- Acceptance
- Anger
- Attitude
- Awareness
- Awareness
- Balance
- Behavior
- Blaming
- Boundaries
- Boundaries
- Calm
- Challenges
- Change
- Change
- Choices
- Choices
- Chores
- Communication
- Communication
- Control
- Creative Thinking
- Critical Thinking
- Decision-Making
- Distortions
- Emotion
- Emotional Intelligence
- Environment
- Expectations
- Fear
- Flexibility
- Forgiveness
- Framework
- Goals
- Gratitude
- Grounding
- Growth
- Happiness
- Health
- Housework
- Hurt
- Identity
- Info
- Insight
- Journaling
- Learning
- Listening
- Marriage
- Mental Health
- Mindfulness
- Narratives
- Navigating Women's Roles
- Perspective
- Physical Health
- Power
- Problem-solving
- Reflective Listening
- Relationship
- Relationships
- Resiliency
- Self talk
- Stories
- Stress
- Support
- Thinking
- Time Management
- Uncertainty
- Writing
- March 2022 (1)
- January 2022 (1)
- December 2021 (2)
- November 2021 (2)
- October 2021 (1)
- August 2021 (1)
- July 2021 (1)
- June 2021 (2)
- May 2021 (3)
- April 2021 (1)
- March 2021 (2)
- February 2021 (3)
- January 2021 (6)
- December 2020 (4)
- November 2020 (5)
- October 2020 (5)
- September 2020 (4)
- August 2020 (4)
- July 2020 (5)
- June 2020 (4)
- May 2020 (4)
- April 2020 (4)
- March 2020 (3)
- February 2020 (4)
- January 2020 (4)
Welcome to Life Skills Weekly!
Why life skills? What are life skills, anyway? Why learn or practice life skills? A definition of life skills can be about as simple or as complicated as we wish to make it. Here are a few: Skills you need to make the most out of lifeAny skill that is useful for your lifeSkills that…
More than New Year’s Resolutions
As we begin a new year, it’s important to think of learning Life Skills in the same way we would think of learning other things. Part of learning is knowledge of facts or ideas that prompt us to behave differently. For example, we learn that eating too much sugar can negatively affect our health, so we are more aware of how…
Setting Goals
Why goals? Goals give us direction – they’re like a roadmap. Goals help us focus our efforts on what matters to us, and avoid wasting time with “side roads” that don’t help us get to the desired result. Setting goals enables us to positively affect our future. There are many different areas for goal setting.…
Self-Awareness
One valuable life skill is self-awareness. It is very useful to know ourselves. Maybe somewhat un-intuitively, knowing ourselves also helps us to communicate with others more effectively, and to be more empathetic of others. One aspect of self-awareness is to be able to find out more about ourselves “from the inside in”: self-introspection. What are…
Emotional Intelligence
The term “Emotional Intelligence” was coined in 1990 by two researchers who described it as “a form of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and action” – History of EQ). In 1996, Dan Goleman popularized…
Feelings and Emotions
Feeling is one of the basic physical senses—perceiving by touch. It has also been generalized to mean perception of events within the body. A feeling is also an emotion, or an emotional perception. Feelings as emotions can be initiated by bodily responses—the interaction between physiological events and cognition (see Encyclopedia Britannica). Emotion can also be…
Stop, Look, and Listen!
