Building skills for life’s challenges

While the teen years can be the most confusing years of a person’s life, these are extremely important for inculcating skills that will help them be a better person. With people exploring and experimenting these days, it is more important that skills such as time management, communication, flexibility, and productivity are being mastered by them. 

Time management is extremely important. Teens these days are not just students studying a particular subject or a course, a teen student is more than that. Along with studies, they have their co-curricular activities, hobbies, and personal projects going on. It is important to maintain a balance and manage your time so that you can devote equal amounts of time and attention to everything, while still having enough time for yourself. 

With so much going on around, a teen must also focus on how they communicate with each other. One of the most important aspects of human social life is how you communicate with the people around you. No matter how hectic your day has been, or how tired you are, you must learn to communicate with the ones around you clearly. Even if you are in a situation to not have a proper conversation with them, you should be able to communicate and tell them that you are not in the space to have that conversation with them at that given point in time.

Considering that we have so many activities and things going on in life, we must learn to be flexible. By this, I mean in terms of how we manage our schedules, but if you thought I would write about physical flexibility here, that is quite necessary too! Having so many activities and projects going on, along with academics, can be a little overwhelming at times because of the schedules clashing occasionally. Suppose you are a part of a debate club and for one of the meetings, the rest of the team prefers one time and you’re the only one who prefers another time, you are the one who is going to have to adjust. It might not always be the case that you’re the only one who has to adjust but you will also not get everything the way you want.

One of the most crucial yet difficult skills to master is productivity. It is very difficult for teenagers to fight their laziness and get over their procrastination, and I know it is because, at times, I struggle with that too. For being uniformly productive, we must learn how to plan our day where we have enough time for ourselves, to make sure we don’t burn out or feel tired/bored of doing all the work. We must take small breaks or recreational breaks to ensure we don’t bore and burden ourselves. 

We start to realize during our teenage years that the way adults around us manage their work, personal time, family time, hobbies, and so on is easier said than done, and easier observed than implemented. When we step into the real world and get to know how difficult it actually can be, we tend to grow more empathetic towards everyone around us, and that is yet another skill we must master. We must not necessarily put ourselves in the other person’s shoes to see how they feel or what they go through, but we need to have a certain sense of calmness and patience when we deal with other people, for they are also people trying to master the same skills that we have.

-Sara Pimprikar, 18 years, Mental Health ally