Category Archives: 250 Words Blog

Life skills are essential to growing and moving 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 Toolbox:

• 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.

The LSN toolbox contains many forms of content for personal learning, teaching and mentoring.  Here are a few ideas.

See the LSN Home Page for a description of the various components of the Toolbox.

Tier 1 – Direct Service

Teaching (class)

• Lead a class using a predefined lesson plan
• Develop a lesson plan using the wiki
• Provide 1:1 coaching on topics
• Host a community workshop using one of the presentations
• Use the blog as a small group discussion topic

Mentoring/Coaching (1:1)

• Help someone discover their life purpose, goals, values
• Help someone find a job…resume, TMAY
• Help people define their career plan…career plan worksheet
• Perform a skill assessment…skill definition, skill assessment
• Create Dream Book.

Self-Learning

• Read Blog, Facebook or Twitter
• Browse the Life Skills Wiki

Tier 2 – Agency Leadership Support

Leadership

• Facilitate an organization design effort
• Develop a process masterplan and document processes
• Lead an important agency project
• Mentor or executive coach
• Develop a volunteer program…best practices, program design
• Develop a mentoring program

Tier 3 – Volunteer Development

Volunteers

• Help someone identify an energizing volunteer role…volunteer assessment tool
• Volunteer “career path”…volunteer development tool
• Lead a volunteer fair
• Be an ambassador for agency members of LSN