores be it drama, cooking, designing, playing sports-the list goes on and on; We only need to realize the dearth of a skill that is obstructing our growth and work on it and that is Our Life skill.
Be it children, teenagers, or adults, all of us need reassurance and validation from others in order to build up our confidence and have a sense of belonging. The number of likes on our social media accounts usually determines our levels of self-confidence. However, seldom do we realize that it is not some external validation that we require, but an internal stimulus that is generated when we try to observe, understand, empathise and connect more with our surroundings and our own selves. In order to grow, we need to push our boundaries further and be our own competition.
We all have a counselor within ourselves! Remember the last time we counseled our friend when they were having a bad-day? It is high time that we introspect and counsel our own selves because that is the real gauntlet coming for us!