Life skills are essential to growing and moving forward toward our vision and goals.

Background:  Life skills are the retirement passion of our Founder.  His journey started with financial literacy for the homeless, then job and career planning for older teens and today it’s Purpose and Vision.  We believe in bite-size learning for life.

What Are Life Skills?  Life skills are just about anything we need to do to live vibrantly and successfully.  A key word is “do”.  Skills move beyond knowledge to capabilities.  Skills can be demonstrated and practiced, not just memorized.  They should be goal-oriented and are usually learned when needed.  The trouble sometimes comes when we don’t even know there is a skill to learn or that we feel we are capable-enough rather than at our personal best.

General life skills apply to every aspect of our lives…self-awareness, relationships in any life role, daily living, job & career, financial management, spirituality and more.  Examples include listening, constructive criticism, stress management, time management, budgeting or writing a resume.  I tend to exclude what we learn in school (writing and math), church (faith practices) or work (technical skills) and put them in a more foundational or specialty category.  Some capabilities such as self-worth or confidence are the outcomes of skill accumulation and practice.

Success is different for each of us.  Life skills help us grow in capability to accomplish more complex things.  Skills allow us to live to our potential.  I presume this to be a good and important thing if it moves us to our goals and purpose.

LSN Content:

• Life Skills Wiki.  Our approach is unique in that includes skill definition, learning paths and modular, bite-size content.
• Live with Purpose speaking events.
• 250 Words Blog.  Our blog is about life, life skills, volunteering and living to our purpose and potential.  We write about 250 words (the amount an average adult can read in one minute).

Other Discussion:

• Our dream is to have community contributors add other life skills, e.g. parenting and to continually improve our Wiki.