Transitions and Life Skills Services Q&A

Life skills are a set of skills used to make the most of your life. Any skill that you can find useful to help in life is considered a life skill. For many, life skills is a term used to understand the skills that are needed as well as necessary to deal with life effectively, while also being able to take on its many challenges.

Not everyone will have the same set of life skills that they deem essential for life. Certain life skills may be more relevant to you, and less to another, depending on your life’s circumstances, beliefs, age, culture, geographic location, etc.

WHO, which is the World Health Organization provided a list of six areas that they deem essential life skills for everyone:

– Communication and interpersonal skills
This broad life-skill is focusing on working with others, and being able to transfer and receive information like messages in writing or verbally in person.

– Decision-making and problem-solving skills
This important life lesson allows you to understand problems, find a way to solve them, either by yourself or with others, and take action to fix or address them.

– Creative thinking and critical thinking skill
This offers the ability for you to think in different ways while finding unusual ways to the issue at hand, figuring out solutions to them, and/or generating new ideas that can help while assessing the provided information carefully, and understanding its relevance.

– Self-awareness and empathy
These both equal emotional intelligence, as they describe that you understand yourself, and being able to have feelings for others and the experiences that happen to them as if they were happening to you.

– Assertiveness, and equanimity/self-control
This set of skills provides you the ability to stand up for yourself, as well as others while still remaining calm during a time of issues.

– Resilience and the ability to cope with issues
You are able to recover from any of life’s setbacks while treating these setbacks as opportunities to continuously learn from, and consider their experiences.

While life skills you may have deemed essential when you were younger, may not be as relevant once you have a family or kids.

Transition services are a set of activities that prepare students or adults to transition from one level of functionality to another, one stage of life to another, one environment to another, or one program to another program.

Transitions are important to everyone as they are considered landmarks in one’s life. Transition services provide support while monitoring the performance of daily life skills, and acquiring a new set of skills that may be deemed critical.

Making a transition can be challenging, this is why having support in transitions and life skills can help with effective transition planning to make the process much easier, and even more empowering to everyone involved in the process.

There are certain components with transition services that are required to help each individual explore the possibilities and work towards their goals. These components include:

– Engaging in concrete and ongoing conversations
– Focus on connections with others as well as information sharing
– Emphasizing employment, portfolio of work skills, and work experiences
– Focusing on the individual’s community engagement, supports and resources
– Fostering goal-setting and self-efficacy

The purpose of developing a transition plan and life skills is to help each individual plan out generally what is needed for them to move forward in life. This could be within a relationship, a career, or a goal you have in mind.

Skills learned from transitioning and life skills can provide successful experiences with a set of skills that will be used in future situations like self-reflection, self-advocacy, communication, critical thinking, independently working or a group-setting style, preparing and planning as well as many others.

For more information, call us. We serve patients anywhere in Michigan. Licensed in Ann Arbor MI, Pittsfield Charter TWP MI, Ypsilanti MI, Saline MI, Dexter MI, Scio TWP MI and surrounding areas. We look forward to hearing from you and helping you find your happiness.