10 Life Lessons
Practice empathy; Practice listening; Smile a lot; Walk; Manage your money; Avoid credit; Public speaking; Investigate the truth for yourself; Learn to dance; Avoid loneliness; plus 1 more.
Learn to practice empathy. One of the most important life skills to learn, indeed we must all learn, is empathy. Empathy is the ability to put oneself in someone else’s position, understanding and comprehending their emotions and feelings. Empathy is not sympathy or pity. And one of the skills needed for empathy is to listen, without interrupting.
Practice listening. Listen to understand, not just to reply. When you do reply, first repeat the other person’s main point, in order to demonstrate that you have listened. While listening keep in mind that you don’t know everything, nobody does.
Smile a lot. Smile at people as a greeting and see what reaction you receive back, hopefully positive. Look at the two images above, one sad the other smiling, my friend is beautiful in both images, but which one is uplifting?
Walk, every day if you can. Take long walks to relax, not necessarily for fitness, although that is good as well. Long walks should be for enjoyment not problem solving, but they can be like a meditation and then good ideas may come to mind.
Learn to manage your money. This boils down to saving, that is, not spending everything you earn and develop a regular saving habit. Wealth is not so much about how much you earn but how much you save.
There is plenty of budgeting and saving advice online.
With some sites suggesting saving from 10% to 40% of your income, and budgeting plans that are all basically describing adding up your expenses including savings over a year and dividing by how much you earn over that year. Then reducing or eliminating expenses as required. Easier said than done but necessary if we are to live within our means and be without the stress of debt.
Avoid credit cards. From an older person’s experience, it really is better to wait to buy something and save for it, rather than be weighed down with debt. Remember your debt is making a lot of money for a large institution somewhere through the interest you are paying.
Practice public speaking. Commonly referred to as most people’s biggest fear. No need to live in fear, to become more comfortable with public speaking the key is to practice. This doesn’t have to be in front of people, make the speech first at home alone in your kitchen.
If you ever have the chance to conduct some training or give a talk, say yes, you won’t regret it, it can be quite satisfying. Don’t worry about being nervous of public speaking, everyone feels that, mostly audiences are friendly; what they want to hear is a story, use that to teach.
PowerPoint PP presentations can be useful for the speaker but not so much for the listener. Always remember the expression ‘Death by PowerPoint’ that is, boring the listener.
PP is good to use as a prompt for yourself as the speaker, it is easy to forget the next point when concentrating on what you are saying, and PP is also good if images of your subject are useful. But be careful not to distract your audience away from what you are saying with too many images or because they are busy trying to read too much text on a slide.
I recently started a new position at an institution, on my first day I attended a staff and students’ assembly and at the end of proceedings I was introduced, the chairman said, “Welcome to Peter, ok Peter over to you.” I had to take it from there! Impromptu public speaking can be difficult, but one of the students had spoken before me and I briefly expanded on his points to make my speech.
Learn the means to investigate the truth for yourself. This includes becoming familiar with science research papers, the peer review method, publishing in Science Journals, and referencing.
Using references to go back to the original research or experimentation will tell you what is actually known about a subject, rather than assumptions that may be made in popular media.
This article explains using Google Scholar and referencing Writing on Medium and Avoiding Plagiarism by Referencing | by Peter Miles | Age of Awareness | Medium
Learn to dance. Not necessarily ballroom or tango but being able to move with rhythm at a club, party or wedding reception. This can be a fear similar to public speaking, especially for some men, and like most things it needs practice.
This YouTube is great for beginners (no affiliation) (18) How to Dance — For Men — YouTube
Avoid loneliness. There is nothing wrong with being alone and enjoying your own company, but we are generally social beings and enjoy being with others.
An expression I have heard says ‘To have a friend, be a friend.’ Help people where and when you can, this may lead to friendships forming, but be genuine in your desire to help, not just to make friends, as people will sense your intent.
Going outside and into the parks and gardens in your city is a good start to reducing loneliness, this can be by the incidental interactions and conversations you may have with people.
Use of Green Spaces to be Less Lonely (environmentalsciencepro.com)
That is 10 but here is a bonus life skill:
Learn to make conversation. ‘How are you?’ Is often used as a greeting and a reply of ‘I’m well, thanks’, is sufficient.
Although often people using ‘how are you’, ‘what do you know’, ‘what have you been up to’ or even ‘what’s up’, are all ways of putting the task of conversation back to you because the other person doesn’t feel confident to speak.
We can use that as an opportunity to start a conversation, again practice makes this easier and also be prepared with something to say.
We had a public holiday here for the passing of Queen Elizabeth II, a few days later I sat near my work colleague in the lunch area at morning break time. I asked if she had commemorated the Queens passing on the public holiday, she looked at me blankly and said, “I can’t remember” and reached for her phone.
Well, that went badly, I thought.
“I’ll just have a look at my photos to remind me”, she said, “here we are, yes, we went to the playground, I wasn’t feeling very well so we didn’t really commemorate the Queen. She did a good job though.”
I managed to squeeze in a comment, “I think she could have handed over to Prince Charles 20 years ago.”
“Yes, she gave a lifetime of service”, my colleague went on.
Then the Head of the School walked in and said, “Sorry for interrupting your conversation.” If the Head Teacher thought we were having a conversation, that is enough conformation for me.
So always be prepared with a suitable topic, if traveling to a meeting, casual conversation beforehand could be “Lot of traffic around today, did you manage to get a park nearby?”
I have been known to check the rainfall reading and the weather forecast before going out to meetings, working with a lot of farmers and environmentalists, the rain and weather are always points of interest.
Here is a humorous conversation topic example on YouTube (no affiliation) (18) Did you see that ludicrous display last night ? — YouTube
