Teach Your Children These 5 Life Skills for Success
Life Skills for Success starts with you
In today’s fast-paced world, it’s important to equip our children with the necessary life skills for success. These skills go beyond the traditional academic curriculum and encompass practical abilities that will help them navigate various situations in life. From negotiating to cooking, these life skills will enable children to become self-sufficient and confident individuals. In this article, we’ll explore five essential life skills for success that every child should learn.
1. How to express yourself with integrity.
Until we can read each other’s minds we will never truly know the intentions of others. It is better and healthier to depend on our abilities to listen, accept, and trust each other until we’re shown evidence to the contrary.
Integrity isn’t the discernment of right and wrong. It’s about learning to listen to your heart, observing your circumstances, allowing for the free-will of you and the other, and lining up your thoughts so the feelings are coherent. Ultimately, what another does or does not do has more to do with the other than you.
2. How to negotiate
Can your kid defend himself against a new boss who wants to take advantage of a young newbie? Teach your child how to recognize an opportunity vs being taken advantage of so they can take advantage of the situation to their benefit. Allow children to argue their point, with integrity, so they become strong in defending a position.
Being able to back up an argument with facts or reasons that show win-win scenarios strengthens their ability to be successful during job hiring, purchases large and small, and it gives them a sense of confidence that they influence what derives from negotiations. Too often we settle for what’s given to us and feel cheated out of something later because we didn’t negotiate well.
3. How to discern risks and navigate them
It’s much easier than it sounds. Selecting the right risks for you has to do with listening to your desires, looking for the intuition that brings you to action and then keeping an eye out for synchronicity. Nothing teaches this better than Law of Attraction. From there it’s as simple as experiencing what happens next. Then know you have control over how you proceed.
Navigating opportunity and risk is easy when you imagine the situation as if it’s a car. Each good risk must have a steering wheel, gas pedal, and breaks. Without any of these, you don’t have a good risk. Choosing when to turn, apply gas or put on the breaks depends on your discernment, and negotiation skills.
4. How to cook 10 meals before moving out
It’s a must. It seems too many people know how to drive-thru, and order from a menu, but don’t know how to make a meal. With the lightest of ingredients, kids should know how to make 10 dishes from scratch by the time they leave the house. I’m not talking about the mac and cheese out of the box or pre-made dishes in the frozen section, and neither count as one on the list of 10. No cheating. Teach how to make tea and coffee too.
If you don’t know, learn with your kids. This is a vital skill; know what each vegetable looks like in its natural state, the many different ways to cook them, what’s a fruit vs a vegetable, how to cook steak from rare to well-done, how to make pasta, sauce, and check for doneness of any meat.
5. How to be happy regardless of circumstances
All too often we’re waiting for circumstances to line up before we feel happy about the situation. We bring more into our experience based on how we feel. It’s simple. We have filters on like glasses. When we feel an emotion strongly, we tend to look for reasons to feel that way in every situation. Look at what happens when we discover a new car we like.
All a sudden we start to see it everywhere on the street. It’s the same thing with our emotional state. We see what is most present in our emotional state in all situations. All senses are equal in their ability to filter what we see. Set your filter to how you want to feel, which in this case is happy, and you will start to find yourself happy in any situation. Choose happiness. It doesn’t mean you don’t ever stray from it. It just means that you use integrity to show compassion for yourself, negotiate into a better feeling place, discern if it’s a good emotional risk, and navigate to where you want to be, and enjoy the “meal.”
It all comes together in the end… a formula for successful children of all ages.
Teaching your child these five life skills for success will not only prepare them for a successful future but also help them become confident individuals who can take charge of their lives. Remember, as a parent, you are your child’s first teacher, and it all starts with you. Encourage your child to learn these skills by leading by example, and most importantly, let them know that you are always there to support them. With these skills, your child will have a solid foundation to build a successful and fulfilling life.
