Kissing The Mirror

Consider for a moment the last thing that troubled you: Was it your weight or appearance; Difficulty communicating with a work colleague or family member; Physical or financial health; Time management or organizational skills? If your answer to any of these is yes, you were challenged by Life Skills. Now think about how you learned these skills. Who were your teachers? In contrast to academics - which children may or may not learn depending on geography, gender, and economics - acquisition of Life Skills is mandatory. Every individual on the planet, be they a world leader or a knife wielding gang member, learns and utilizes Life Skills. The only things optional about Life Skills development are your level of appreciation for their value, the time you dedicate to learning them, and the individuals you engage as instructors. Parents, day care providers, and relatives, are typically your first and most influential educators of Life Skills. How you eat, stand, play with others and solve problems all are learned, initially, from them. Where did they learn Life Skills? From a nutritional college, mediation clinics, spiritual retreats? Not usually… The bulk of their Life Skills were learned from their parents. If their parents stood tall, they stood tall, if their parents ate junk food, they ate junk food, if their parents screamed and yelled, they screamed and yelled. The truth of the matter is - despite an abundance of uniquely qualified educators - the Life Skills educational process more closely resembles genetic inheritance than academics. A poem titled “Children learn what they live” is internationally famous. Its popularity and acceptance among educators is tragic. People around the world readily support children spending decades learning math, sports, and music that their parents do not know, but tell these same children they are forever limited by Life Skills learned from parents. Why? Immediate Opening: Most Important Job on Earth - Raising tomorrow’s leaders! No prior education, training, or experience necessary. If the first great irony in life is that the most important and widely shared job on earth - parenthood - has yet to merit any formal preparation, the second greatest irony is that we accept the Life Skills our parents teach us as if we were computer clones. Even if we hated the quality of Life Skills learned - barring some major personal crisis that requires us to examine their inferiority – we typically do very little to assess our abilities and continue our education once we become adults. As a society we wholly condone formal adult training for everything from tattooing to mountain climbing. When it comes to the critical tasks of marriage and childrearing, however, we simply wing it. If difficulties arise family members attend “therapy.” Webster’s defines therapy as “remedial treatment.” Remedial comes from remedy, which means to “restore to health.” Therapy, therefore, is a term that describes restoring someone to a state they were previously. If an athlete breaks their leg, they attend “therapy” to regain mobility. If someone suffers a stroke they attend “therapy” to regain their cognitive and motor skills. How many individuals attending therapy to improve communication and relationship skills previously had what anyone would term highly competent ones? How can someone regain something they have yet to learn? Relegating education of communication skills to the confines of a doctor’s office typically causes people to feel shame and embarrassment when attending class - this doesn’t exactly create pride in the enrollment process. Does learning more effective ways to thrive in relationships really need to be any different than learning any other skill? Why do we wait for a crisis to learn something that can prevent it? Think for a moment how critical interpersonal communication skills are in your life. Did you ever have formal education from third party instructors? Children are taught to read, write, and spell, but how many are ever taught Active Listening or Conflict Mediation? How might the world change if they were? I obtained my undergraduate degree in communications and not one class provided instruction on interpersonal communication skills. The only place people receive that type of education is when studying to work in mental health, legal, or enforcement fields (psychiatry, social work, law, therapy, the military etc.) In other words, we routinely prepare people to respond to crises in Life Skills but we do not prepare all people to excel. Why? Take a moment and consider today’s media headlines. What do you find? Stories about bullying and wars; Local and global financial crisis; Environmental decay? Inferior Life Skills fuel personal problems and – understandably - also societal. Examine any headline topping your newspaper and ask yourself, what skills are necessary for avoiding or resolving the problem? Then ask yourself, where do people learn these skills? Who are their educators?