13 Life Skills That Are Not Taught At Schools 

Schools play vital role in upbringing the kids and help them become best of human beings. However, the role of schools has widely been limited to professional knowledge and help earning money. Author of this article has listed down and elaborated 13 life skills that are not taught at schools.

1- Communication / Conversation Skills

Regardless of our educational qualifications and certifications, our success or failure in life heavily relies on how we express ourselves to others. Effective conversation skills will make you a likable person. Schools, unfortunately, only focus on the information and knowledge whereas there should be dedicated subjects on how we interact with others. This should primarily include speaking to family, friends, teachers, shopkeepers. Later at college / university level, enhanced courses on how to speak to managers, boss, spouse need to be introduced

2- Relationship Management

Relationship management starts with tolerance, better listening skills, empathy and respecting others’ opinions. At a young age students do not understand these concepts. By the time they become adults, some of them learn these skills through their parents. However not everyone has good-guiding parents and not all parents know these skills in detail. Hence introducing Emotional Intelligence based courses at different grades of schools and colleges will help develop more tolerating pupils that would lead to tolerant societies and nations

Our relations stay alive as long as we live on the face of earth, hence it is imperative that we learn the skills that enable us to develop and sustain amazing relationships, be it with our loved ones or with colleagues or even with strangers. These skills include but are not limited to trust development, emotional intelligence, ‘lighter’ talks, giving gifts, staying in touch and so on.

3- Financial Crisis Management

Not each family enjoys the same level of blessings. Several medium and low class students develop inferiority complex due to the natural tendency of comparing themselves with the upper class. Such students may not become better leaders as their personality will have serious limitations in terms of shyness, less assertiveness, lack of decision making and so on. 

Schools should introduce some subjects on how to be adaptable in different phases of life. If specific courses cannot be prepared then schools should encourage students to write essays on such subjects. They should be given certain situations to produce essays such as

• How to survive in joblessness.
• How to develop, modify, adapt different spending habits
• How to manage life with 3low income situations
• How to look at life from needs vs wants perspective

4- Failure Recovery Skills

Deaths, job loss, accidents, financial jerk are inevitable situations in life. No one is free from such a situation. Even if someone sounds perfectly happy on social media, they will have their private problems which they do not want the world to know. A resilient person can return back to a normal human being as soon as life throws a challenge at him/her. A resilient person detaches himself/herself from life challenges emotionally and addresses the problems logically. A larger problem can always be broken down to smaller problems and addressed one by one.

Crisis management can also be done using Stoic techniques. A stoic is a person who is indifferent to pain. While humans primarily are emotions based creatures, yet practicing for being a stoic will help achieve a state that life challenges do not cause emotional breakdown.

Spirituality plays a major role for recovering from failures. A strong connection with God enables us for the same. Universal laws of God teach us that problems are inevitable. Problems are not road blockers, instead problems are the path to success. God takes men into deep waters not to drown them but to cleanse them. While schools/colleges may not teach these skills, students should start reading articles on such subjects to get insightful tips to achieve mental toughness.

13 Life Skills That Are Not Taught At Schools

5- Health Management

Life was different a couple of decades ago. Kids used to have organic food and stayed healthy due to immense physical activities after school and on the weekend. Due to the easy availability of technical gadgets, less interest in physical games and general safety measures, many students stay home.

Due to the ease of fast food ordering and home delivery, the physical inactivity issue becomes more alarming for our current generation of kids. While there have always been game breaks during school hours, it is very important that Education Ministries introduce Health Management courses where students are emphasized to prioritize their health. They should be given guidance about obesity, diabetes and cholesterol. 

Some of the countries have already taken necessary measures, many of the developing countries need more focus on this critical subject.

6- Work Life Balance

Happiness attained through balanced life. Each segment of life should be given fair time and attention. While making money is critical act however not have health relationships, not having good company of friends, not having good health will lead to stressful state of mind

7- Self Assessment and Self Improvement Skills

One of the critical Keys to success is to believe in continuous improvement. If the kids today understand this concept and initiate their life-long learning journey now, they will become better leaders for tomorrow’s world. Key triggering point on what to learn comes from self-assessment. Schools should ignite such concepts in student’s brains that they should assess their skills in line with their interests and start their learning process, even at a smaller scale. Every single minute of learning will constitute the success of a student.

Check out this resource “100 Most Powerful Life Coaching Questions”

8- Spiritual Health

Spiritual health is important for peace and tranquility. With the continuous advancement in the entertainment industry, our youth is moving away from the Connection-with-God. Parents these days are bringing up the kids by instilling the desire for the best career and a lot of money. As a result of which, general chaos is seen in society since everyone is taking aggressive part in this rat race.

Spirituality also means to escape from daily life and spend time with oneself. Following thoughts might be helpful to establish spirituality:

• Who am I? What is my higher purpose in life?
• What can I do for the less fortunate people of society
• What God expects from me
• How can I tune my thoughts to align with the plans of God?

Check out this outstanding resource “60 Thought Provoking Questions”

9- Cognitive Skills

You might have noticed that people who do not have good reasoning skills tend to enforce their opinions on others, which leads to brawls consequently. Logical thinking is a skill that you can practice and improve on. As a practice, consider writing benefits of watching television. Once you have listed down your points, challenge these points and prove yourself wrong. Once you prove that some of your original postulates were wrong, think again and convince yourself that the original concepts were absolutely correct. Confusing?

Basically by practicing this, you are enabling and empowering your brain to consider  a situation from a different perspective. You got the idea? Basically, this skill will help you to manage different situations in life specially when people are opposing to your thoughts but you are already mentally prepared on how to respond since you have already pre-assessed the  possible confrontation situation

10- Failing Honorably

Every billionaire failed at least 5 times, before finding success and I mean major failures, like when Mark Zuckerberg lost 4 billion dollars in a day. How many of you will almost commit suicide if you lost 0.5 percent of that?

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