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place. – George Bernard Shaw Children are encouraged to “Stop, look and listen” before crossing railroad tracks or streets. Why? Because being unaware can be life-threatening. Have you ever considered the consequences of not stopping, looking, and listening when it comes to…
Visualization
Visualization can be a powerful technique for ‘Living Better’ – achieving successes that are important to you. What is visualization, anyway? Visualization is “seeing in your mind’s eye”. In a word, imagination. It’s not just thinking. Visualizing includes imagining with true-to-life images and scenes. Visualization is purposeful – it’s not just daydreaming. It is purposefully…
Flexible Thinking
Physical flexibility can help us reach places and do things that we couldn’t otherwise, keep us from getting hurt if we fall, and help us to make progress by getting over, around, or through obstacles. Mental flexibility is much the same. It can help us solve problems, reach conclusions, be safe emotionally, and overcome obstacles.…
Coping Skills Overview
As you’ve seen in the past weeks’ posts, there are a great many coping skills available to us to deal with the demands and challenges of life. Let’s jump up to the 30,000-foot view to categorize some of these. We are complex beings, with thoughts, emotions and behaviors all working together. Our thoughts, emotions and…
Thinking Skills
Our thinking patterns have a big impact on our emotions and our ability to act in positive ways. Becoming aware of how our thoughts affect us and developing helpful thinking patterns is a skill that can help us realize more positive outcomes in our career, our relationships, our health, and in our general feeling of…
Black and White Thinking
Black and white thinking, also called polarized thinking, is a way of viewing situations that fails to acknowledge the nuances that exist between two extremes. With black and white thinking, situations, problems, outcomes, and even people are seen in extremes. Accompanied by our tendency to predict the worst and ignore the positive, this kind of…
Mind Reading
Mind reading and taking the blame are two skewed thinking patterns that often go together. We think we know what the other person is thinking, and it’s probably our fault. That can bring on a lot of stress! “The boss looks upset. She’s probably unhappy with me again.” “Jack looked a little puzzled. He’s probably…
The Inner Prosecutor
Self-blaming often goes along with mind-reading, but it also has a life of its own, separate from mind-reading. In self-blaming, we attach too much power and responsibility to ourselves. We hold ourselves accountable for things that are outside our sphere of control, and take responsibility for things we had no part in. The ‘inner critic’…
Labeling
Labeling is a form of negative over-generalization used for people. We take a single event, behavior, or characteristic and use a label to generalize it to the whole person. We can label ourselves, or others. This is also called global labeling or mislabeling. The problem with this kind of labeling is that the generalization, or…
Negative Filters
Have you been wearing dark glasses lately? Negative filtering is one way to get ourselves into a negative-feedback loop that can be challenging to get out of. This type of thinking keeps us aware of and dwelling on negative aspects of ourselves or our situation, and either discounting or entirely ignoring positive aspects. We come…
Overgeneralization
Overgeneralization is another way of thinking that can add to negative feelings and sabotage constructive effort. The motto of overgeneralization is not “if you don’t succeed the first time, try, try again.” It is rather “Because you didn’t succeed the first time, you are doomed to failure” or “Failing the first time means you won’t…
Better Ways of Thinking
We’ve talked about several ways of thinking that are not helpful—and even harmful, along with suggestions about how to counter each one. Let’s do a round-up of these: Black-and-white thinkingAsk questions to arrive at a more balanced viewpoint: “Really?” “What do you mean by…?”Use more nuanced words— “gray” or middle-of-the-road words. Steer clear of always,…
More Thinking Aids
One of the strategies for countering rigid or harmful ways of thinking is to ask ourselves questions about our thoughts and assumptions. Likewise, we can treat our thoughts as “best guesses” rather than as facts. We can also use the PACE model in our own inner dialog: Playful, Accepting, Curiosity and Empathy. This can reduce…
Next Up: Feelings
We are complex beings. Many parts of us interact to produce “who we are” or “what we do” or “how we feel”. There are also many areas where we can intervene in these interactions to bring more satisfying outcomes. The more we observe ourselves and the greater awareness we have of our own inner processes,…
Feelings Primer
Feelings are considered the conscious experience of emotional reactions. Many people when expressing themselves will use the word “feeling” interchangeably with the word “emotion.” Feelings are, in their most basic definition, senses—like the sense of smell or taste. A cool breeze might give us a pleasant sensation, and a foul smell just the opposite. Losing…
Emotion ID
