You already have these six Life skills. They were included in the package you got when you started life. But none of them work alone. Each one interacts with the next one and each one helps every other one. The better each skill is working today the better the others all work together today and the better and more balanced you'll feel. Each one helps you function more effectively, with a more grown-up sense of balance. Your key life skills help you deal with any of your vulnerability issues as they arise.
There are separate pages ahead about each of these six in this book. Here is a summary.
Your Identity and Self-esteem skills help you be more aware of how important it is to be who you really are; your history; your knowledge; your life experience. They remind you that things you do or did are not part of your identity or who you are.
These skills help you believe in yourself and your true self worth. Strong self esteem is when you can tell yourself “I am worthwhile and valuable just as I am.”; “I affirm my self value.” That makes it easier to hold a warm positive regard for others and to feel good about yourself when you give and receive compliments. You are even comfortable talking about imperfections in yourself.
Your ability to set strong Boundaries
A boundary is an energetic shield which blocks negative energy coming at you from other people. Boundaries are a vitally important life skill helping protect you from feeling too vulnerable. They help you say ‘no’ or ‘yes’ to others in a healthy way.
Boundaries help you set limits, while still being vulnerable. They help you understand and respect imperfections in others. When people send you negative “You are...” messages it’s your boundaries that remind you that who you are is none of their business. They help you disengage from, and even better avoid getting enmeshed with difficult people.
Boundaries help you develop a stronger sense of who you are and reject messages from other people when they try to tell you they know better than you who you are or try to get you to change yourself to be more the person they want you to be.
Mature boundaries in relationships help you to be more open and intimate without getting too close too quickly (engulfing) or alternately backing away (avoiding) to stop feeling engulfed.
Reality skills
Your Reality skills include your ability to hold a healthy sense of what is real for you (your reality) from others who try to manipulate that part of you.
At the same time it helps you to honour other people’s reality even if theirs may seem very different from yours, coloured by distortion, denial or disassociation.
Reality skills help you to be more conscious of issues like truth; right-wrong; justice; fairness; openness and honesty; trust and trust-worthiness; your sense of reason and being reasonable. Together with your boundaries they help you avoid being manipulated. They support you when you need to protect, value and appreciate your history; your knowledge and your experience.
Noticing
Your reality skills help you notice what is actually going on around you, compared with what may seem real to your young PYRO team. (Some of them don’t have very good eyesight.) As your sense of what is ‘actual’ grows you notice more things you need to notice.
Self-Nurturing
You are able to take care of your own needs and wants appropriately. You come to understand that liking yourself is an essential part of healthy self nurturing, neither a fault nor vain, as some people would have you believe.
Self-nurturing also means you are able to reach out to others in a grown-up way if you need to and ask for help to meet your needs and wants, and then accept the outcome whether it is helpful for you or not.
Balanced with Loving others
The better your self nurturing abilities the better you are at balancing complex issues like caring and sharing, keeping your giving and receiving in balance. You can balance unconditional loving with conditional commitment; exploring the many different ways you can choose to give and receive love and nurturing. This makes you better able to nurture others in healthy, unconditional ways.
Energy Balancing
Energy Balancing skills help you sit comfortably between opposites in your life, to moderate any polarised or extreme (too black or too white) patterns in the way you think, speak or act.
You can still experience strong highs and lows. You can experience occasional “flips” between polarised or too far apart opposite positions, but you no longer stay stuck in the old one sided unbalanced trap of all black or all white thinking.
Options, opportunities and alternatives
Balancing skills open up your ability to see options, opportunities and alternatives that enrich your life. There are almost always more than two possible ways of dealing with life’s problems. Recognising your different options increases your sense of self empowerment and highlights the freedom you have as a grown-up to choose what you can change and how you change.
Security skills (Safety, Sanity, Self) help you stay aware of your vulnerability; your ability to protect your self and maintain your safety, sanity, self and spirit too.
Notice how each of your Key Life skills is working inside you, right now.
Self-awareness is an overall skill that helps you keep track of how well each of your life skills is working every day.
