Professional Skills Essential For Everyday Life

Contributed Post

From any profession, there are always skills that you should apply to your everyday life as well as your working one. For example, setting goals, writing lists, managing your time and your workload, making a schedule,etc., are all things that you should apply to everyday life, housekeeping, etc. Then there are the skills you learn for building relationships or for dealing with clients, again many of these can be adapted to everyday life friendships and family relationships. But what other essential life lessons can we learn from professions?

Writers

Writing lessons can teach us a lot, for example, Stephen King said: “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time—or the tools—to write. Simple as that.” This lesson for writers to learn through reading, while this advice is extremely practical because reading can expand a writer’s vocabulary, spark their imagination, or teach the mechanics of fiction writing, learning through reading is also relevant to daily life. While reading is an excellent past time for entertainment, it is also a great activity for actively better yourself, to learn about new topics, exercise your imagination, or empathize with other people’s experiences. Reading about the world acquaints you with knowledge and perspectives you might not have encountered otherwise. Whether or not you intend to write your own story, reading is an essential tool for educating yourself and understanding more about the world.

Soldiers

In Robert Greene’s The 33 Strategies of War, he talks about ‘picking your battles carefully’ for the perfect-economy strategy. He says that we all have our limitations and our energies and skills will take us only so far. With this in mind, you must know your limits and pick your battles carefully. When thinking about this lesson in terms of war, you have to consider the hidden costs of war: time lost, political goodwill squandered, an embittered enemy bent on revenge. Sometimes it is better to wait, to undermine your enemies covertly rather than hitting them straight on. This couldn’t be more relevant to everyday life and your day-to-day relationships.

Lawyers

While there are many attributes that lawyers have that you have to have in other professions too, having resilience and self-confidence in this field is essential. Determination and enthusiasm go a long way – as does resilience and confidence in your abilities. You should apply this in your job but also in anything else you’re trying to achieve. If you’re on a diet, training for a marathon then you need to be confident that you’re going to make it and when you get knockbacks, you need to have the resilience to get back up again. You also need to be easy to talk to and a good listener – again this can be said for many professions, but according to Field Law Office, LLC, it is essential as people from all walks of life can get into trouble with the law and they need to know they can go somewhere where they don’t feel ashamed.

Doctors

Although the qualities to be a competent physician aren’t quantifiable, they are evaluated by a person’s potential to demonstrate traits that are shared by some of the best physicians working today and compassion is one of them. Physicians aren’t robots, and they aren’t just there to deliver a prognosis insensitively or mechanically perform complex surgeries. They need a heart because patients respond better to a physician who is empathetic to their needs, so they need to focus on exercising courtesy and compassion with their patients. The same can be said for anything, having empathy toward your friends and family can be easy as you know them and you know what they’re going through. But do you have compassion towards waiters and waitresses? To people at the bank or the other end of the phone in a call center? You don’t know what they’re going through, so forget yourself for a minute and be kind to them, it goes a long way.

Teachers

As well as many other qualities and skills, a teacher needs to set clear objectives for lessons and will work to meet those specific objectives during each class. You could do the same each day, for each task or any job it can be applied to.

Designers

Designers are creatives and thinking all the time, some days the ideas just don’t come, or things aren’t going right, in this industry people are often perfectionists, but one thing they need to be able to do is to allow themselves to make mistakes. You should do this in everyday life. If you don’t allow yourself to make mistakes, you’ll never learn from them, and this will rob you of personal growth. Good designers know what it’s like to seek perfection, but they also understand the importance of letting themselves fail occasionally. Since it’s pretty much impossible to create something new without making mistakes, a little tolerance for error is not only permissible but also necessary.

Financiers

While you might think it’s all numbers and data, people who work in finance also need to have strong communication skills. Communication skills do aid in all aspects of life, but from a business standpoint, all transactions result from communication. Excellent communication skills are essential to allow others and yourself to understand information more accurately and quickly. And of course, excellent communication is vital for all relationships you have in your life. You can improve your communication skills by listening and paying close attention to what others are saying and clarify ambiguities by rephrasing their questions for greater understanding. You also need to be concise and convey your message in as few words as possible. Do not use filler words and get straight to the point as rambling will cause people to tune out or be unsure of what you are talking about. Next is your body language, and it’s also essential to practice proper body language, using eye contact and utilizing hand gestures.

Business

Negotiation training is something valuable in business involves learning how to negotiate which is essential and advantageous in the professional world for numerous reasons such as the challenge of making prices for goods and services comparable to what clients are willing to pay for them. As a result of this, it is often necessary for employees to negotiate their prices to make them more cost-effective for clients. This skill can also be infinitely useful in your personal life too. For example, learning how to negotiate rules and regulations for who will complete which chores and when. Roommates can also improve the quality of their lives by learning how to negotiate how much each will pay for the monthly rent as well as who will do the grocery shopping, and how frequently. When individuals take the skill of negotiation from their professional lives and into their worlds, they will often find that their ability to cohabitate peacefully with others increases exponentially.

Sales People

A good salesperson will learn new skills every day, and one thing that they can do which you should adopt in everyday life is to share your insights and skills with others to promote positive change. Advising others doesn’t mean that people have to take it or listen to it. But spreading the word of your experience, you never know who it’s going to help.

Entrepreneurs

Any good business owner will know that they must keep going, even when things get tough. It might sound obvious, but whatever it is you’re trying to achieve, you have to try, try, and try again. When you become discouraged with your progress in a new fitness routine, for example, be persistent. When your fifteenth attempt at organic quinoa and ancient grain salad goes sour, tweak the recipe again. When you just want to curl up into a ball and not do anything incase of the slightest risk of failure, take a deep breath, and just try it!

Everyone

Be open to – yet critical of- criticism. For everyone in everyday life, being open to criticism is essential, and it is the only way to improve and to learn. Criticism, like honesty, is often a bitter pill to swallow, but often negative feedback is a necessary evil. You need to be flexible enough to change your mind too. We need to make mistakes to be able to learn from them, and we often need to hear constructive criticism to get stronger. Finally, you need to love what you do – in work and life. Whatever you’re doing, you need to do it because you love doing it. You need to be willing to go through the hard times, be prepared to fail and be ready to work; otherwise, you will likely miss the joys of self-sufficiency, growth, and fulfilling your potential.