Emotions come in many flavors and sizes. Sometimes we begin teaching children four basic emotions: mad, sad, glad, and hurt. On the other end of the spectrum, Live Bold & Bloom undertakes to list 400 “emotion words” – names of emotions, or adjectives describing the emotions. Some emotions are felt as positive or pleasant, others…
Managing Emotions
Why is emotion-identification one of the first steps in managing our emotions? It is often easier to know what to do with, or how to react to, something we know, rather than to something we do not know. When we can say “oh, I know what this is!” or “I often have this feeling when…
More Emotion Management
Emotional self-regulation is defined on the Crisis Prevention Institute Blog as “the ability to monitor and manage our own behavior. With self-regulation, we can calm ourselves down when we’re distressed, and pick ourselves up when we’re low.” Successful management of our emotions does not mean suppressing them, denying them, or pretending that we don’t feel…
Anger Management
It is especially important, and useful, to have effective emotion regulation skills when it comes to anger. Without the all-important pause, where we identify our emotion, ask ourselves what prompted it, and choose our reaction, anger can easily produce harmful behavior. Anger often results from hurt and can result in hurting others. HelpGuide.org puts it…
Codependence
Codependence, or co-dependency, as it’s also called, involves the opposite of emotional development and emotional regulation. Co-dependent people have learned to suppress and avoid emotions and disregard their own emotional needs. Mental Health America offers this description of Co-dependency: “Co-dependency is a learned behavior … an emotional and behavioral condition that affects an individual’s ability…
E.I. Concepts
Awareness of emotions and emotion regulation brings us back to the subject of Emotional Intelligence, which we wrote about in an earlier post. Daniel Goleman, psychologist and author of the 1995 New York Times bestseller Emotional Intelligence, views Emotional Intelligence as “a profile of specific competencies that range across four different areas of personal ability”. These four quadrants…
Behavior
In a previous post Next Up: Feelings, we used this diagram to illustrate how thoughts and feelings influence behavior, and how behavior also influences thoughts and feelings. What do we mean by behavior, as it relates to emotions and thinking? Behavior can be a direct expression of an emotion, like crying when we are hurt…
Thinking and Behavior
The diagram in our previous post, Behavior, shows how behavior can affect thoughts, and how thoughts can affect behavior. Let’s start by looking at how thoughts can affect behavior. We mentioned the RAI strategy – Reflect As If. This involves reflecting (thinking) on the person we would like to be, and then acting (behaving) as…
Behavior and Emotion
Behavior ties in with emotion because emotions come with an urge to act. Behavior is sometimes a direct expression of emotion. If we are skilled enough at emotion regulation to take the critical pause, label our emotion, and choose our behavior, it can be a modulated expression of emotion. But does it also work the…
More Coping Skills
Several weeks ago, we took a jump up to the 30,000-ft level for an overview of coping skills. We discussed how thinking, emotions, and behavior all affect each other. Then we examined some specific thinking skills, emotion regulation skills, and behaviors, and how we can use them. Now it’s time to jump up to a…
Boundaries
Good boundaries make other coping skills more effective. But what is so important about boundaries? How do boundaries apply to life skills? Our bodies, the natural world around us, our culture and civilization, and our “higher” or “inner” beings (what you might think of as soul, spirit, consciousness, or heart) all have boundaries. Maybe the…
Getting Personal with Coping Skills
Introducing some personal, close-to-home coping skills into our lives has serious advantages. With ourselves, we are operating in our sphere of influence. We can waste a lot of time trying to control others and be none the better for it. Even if we hope to contribute to world peace, the only place to start is…
A Personal Book
A personal book can take many forms—from a timeline or journal to a goal tracker, workbook, or picture book. It can also be used to write about thoughts and feelings or as a narrative about the past. They all have in common that they are about you, by you, for you and belong to you.…
Personal Dialogue and PACE
Many people have an active monologue or dialogue going on in their thoughts – a monologue or dialogue with themselves. It can be a conversation that is well worth paying more attention to. Often, we don’t realize that changing what we say to ourselves, or how we say it can have a big impact on…
Self-reflective Questions
In a previous post we wrote about Self-Awareness. One way to get personal with coping skills is to get to know yourself better! If you are interested in life skills, and are reading these words, chances are you are interested in improving yourself or your life. Do you have a vague sense that things could…
Personal Narratives
Narratives: what are they? A narrative is a spoken or written account of events or a story. A personal narrative is a story we can express to ourselves or someone else about ourselves. There are several kinds and sizes of narratives—from our daily inner dialog, to our belief system and way of looking at the…
