Life Skills
A Third Age Education feature
by Graham Smith

By the time we reach the Third Age we have usually acquired a very full set of life skills.

Increasingly, businesses are realising that those skills, honed through a lifetime of involvement in different situations, are invaluable to the younger generation.

Now we could get very heavy and involved here about what constitute life skills. For instance the World Health Organisation defines life skills as, “abilities for adaptive and positive behaviour that enable individuals to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life”.

Are you still with me?

Much of what we hear today is abbreviated, even our country is referred to on media bulletins as “the UK”. There is HR, human resources; IT, information technology, and how’s your SEO? Search engine optimisation, which has nothing to do with mechanics.

With the slick approach to work ethic it is all too easy to forget life and, especially, social skills. They matter, and as a Third Ager I have to say I don’t think enough attention is paid to either of them in our education system.

Every generation has its idiosyncracies, slogans and language quirks, but look at the way many public figures have flowed through from their early age to, usually, the Third Age they are in now, and they have mellowed, matured and harnessed the skills they have learned along the way, or at least some of them.

Enjoy the elements which make your generation different and special, but don’t forget that the thread which runs through every generation is surely the life and social skills required to help the generation yet to come, or in their formative years. Those skills are a common denominator of life itself.

Good manners, gathering information, imparting knowledge, self esteem and confidence building skills, self evaluation, self assessment, dealing with grief, anxiety, there are so many life skills. We will never touch all of them.

One so called life skill which rather grates with me is anger management. It is a relatively new phrase which used to have no place in life skills because it was dealt with by the imposition of discipline. Not so today.

As a Third Ager I will have a few supporters who agree that the dumbing down of values in general has spawned more life skill requirements. In our day, whenever that was, many of the so called necessary skills of today had been acquired by intrinsic common sense and parental guidance.

As Third Agers we surely have a duty to pass on whatever life skills we have learned. You will do that at the risk of being called a dinosaur, not always in such pleasant measured terms, but it has to be worth the effort.

By the time you are in your Third Age you will have learned a set of life skills which would have served you much better when you were a teenager, but of course you knew it all then anyway.

Thirty and more years on one skill we have all learned is that we never know it all. We are learning every day of our lives. The skill is surely to pass it on, in whatever way, to those who have thirty or more years to go.

Graham Smith for Third Age.