This article highlights the top 9 essential life skills that can contribute to student’s academic success and improve their overall effectiveness in life. Read on to discover these important skills.
Certain factors, including cognitive abilities and mental stability, determine academic success. However, life skills are the most important but ignored factor contributing to students’ academic success.
These skills can help students manage their emotions, make quick and accurate decisions, and solve the problems that come their way to success. According to research by the National Library of Medicine, in a sample of 1745 students of different schools and genders, students with life skills performed satisfactorily compared to students who lacked these skills.
Knowing their importance, we decided to compile this article providing a list of life skills that are helpful for students and their academic performance.
What are Life Skills?
Oxford Dictionary defines a life skill as “a skill that is necessary or desirable for full participation in everyday life.” Also known as psychosocial competency, life skills are a set of psychosocial skills that help a person navigate the challenges of life. These skills are acquired through life experience and learning, and life training can help one develop them.
List of 9 Must-Have Life Skills for Students
If you want to thrive in your academic career, learning life skills is equally important to learning your major subjects, like mathematics or literature. Considering this need for students to learn life skills, we have compiled some must-have skills for academic growth.
Let’s have a look for a better understanding:
1. Time Management
As a student, you have to manage many academic tasks, such as writing assignments, studying for tests, and keeping up with the syllabus. Balancing these responsibilities can feel like a lot, especially if you’re also working part-time and handling family duties. Good time management skills are crucial, but sometimes, it’s just too much to handle. In this regard, online help with assignment writing can really make a difference. Professionals can lighten your workload and make sure you meet your deadlines without sacrificing the quality of your work.
The ability to control your time and make it work for you is a crucial skill to have that can put you ahead of your peers. Prioritising your tasks, setting deadlines for them, and a daily planner can help you allocate time for different tasks, prioritize them easily, and ensure you stay on track by planning daily activities and balancing responsibilities effectively.
2. Goals Setting
Goals are the little objectives you set to keep your life moving and be successful in all areas of life, including academics. Goal setting is proven to be a good life skill for keeping yourself ahead of everyone around you and achieving whatever you want in life. When you keep your goals specific, time-bound, and achievable, you will be able to get them like nobody can.
Setting effective goals will enable you to get answers to the following questions.
What do you want? In which time frame do you need that? Is that something achievable? How much do you want? Is that related to your ultimate goal? Once you get answers to all of the above questions, you will have set a SMART goal. When you have a goal set, you need to be disciplined and complete the required tasks in time, which is necessary in order to achieve those goals.
3. Communication
When you can communicate properly with people around you, in public places and institutes, you can thrive in any field of life. Effective communication skills enable students to convey their questions, get answers to them, clear misunderstandings, and get the work done. However, communication is one of the most important life skills for students, as lacking it can lead students to conflicts, social isolation, and misunderstandings between their peers.
Communicational issues are commonly caused by a lack of confidence, language barriers, and emotional barriers. However, students’ communication skills can be improved by practising active listening and having a positive learning environment. A good learning environment encourages students to participate in class, ask questions, and give feedback.
4. Critical Thinking
Critical thinking is an essential life skill for students. It teaches them to analyse everything critically and see every perspective on an issue. This skill is crucial for evaluating information, making good decisions, and forming opinions.
Critical thinking skills can benefit students by helping them understand the true meanings of the information they receive in the classroom. Students can evaluate absurd knowledge, analyse it, compare it with existing information, and enhance comprehension.
5. Decision Making
Picture this: You decided to study aeronautics as your major one month before admission, and then you applied to different universities for different majors. Guess what? You got accepted for many of those majors in multiple universities. But now you are freaked out when deciding where to study and what to study. A lack of decision-making skills can literally do this to you.
At its core, decision-making is a cognitive and mental process through which you choose the course of action among several possible alternative ways. These skills can help you make your decisions in time and avoid ambiguity at the last moment.
6. Stress Management
Stress management is a defining life skill that helps one live a healthy and comfortable life. Stress is something that can attack you from either side, and you don’t have a sword to defend yourself. The only defence weapon that can save you is your stress management skills. You cannot hide from stress and anxiety, especially in the student’s life, where you have to cope with the stress of reading, writing, and researching, along with your commitments.
Stress can truly damage your cognitive abilities, making you fall behind in your academic performance and meeting personal obligations. This can lead to serious mental illness if not managed properly. Students with part-time jobs especially struggle with stress issues due to academic pressure, personal life, and professional career management.
7. Problem-Solving
There are countless problems we face in our daily routine, as do the students. Problem-solving skills give you the ability to resolve issues and cross hurdles to achieve your goals.
If you want to resolve problems promptly, effectively, and without wasting a significant amount of time, you need to enhance your problem-solving skills. This skill can save you time, help your complete tasks, and avoid unnecessary stress.
One thing you need to understand is you cannot run for assistance whenever you face a problem. This can waste a lot of your and others’ time. While asking for help is not a bad thing, you might face issues, but not being able to solve any problem can be concerning.
8. Growth Mindset
Have you ever experienced down times when no hope was left, but you still believed that you were going to make it? Congratulations, you have that growth mindset for success. This mindset comes with belief in your skills and capabilities. Students with a growth mindset never give up on academic pursuits and believe that they can learn anything and develop the required skills to achieve their ultimate goals.
The core of this mindset in students is that they believe intellect and abilities can be developed through hard work and effort. In contrast, students with fixed mindsets believe that these are natural abilities and that they can do nothing about them.
9. Coping With Failure
Life skills are required for students to succeed, but the ability to cope with failures in life is the most important. No matter how many skills you have, if you do not know how you will handle failure, you are lagging behind.
When we experience failure, anxiety and stress often take over our minds, leading to thoughts of wasted time, falling behind others, and fear of judgment. Societal pressure can further worsen these feelings, making it difficult for students to handle this challenging phase on their own. However, when students emerge from this difficult period, they develop a heightened fear of future failure. As a result, those who lack the necessary skills and have already faced setbacks request help from custom assignment writing platforms in the UK to avoid similar situations in the future.
Summing Up
To summarise this guide, we can say that life skills are critical for students if they want to excel in life. Of course, they do not depend on others’ approval for every decision they make, nor can they afford to fail in their decisions. This situation can only be handled by developing essential life skills.
These skills are needed to be developed from the very beginning. However, if not developed, this doesn’t entitle you to not work on them and start getting failed in life. You need to have a growth mindset and passion to achieve anything you want in life. This article is also composed to cater for the same issue and inform you of the importance of these life skills for students.