Personal Space
In a previous post about boundaries, we mentioned how we use expressions about physical boundaries to apply to emotional boundaries: “He gets under my skin” or “Keeping someone at arm’s length.” The term Personal Space usually refers to physical space, but it can also mean an appropriate emotional distance. Part of emotional intelligence is the…
A Safe Place
One useful coping skill during times of stress is having a “safe place” we can go to whenever we need to. All we have to do is close our eyes and imagine ourselves there. Because of the way our brain works, imagining ourselves in that place can have the same effect on us as being…
Practically Positive
The term “positive thinking” has been in our vocabulary for a while and has come to represent different things—everything from always having a smile, seeing the silver lining in every cloud, to the “think and ye shall receive” mindset. Aside from all the hype, though, research has shown many benefits of thinking less pessimistically and…
Mindfulness
What is mindfulness? Mindfulness is the practice of bringing our awareness to the present moment, without judgment. We are usually taken up with our thoughts and feelings and reacting to them as we think and feel them. Mindfulness is a way of being in the present and simply observing ourselves. According to Simply Well Blog,…
Relationship Skills
Relationships can be enjoyable and helpful, or stressful, and are almost always some combination of both. Relationships take work. Being more skillful is like sharpening a cutting edge – the work is easier, and we are not working as hard to get the results we want. Being skillful in our relationships can help tip the…
Group Problem Solving
If you are in a situation where several people need to decide something or come up with a plan, there’s a strategy that can help things flow smoothly while giving everyone a voice. It works like this: Use a notebook to record the details and designate one person out of the group to be the secretary. Everyone sits in a circle, either physically or virtually. It’s…
Resentment
Just as life often holds scrapes, breaks, strains, and accidents which affect our bodies, so our emotional lives and relationships often hit bumps. Sometimes cracks appear, which need to be mended. Sometimes walls are erected which keep us from communicating and furthering a relationship. Sometimes we feel like others don’t love and appreciate us, and…
Forgiveness
Forgiveness is something we do for ourselves. Forgiving ourselves, first of all, and then others if we choose to, allows us to set aside the weight of hurt, anger, resentment and shame that weighs us down when we have felt hurt or wronged in some way. We can even build up resentment by not taking…
Gratitude
The Thanksgiving holiday is a time when we typically think about all we have to be thankful for: family, friends, plenty, etc. But did you know that the simple act of frequently noting a few things we are grateful for can be a significant mood-booster? When we adopt gratitude as an everyday mindset, it has…
Coping with a Pushy Person
Seriously pushy people are called bullies. You can probably imagine the tough kid on the playground, literally pushing people around. Most pushy people we interact with are boundary-pushers—people-pushers in the figurative sense. They are trespassers who do not recognize or do not respect boundaries. They may be the interrupters who always dominate the conversation, or…
Resiliency and Flexibility
When it comes to coping with life’s challenges, resiliency and flexibility have some things in common. One of the dictionary definitions of resilience is the ability of a material to return to its original shape and size after being compressed or deformed. Hard, inflexible material has little resilience. Conversely, flexible material can more easily return…
Coping with Change and Uncertainty
The year 2020 brought events and situations that none of us could have anticipated. Dealing with change and uncertainty is often difficult, and we have had a year like no other full of changes and unknowns. Studies have documented the profound effect of the pandemic on mental health and offered us insight into what contributes…
Environmental Support
Routines are useful to provide a sense of familiarity, as we mentioned last week. They can also be used as cues to help us do the right thing at the right time. Once a routine, or a habit is established, our brain can put that activity on autopilot, so that it is easier for us…
Using Resources
As we wind down this year of Life Skills Weekly, what resources are available going forward into 2021? Self-development and learning need not end with the year. The blog contents will still be available. You can still access them by scrolling back through “previous posts” in the blog, by using the Search page, or by…
Lifestyle Balance
Thinking back on 2020, it has become abundantly clear that lifestyle balance plays a big role in our ability to maintain not only our physical health, but also our mental and emotional wellness. During lockdowns and stay-at-home orders, we have learned how much it means to go outside, to exercise, and to socialize in various…